What is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in SEO?

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What is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)?

Accelerated Mobile Pages are essentially a form of HTML that focuses on all the important stuff needed by mobile phones, while the rest is cast aside. Much like a race car being stripped down for the track, AMPs are webpages that have been stripped down for mobile phones, the likes of which are likely to have slower processing power and slower internet connections than desktops or laptops. The theory (and reality) here is that AMPs load faster on mobile phones than normal webpages, thus improving the user experience.

You can create an AMP page by getting your developers to follow AMP guidelines, and have Google host your page on gstatic.com so that it is cached by Google (again improving load speeds). We don’t want to dive deep into the intricacies of all those severely restricted Javascript libraries or the structuring of your CSS – leave that to your trusty dev team. What we do want to portray is the benefits of adopting AMPs, both now and in the future. We think it’s pretty clear that pages which have leaner code and utilise better caching will load faster. But there are more benefits to be considered:

What is mobile-first indexing?

Google have switched to mobile-first indexing, meaning that Google will rank websites based on the content displayed to a mobile user and their corresponding user experience first – predictably, desktop comes second here. AMP has been developed as an open source resource partly because of the inevitable tide of mobile phone usage, seen again here by mobile-first indexing. In short, you care about your mobile phone, Google cares about their results via mobile phones, and as such they are superseding desktop content with mobile content.

Is AMP good for SEO?

AMP can help with SEO, however optimising elements such as page speed, core web vitals and improving the mobile experience of your site can help to improve your site’s performance. AMP is not a specific ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, however, speed is.

Not everyone is on board

Accelerated Mobile Pages have obvious positives – the news carousel has forced media outlets to produce fast loading pages which have boosted exposure for the technology and subsequent adoption rates. Users have a quicker experience and webmasters are continuing to treat mobile traffic seriously, all good news for the AMP project on the whole. There are some (including The Register) who believe that AMP is just another ploy by Google to ‘control the web’ that actually holds little benefit for websites, especially for those looking to monetise their content (many adverts are stripped out of AMPs). Others believe that it forces publishers to serve the user rather than the other way around.

One thing is for sure, AMP is growing very quickly. As a rival to Facebook’s ‘instant articles’, it is interesting that Facebook now supports AMPs in their instant articles – although with their plagiarism of Instagram it is pretty clear that Facebook is taking the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ tact. You may want to create accelerated mobile pages because you believe in the technology, or you may be more sceptical. Whatever your stance, the one thing that comes out of all of this is that if you aren’t yet mobile-ready, you better do some catching up… what are you waiting for?

Want to attract more traffic from mobile search?

Work with our technical SEOs to implement AMP pages where appropriate to maximise your engagement on mobile devices.

Speak to our technical SEOs