With the changing pattern of surfing the web and doing minor and major transactions on them through mobile devices, many things have changed as well. The visibly important changes brought through this are in digital marketing and SEO. Web developers are also developing mobile-friendly content with some vision in mind, and the marketing teams for sites are also doing the SEO and marketing based on the factor that most sites have a huge chunk of mobile-based visitors.
The current statistics reveal that there are as many mobile visitors for a site as there are desktop-based visitors, and this tells how important it is to get a responsive design for websites. A responsive design, by the way, means a design of a website that makes the site adaptive to the screen size and resolution of the device it’s opened and operated on. To help every website get that model Google came up with the launch of its latest open source project the AMP project.
What is AMP
AMP is the short form for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Mobile pages which are optimised to be lightweight and easy to load, and comes in a responsive design for best loading are these AMP approved pages. And the AMP program by Google is to alter the search results in a mobile based on showing the AMP pages first on the results list. The search results alter based on the device that is being used for web surfing. The most appropriate results which must be displayed on a tablet or mobile search and displays content that would be that much easy to load on the device is preferred using this program.
Webmasters must get their sites developed responsively
To get a site shown under the AMP program, the webmasters must get the site made responsively. If the site is not made responsively, then there would be the least chance of the site getting listed in the AMP criteria. Now, this can be an easy decision to get a site made from scratch ina responsive design. But what about the sites which are old and were made with a heavy to load structure. They will have to be modified too much to make things AMP friendly.
Creating AMPs through Google AMP
To make the transition of the old heavy model sites into lighter responsive sites easier, Google has taken the initiative.Copies of HTML files and webpage are stripped into simpler versions which can then be copied to make mobile-friendly versions of the same page. The resultant AMPs are fast loading, and lightweight pages and they are marked as mobile friendly by a symbol of a blue lightning bolt which shows by their side in the mobile SERP.
Why change to AMP for an old site
If you are running an old site, and it’s already doing fairly well in searches, then is there any more requirement to change its pages to AMPs? Well, there are some certain shot advantages of creating AMPs out of the old model heavy pages. They are as follows:
- Audience viewing a page, whether on a desktop browser or mobile browser loves it when it loads fast. Since large pages tend to get slower on smartphones, hence the requirement to turn them into lighter AMPs is always there. This ensures that visitors would stick to the page and view it.
- It’s a proven metric that even a delay of a second can affect the page visitors and reduce the conversion rate of the page by almost 7 per cent.
- Many people believe that to rank in the SERP of a mobile AMP is a must.
Should you change to AMP?
If you have a site that gets a considerable amount of visitors through mobile-based browsing, then certainly you must consider changing the whole site to AMP site. That’s because if you do not change it now, with the rate of changing technology may be too late for you, and you can get kicked out of the competition in no time, thereby your SEO effort all getting nullified after the non-AMP site.
The Google AMP bug
Many developers and webmasters, SEO experts and digital marketers, have noticed the fact that Google AMP does not work as designated all the time. There is probably a bug with the AMP listing at Google’s end, due to which the AMP sites do not get a marking when they are shown on search results. The way out of it is still not known. However, you can not wait to convert the site to AMP until the big is removed. You have to act now to stay in the competition. If you care to get your site listed on the top and get traffic from mobile users, then its high time you use the Google AMP open source program to transform the pages into the AMP format.
Talk to your marketing team
If you are unsure that your website would be found in a mobile-based search or not, and if you do not know that its pages are responsive and AMP or not, then you must talk to your SeoMarketer Sydney SEO team. The timely initiative would help you get the non-AMPs converted and stay in the competition. To start with finding out your site’s rank in a mobile search against all your keywords, and then see what the difference is after the pages are turned responsive, and then their SEO is again done for the same set of keywords.
Finally
Mobile responsive design is not just great to fetch attention for the viewers, but also equally important to get a rank and traffic through a mobile-based browser. When Google searches are executed on mobile, the results there would be different from the same search performed from the same location on the desktop. And that is the charm of doing AMP which makes the pages so well viewable on a mobile search. Hence it’s time you think about it and gets this done. You can hire a professional to do it for you.