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Written by: Andrew Schmeerbauch
AMPs are changing the mobile game as we know it.
As ecommerce continues to take up a larger share of the market, it’s up to you to ensure that your content marketing strategy is keeping up with the times. And if you’re not optimizing for mobile , you risk falling behind your competitors.
According to a survey conducted by HubSpot Research, 33% of respondents said that their phone was the primary device they used to access the internet. That’s why tech giants like Google are rolling out new ways to build pages that load faster on mobile, in the hopes that a poor connection won’t prevent mobile users from getting the information they need.
AMP 101: What Are They, And Why Are They Important?
AMPs, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, are part of an ongoing project launched by Google in October 2015 to maximize a user’s mobile surfing experience. As of this May, Google announced that there are now more than 2 billion AMP pages covering approximately 900,000 domains — not bad for an initiative that hasn’t even reached its second anniversary. Following its early success, the AMP network is looking to expand to even more ecommerce sites, and may even attempt to tackle the online ad experience .
What makes these AMPs so special? In short, they make browsing on your phone faster…much faster. By removing JavaScript from mobile pages and prioritizing text-based content, AMP are able to load information almost instantaneously. To put things in perspective, according to Google research , about 70% of conventional mobile pages require between 7-10 seconds for the visual page content to load. By comparison, the average AMP page takes less than a second to load — and that load time is getting shorter by the day. At those speeds, it’s no wonder more and more major tech companies (Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TripAdvisor, to name a few) are publishing using the AMP network.
Related: 5 Signs That You’re Working With a Great Content Marketing Agency
How AMPs Can Skyrocket Your SERP Ranking
Although Google insists that AMP is not a ranking factor, there’s no denying that page speed is. Even if AMP pages don’t receive a boost in rankings purely based on their affiliation with the project, they’ll still rank higher than conventional mobile pages simply because they load faster. Of course, SERP ranking isn’t the only metric an AMP can improve. With faster loading pages, you should also see a significant dip in your bounce rate — especially since (according to a study conducted by Google ) more than half of all mobile pages will be abandoned by potential visitors if the page takes more than three seconds to load.
Here’s the bottom line: AMPs are going to be the future of mobile. Check out the project to keep up with the times!