How Does AMP Affect 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.

When Google started focusing on user-friendliness on mobile view and eventually made it one among the mobile search engine ranking factors, all the site owners have started running behind the faster mobile experience.

If the site is not loaded quickly on the mobile search engine, there will be a hiccup that may discourage the user to quit from the page. So it’s good to optimize your pages for mobile users.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (aka Google AMP), is an open source initiative backed by Google that helps publishers design mobile-friendly pages that load instantly on mobile devices.

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

Accelerated Mobile Pages (aka Google AMP), is an open source initiative backed by Google that helps publishers design mobile-friendly pages that load instantly on mobile devices.

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

The sites that will benefit the most from AMP are publishing sites. Sites that produce content. So how you’ll apply this to your client is not by making their entire site into AMP. That might affect conversions negatively. Rather, you can transition your client’s blog section or news and updates section into AMP.

One of the starkest differences is that AMP pages do not have a lot of stuff for more complex user experience. Everything is stripped-down.

1. AMP forces you to use a streamlined version of CSS.
2. Javascript is not allowed at all – in fact, I’m still trying to figure out how to make share buttons appear on my AMP pages.
3. You are forced to use an off-the-shelf Javascript library that AMP provides you with – which forces your images to lazy load.

That’s it. 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 shareability.

Although AMP is already showing great promise, its future is uncertain. The success of AMP will depend largely on how popular it becomes and this can only be measured by the number of people that use it on their websites. Of course, it will become standard if enough people implement it.

So far the future is looking good for AMP because it delivers something that ranks high with most users, speed. Add this to the fact that Google has invested many resources into implementing AMP and marketers can expect to see results if they choose to use it, especially if speed was an issue for them previously.

1. Page Speed
2. Responsive
3. Mobile-first user experience
4. AMP components
5. Fast growing
6. Whatzit
7. Bing

In order to comply with a valid AMP structure, you cannot run your own JavaScript nor load external libraries. For many developers, this reason alone is enough to shy away from AMP.

However, AMP intended for developers and creators to use the various AMP components to accomplish things rather than by accomplishing them through JavaScript. When paired with state management components, such as provided by amp-bind, there is enormous flexibility on what you can still do.