Since everyone is going mobile, the use of smartphone, especially mobile internet increases rapidly. Therefore, in order to satisfy the needs of mobile internet in smartphone, Google along with platforms, publishers and content creators, developed the (AMP) project. If you are working or SEO service you better figure out what AMP is and how Google AMP affects your mobile SEO to better performance of your web page.
What Is AMP?
AMP is a way to build web pages for static content that render fast. AMP in action consists of three different parts:
There are three basic ingredients that make up an AMP page:
- HTML: This one is the most basic regular HTML, but AMP HTML uses custom properties for resources such as images, videos and iframes and a restricted set of technical functions, defined by the open source AMP specs.
- JavaScript: By using AMP JS, all external resources load asynchronously. However, in order to load it asynchronously, you need to set sizes in the HTML, which enables the page layout is determined before elements are loaded.
- AMP Cache: Google’s AMP Cache is a separate cache used to store AMP pages to serve in search results. This method increases the efficiency since everything comes from the same location, especially when pages stored in the cache are served to user.
So, how will those three categories benefit your mobile SEO? If you haven’t convinced yet, take a look these two reasons on what it means for SEO.
- Page Speed
Page speed is the most important component among so many components that determine mobile friendliness since most people generally hate to wait, especially when they have to wait a web for loading. In fact, according to a reliable research 40% of mobile internet users won’t wait for more than 3 seconds for a page to load. Beside, amazon famously discovered that every second of page load time cost them 1% of their total sales. It shows that fast loading page quickly matters.
The main reason behind the AMP standard is to load pages as fast as possible. While for non-AMP pages, meeting the one-second ATF requirement is such a hard toil since mobile devices have limited CPU and battery capacity, and after DNS lookups, TCP handshakes and HTTP requests and responses. And that doesn’t even take mobile network latency into account. In fact, faster page speed is the major advantages that AMP’s may provide.
User Experience
Another mobile friendly reinforcement that AMP provides is by connecting your content, brand and/or company to a user during a “micro-moment” which as a result improves your site’s mobile user experience. Micro-moments are the instances in which a person spontaneously and automatically picks up their Internet-enabled device to fulfill a current need. This technique is vital to building not only conversions, but brand awareness and loyalty as well since AMP JS manages the entire load chain and prioritizes certain requests over others which enable your users to start reading immediately after arriving.
Moreover, Google AMP knows ahead of time what your page should look like before anything starts rendering, since AMP requires height, width and other aspect ratios to be strictly set which cause the elimination of a major source of frustration, for instance page elements jumping around the screen as various resources are loaded. Nevertheless, AMP will work very well if you have any issue with loading of page related with content consumption since it will permit a significant upgrade to your mobile user experience.