AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages for Local Business Sites
So, what is an AMP website and why is it important?
Google’s primary purpose is to serve up relevant results that provide a user-friendly experience. Thus, they have created a new service offering their servers for new AMP websites. These are websites with “Accelerated Mobile Pages”.
The AMP website will look very similar to your current site but will be a separate site built exclusively for speedy mobile viewing. Once built this site is placed on Google’s server. Your current website will continue to be seen on searches done from desktops and laptops. Your AMP website will load up at lightning-fast speeds for mobile users making it a better experience for those searching for you on their smartphones or tablets. Not to mention good for your website SEO.
David explains a little more in this video.
Most importantly you will be ahead of your local competitors if you have your site AMP-lified.
Google recently started doing this back in 2015 for news-related sites. Now they offer it to everyone and we have seen definite improvements in site rankings on mobile search although Google hasn’t yet confirmed it as a factor. 😉
Your AMP website will load up at lightning-fast speeds for mobile users making it a better experience for those searching for you on their smartphones or tablets.
Remember, more than half of visitors to your website are coming from mobile
As The AMP Project states, “AMP pages load near instantly enabling you to offer a consistently fast experience across all devices and platforms that link to AMP Pages including Google, Bing, LinkedIn and more.” This is the main benefit of creating AMP pages for your website. You can see many of their AMP case studies here.
The second most important benefit for your website is Google is the one who is caching the page on their own servers. “When users select an AMP page, Google Search retrieves the page from the Google AMP Cache, enabling a variety of load optimizations that often make these pages appear instantly, such as prerendering.” is how Google describes it for developers.
And if that wasn’t enough, AMP pages also get a cool amp icon next to their listing in the mobile results. This icon attracts attention and encourages clicks to your page before others. There is an example of the icon next to our website result in the image below.
The official blog announcement from Google explains that many developers and companies are committed to developing amp pages for current and future sites. It will make the majority of web searches provide a more exceptional user experience when using browsers on their mobile device. Yet another benefit to serving these speedy pages, increased positive user experience.
Read more about the announcement below:
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages.html
From an SEO perspective, even though it isn’t an official metric yet Google has always given preferential treatment to sites looking to exceed the visitor’s expectations in page load speed and smooth site operation. It would be beneficial to add amp just from a personal branding perspective as well. Giving site users an improved visit.
We can explain things further if you would like more information on an AMP website. To conclude, what better reason than simply; amplified pages for your local business may encourage mobile browsers to visit your site first instead of your competition.