Passionate about SEO, we are always looking at new ways to deliver the best results for our clients. The digital landscape is ever-evolving, because of this we have to push harder to find tactics that give our clients a little edge over their competitors.
SEO is not only there to satisfy search engines like Google or Bing. it’s also vitally important to improve user experience.
In part 3 of the AMP series, we cover the impact that Accelerated Mobile pages may have on SEO tactics.
A correlation between AMP and How Google works in Organic Results
As we all know Search Engines look at thousands of factors when placing websites in their respective positions on the results page. It can get really messy when trying to break that down. From an AMP perspective we are going to look at the following items:
Now that we have highlighted the items that AMP would impact, let’s break down item individually:
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
As we all know the CTR is probably one of the most crucial aspects to organic rankings. It becomes pointless for a site to rank in any position and have a low CTR. AMP can help with this. If we look at the screenshot below (from a mobile device), we will see that there is an AMP icon in the results.
Users will immediately know that the site is going to load a lot faster and will be more tempted to click on that result. In this scenario, AMP can impact the CTR which in turn will help your SEO efforts.
This becomes more critical when Google is trying to keep searchers within the Google set of sites. The zero click-through rate is becoming an even bigger factor therefore having search results that stand out will help your efforts tremendously.
Site Speed
This has become one of the biggest items in terms of SEO. Site speed is crucial to where Search Engines place you. We know that if your site loads longer than 3 seconds, 40% of users will abandon your site and 80% of them will never return. So yes, Site speed matters.
Enter AMP which can generally improve your site speed by up to 4X faster. Naturally, this will have a significant impact on your sites’ visibility. In this case, AMP will help big time.
As a side note, you don’t have to deploy AMP to improve your site speed. There is a myriad of other tactics that can be implemented which can boost your site speed and have the same impact.
Bounce Rate
Continuing from Speed, we look at the stats in terms of your site loading fast or slow. Users much prefer sites that load as possible and the longer your site takes to load the more users bounce off of your site.
If your site is overly flashy, too busy, just doesn’t make sense or isn’t user friendly, this is generally not very appealing to the user. The great thing about AMP is, it gets to the point and the view is straightforward.
User Experience
To tie everything together, we need to look at the user experience. If your site does poorly in this area AMP will not help you as much as you would hope. Although, if your site is sound and delivers a really great user experience going the HTML route may be the better option for you.
Have a fast loading site with a low bounce rate will of course boost rankings and the Click-through Rate which does matter in the grander scheme of things.
In a nutshell
Accelerated Mobile Pages as a tactic will not give in enhanced rankings on its own. It is the enhancer or amplifier to your current efforts. Essentially AMP is not a standalone tactic that is going to miraculously boost your rankings and cause you to overtake all your competitors.
It isn’t necessarily the cherry on top that makes everything better. Yes it can help increase your visibility and Google may reward you but we wouldn’t suggest singularly relying on it.
Using AMP is solely for providing a better more enhanced experience for customers and people at the end of the day. Google and other Search Engines may or may not move you up the results ladder. It depends on so much more.
Do we recommend using AMP as part of your SEO strategy? Yes, in conjunction with best practice web and SEO methods.
If you would like to further discuss this topic, get in touch with us. Each project is unique and may require different SEO efforts, we will take the time to see which tactic works best for you.
