How Will Accelerated Mobile Pages Affect Your Digital Marketing?

The way users are navigating in search results (SERP) is becoming a bigger factor in SEO. Google states 50% of users use mobile devices to perform searches. This figure alone shows whether you have AMP content or not, it is incredibly important to ensure your mobile site is mobile-friendly. Further research discovered 40% of users will bounce off any website that does not load within 3 seconds. This shows a tremendous importance on the loading time of your content. If your website does not accommodate for these factors you could be losing potential conversions. So how will accelerated mobile pages affect your marketing?

What are the advantages of AMP on online marketing?

Well, the main key benefit is the faster loading time, we live in this fast-paced world where users are wanting instant answers to their queries and if they do not deliver those answers they will look elsewhere. If you have a good speed it is highly likely to increase engagement, page views and shares.

Higher rankings

Being such a new initiative it is unclear how this project will develop, but it is shown that AMP will be displayed in a news carousel above organic results with an icon to indicate it is AMP. This is likely to increase the opportunity of more readers.

Paid search impressions will likely increase

It is has been suggested paid search impressions are likely to increase because users are most likely to return to SERP after reading an article.

AMP is open source

AMP content users open source code. This allows developers to make further developments if they need.

More upcoming features

Upcoming features such as Analytics for this new initiative are already in the pipeline. Analytics will help users evaluate how their AMP content is performing and the impact it is making to their online marketing

What are the disadvantages of AMP on online marketing?

Whilst AMP show great advantages, it does have its fair share of disadvantage being so new. So let’s take a look at them:

Lack of call to actions

Whilst AMP content may help receive engagement from readers, it currently fails to provide effectve opportunities to generate leads. The content does not allow for any forms, therefore if your goal is to have any call to actions that gather contact data or subscriptions this current version will not be of help and you will have to wait for any future upgrades

Not for non-publishing sites

The focus of the project is only really useful for news or blog posts and does not really provide much advantage for non-publishing sites. Sites that are built for ecommerce don’t generally post news worthy content and therefore will be restricted.

Lack of design

Whilst the main benefit of speed is highly enticing, the design and user experience is highly restrictive, leaving you to decide if your content is powerful enough to speak for itself without all the visual aspects.

Could affect domain authority

You will receive fewer links. Other sites will link to AMP content and not to the publishing domain. For example, the publishing domain will be tagged on the end of www.google.com/amp/. This may lead domain authority to suffer as people will link to the amp URL rather than main domain name

Budget increase

While some content management systems have already taken the leap to integrate AMP content, others still have not. WordPress has introduced a plugin and an option for bloggers that automatically allows you to switch to the AMP version, if the pages are hosted with WordPress. If your CMS does not support AMP you will have to budget and turn to your developer. We imagine other content management systems will add support for AMP HTML pages as the project evolves.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that any business wants to lose a conversion based off slow page speed. And with user’s particularly using their mobile devices to consume news on the go, mobile sites play an integral role in delivering digital journalism. Google is committed to delivering answers to queries in the quickest and fastest way. Whilst the introduction of AMP is certainly appealing, you can see it has tremendous benefits for publishing sites, but still lacks appealing qualities for non-publishing sites. However, watch this space, the project has already been speculated to evolve in 2017, which can only make us believe the technology will become necessary for everyone in the future.