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Do you interact with a lot of content on a mobile phone or tablet? The experience can vary from VERY fast and efficient to frustratingly slow – so Google has introduced a solution to help you and your business …Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP).
Yes, that’s right – loading time of articles on mobile devices can take from 2-3 (best practice) seconds to as much as 8 seconds on some devices. The result can lead to a drop off from frustrated readers who never get to their desired web page or search result.
When frustrated readers drop off, publishers can miss out on website visitors and advertisers miss out on business leads or revenue from ads.
Enter Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP
To counter this problem, Google has introduced a brand new open-source HTML platform – AMP ( Accelerated Mobile Pages ) which allows websites to build light-weight web pages and dramatically increase the loading speed of pages.
Working with publishing and tech partners Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn – Google expects the new format will create a “fast and beautiful content browsing experience for the mobile web.”
Web pages with rich content like video, animations and graphics can work alongside smart ads and load instantaneously across multiple platforms and devices.
Converting pages to AMP format is expected to satisfy the mobile-friendly ranking signal, but according to John Mueller of Google, “there’s no ranking signal that’s solely associated with AMP.” YET.
However, Google is increasing the ranking boost to pages that are mobile friendly, from May 2016. The search engine giant rarely makes announcements about upcoming changes in the search algorithm metrics – but this time, they have.
“As the next step in our ongoing efforts to help users find more mobile-friendly content, beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to our algorithm that increases the effect of the ranking signal.”
A Google Spokesperson has confirmed that this is still just the “mobile friendly or not” signal that is being amplified. Google also confirmed at present that there aren’t any plans to bring this to tablets.
So in short, the update won’t affect desktop searches. This is boost is for smartphones only. But as an increasing number of business related searches are made on mobile, ensuring your site is mobile friendly is becoming more and more important.
Is your website mobile friendly? Test it out right here for free.
If you want to know more about optimising your website for mobile search, contact us today. We’re here to help.
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