Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is the latest trend in the virtual world and many SEO businesses are now concentrating in AMP projects. If you didn’t know, the Accelerated Mobile Pages project is the latest initiative from Google aimed at making a better and user-friendly mobile web culture. This is achieved by introducing a new standard to build web content for the mobile devices.
The new standard is basically a set of rules that help to form a light and simple version of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Consequently, web pages that are built in compliance with AMP will load real fast on the mobile devices.
Ever since the launch of AMP last year, it has been an important topic in SEO news. However, despite all the hype and buzz about the AMP project, many SEO businesses and webmasters do not give the required importance to AMP. So, is AMP yet another fad that will come and go in a few weeks’ time or will it stay to become the future of mobile SEO?
When asked this question, Adam Greenberg of Google said, “Google now links to AMP pages in all its search results, which shows the project is now pretty central to the company’s plans.” On that note, let us see how the AMP project is going to affect the online world and SEO trends.
Improved User Experience
We all know that page loading speed is an important factor that affects user experience. Many studies conducted in this area have proved that a slow loading web page will lead to higher bounce rates. Reports prove that about 40% of the visitors to a website are likely to navigate away from your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. AMP pages can help solve this issue.
The lighter version of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets that are used in AMP pages makes it possible. In addition, the AMP content is cached in the cloud; it is this content that is delivered to the visitor and not the one from the server. Experts claim that AMP pages load thirty times faster than the non-AMP pages. Statistics prove that the average load time for AMP pages is 0.7 seconds and that for the non-AMP pages are 22 seconds.
SEO company executives claim that AMP pages perform better in searches, both in terms of Click Through Rate (CTR) and Ranking. It is true that switching to AMP web pages will not introduce huge traffic flow to your site right away, but it will pay off for sure, as AMP is already dominating fresh content and the page sharing trends are on the rise.