It’s Time to AMP Up Your Website

A year on from the launch of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Google have announced a global rollout in mobile search results.

Now that there are over 600 million AMP-enabled pages online from top publishers such as Washington Post, Slate, Gizmodo, Wired, Pinterest, eBay, and Reddit, Google are moving to the next stage of ensuring that users have an even better mobile search experience.

AMP essentially ensures that your website loads faster on mobile, without having to sacrifice ad revenue or altering the overall experience. 53% of users will click off your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, so offering fast load times on all devices is essential to improving your bounce rate, conversion rates, and encouraging people to use your site.

Improvements Through AMP

It is often expensive and time consuming to jump on the latest SEO bandwagon – when Google announce changes, it usually makes sense to wait to see the true impact of their updates (and whether others in the industry update their sites accordingly).

We can now see that AMP loads 4 times faster than standard mobile pages – while loading speed isn’t a major ranking signal, it does have a huge impact on how people interact with your site and whether they will come back next time they see it in the search results.

A year on from the initial AMP roll out, publishers have seen fantastic results related to improved mobile speed:

• Washington Post saw a 23% increase in search users who return within 7 days
• Slate saw a 73% increase in visits per monthly unique visitor
• Gizmodo saw a 50% increase in search impressions
• Wired saw a 25% increase in click through rates from search results

(Source: Search Engine Watch)

The Future of Search: Splitting Mobile & Desktop Experience

AMP is just one change out of many that Google make every year. We have seen Google make consistent changes to give priority to sites that offer a positive mobile experience given the fact that the majority of search users who are on mobiles and tablets rather than desktop PCs or laptops. After giving mobile-friendly sites priority in search engine results, Google are now working towards a separate search experience for mobile users and desktop users.

Rather than being separate but parallel, the mobile search index will be the primary source of fresh information – desktop will be a separate index that is less up to date.

Google have not given a time frame for splitting out search results, but proactive businesses will certainly benefit.