Accelerated Mobile Pages: Does it Affect your SEO?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is out and has been speculated to have two benefits for SEO. One is it will have a “Fast” label designation on search engine results pages, and the other is that it will be a ranking factor.

As to how much of a factor, that is yet to be seen. But we all don’t know about this and so let’s understand what are AMP and SEO and how we can use it to benefit from our site’s mobile visitors?

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages?

AMP is an open-source coding standard for publishers. The aim for AMP is for publishers to be able to load their sites quickly on mobile since mobile responsive could be clunky and slow because desktop resources are heavy and plenty.

Most of the elements of a desktop website are unnecessary for a mobile site. Until recently, AMP and SEO was just for User Experience. Now, Google has backed it up – and is encouraging websites to follow suit.

Why is Accelerated Mobile Pages Important?

Ever tried to load your site on mobile? Are you happy with the load speed? I know loading a site in desktop is taking long and someone has a respectable amount of speed for my internet connection – but mobile?

Not a lot of people have good internet mobile providers. Simply put, browsing on mobile while you’re on-the-go will mean that your internet speed is not always fast.

So it’s best to optimize the experience of mobile browsing for all users (at least that’s what Google wants to happen) by standardizing a mobile version of your site with AMP and SEO.

Who will benefit the Most from Accelerated Mobile Pages?

It’s unbelievable that you’ll want to make your services or product landing pages into Accelerated Mobile Pages. It would be stripped down of its first-impressions.

That would defeat the purpose of your original design. So, not everyone will be adopting Accelerated Mobile Pages and SEO.

Thinking about SEO Services site and how it would look like with Accelerated Mobile Pages is just unimaginable. Many people will leave it as it is.

The sites that will benefit the most from AMP and SEO are publishing sites and the sites that produce content. So the way you’ll apply this to your client is not by making their entire site into Accelerated Mobile Pages.

This might affect conversions negatively. Rather, you can transition your client’s blog section or news and updates section into Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Actual Sites that Prefer Loading Accelerated Mobile Pages

If we try opening an article from Twitter from the native mobile app. you’ll notice that Twitter has its own browser now – and it’s not really loading sites fast enough.

But if a site is using Accelerated Mobile Pages then it loads fast even with Twitter’s native browser.

What is the Difference between AMP and Non-Accelerated Mobile Pages Mobile Browsing?

Starkest differences that AMP and SEO are:

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages forces you to use a streamlined version of CSS.

2. Javascript is not allowed at all.

3. You are forced to use an off-the-shelf Javascript library that AMP provides you with – which forces your images to load slowly.

Basically when you integrate AMP to standardize your mobile responsive pages, you are putting speed and readability as top priority over anything else – even over shareablility.

How can one make AMP Work for a WordPress Site?

Here’s where things get interesting because you can actually integrate AMP in about 5 minutes for your WordPress site, following these steps:

1) Install the AMP WordPress plugin by Automatic

2) Activate the plugin – what it will do is append /AMP on all your pages but what it won’t do is redirect mobile visitors to your /Accelerated Mobile Pages pages

3) So the next step is to edit your .htaccess file – you could use an FTP program to do this.

4) Lastly, you will want to edit the CSS to make your AMP look and feel more like your site. You can edit the CSS using FTP by going to your wp-content -> plugins -> Accelerated Mobile Pages -> template.php.

So, you are good to get started with it now.