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Google introduced accelerated mobile pages (AMP) back in August with limited reach. Prior to that, these results only appeared in “Top Stories.” The August move had them showing up in organic mobile search results.
Now, AMP results are moving more broadly into global mobile search results.
Page Ranking
One of the first things that marketers are likely to want to know is how this change will affect page ranking.
Google officials have clearly stated that the AMP rollout will not be accompanied by a ranking change.
Articles that are formatted for AMP will not get a boost in search results. However, if you have a version of your article for desktop search and an AMP version for mobile search, Google will choose the AMP version for display. You just won’t get a boost over pages on other sites.
AMP pages are designed to load much faster than other pages. Therefore, if you have more of your content formatted for AMP, it will load faster for visitors, which means that you will have a lower bounce rate and a faster overall speed for your site, both of which will improve your page rank.
These qualities create a positive feedback loop. The faster your content loads, the more improved your overall SEO, which moves you to the top of search and helps you get more visitors, thereby improving your SEO even more. And so on.
Types of Content
AMP isn’t just for traditional content like blog posts and articles. Google notes that AMP is being used for a great variety of content.
Google officials say that AMP is being used for news content, shopping pages, cooking pages that include recipes and videos, travel content that includes maps and other interactive elements, e-commerce pages with order forms and shopping carts, and entertainment pages, among others.
The goal, according to Google, is to make websites more accommodating for mobile users. The search giant is using its influence to make that happen by providing the tools to make it easier and rewarding those who use those tools.
Reach
So far, Google said that the use of AMP has grown quickly and officials are happy with the response to it.
This summer, there were only about 150 million AMP-enabled pages. Now, there are about 600 million pages that have AMP.
The reach of the pages is also broad. The pages represent about 230 locations and are written in more than 100 languages. Major companies like WordPress, Bing, Reddit, and eBay are even using AMP to promote their content.
Those numbers are only expected to grow with this global rollout. One day, we expect to see the majority of content formatted for AMP.
How to Get AMP
All you have to do to take advantage of AMP is to learn how to code your pages in the appropriate markup.
Google offers an extensive tutorial on this markup language that walks you through every step of creating your AMP page. You can go through each aspect of the page, including adding a photo, modifying your layout, adding your content, previewing and validating your page, and publishing it.
Google also provides guidelines about including media and iframes, including third-party content, ensuring that your page gets seen, validating your page, and configuring your analytics.
All you have to do is create the page and publish it. Google will then select that page for mobile results when crawling your site.
Mostly, the markup language just adds AMP JS library information and a boilerplate to the basic page HTML.
If you aren’t that proficient with code, you can easily test and preview your page before you publish it to ensure that everything is showing up the way it should and you have no errors in your code.
There are also numerous online forums and chat rooms where you can troubleshoot your AMP markup and get answers to your specific questions about how to accomplish something specific with the markup.
Of course, you also have the option to hire someone who can do the markup for all your pages if you are not confident in your ability to handle it yourself. The expense of hiring outside help will be well worth it with the benefits you will get having your pages available for faster loading on mobile devices.
The number of mobile users has grown significantly in recent years, and it is only expected to grow more. Finding ways to reach more of those users and to make your site load faster will only improve your online marketing strategy and help you get more brand exposure and more leads and sales.
If you haven’t already started implementing Google’s AMP, now is the time to start. Check out the tutorials or hire someone to take care of the work for you.