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4 Reasons Why You Should Be Using AMP’s

If you don’t work with SEO regularly then you’re probably not familiar with evolution of Google over the past 20 years. In the beginning Google created something the world had never seen before by creating an efficient way of filtering content for internet searches by calculating a site’s prowess based on the amount of other websites that would link to it. The idea here is that instead of ranking websites that used a given word the most (the old way search engines worked) they would judge the quality of its content based on how many other websites actually directed users to said website. By this standard, Google was assuming that if it is quality content and a great reference for whatever you might be searching for, people would link to it on their site because they information it provided was legitimate. Easy enough, right? Nothing could go wrong here. The honor system would prevail is it always does.

 

Uhhhhh…not quite.

 

Over the last 20 years Google has been working diligently to improve the overall search quality for everyone in various ways. Up to this day, they implement somewhere around 600 changes a year to their algorithm, all with the focus of creating a more positive user experience with each change. These changes to don’t always fall in line with the information that is actually brought to the top of the search. As of the past two years there has been more of a push to improve one aspect of User Experience, site speed. This is not to say this is just now happening. Site speed has always been a consideration but has gained more emphasis of the past two years especially with the increase in internet browsing on mobile phones. This has become one of the most prominent topics in the SEO industry, leading to the idea if that your site cannot load in under three seconds then your rankings could be negatively affected. This may seem like complete craziness to those that aren’t familiar with the process of building a website but luckily this is a realistic goal. There are many things you can do to bring your site load time down to that magical three second mark. Today we’re going to focus on the benefits of one way; AMP’s.

 

An AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) is a web page that is broken into very basic elements so that it runs faster instead of having to wait to load slow resources (i.e. videos, gif’s, etc.). There are still ways to include interactions and videos on these pages but have to be run with AMP based code, making it load within a literal second or two. I’m not going to lie to you though, this can take a little bit of work. There are some workarounds like using certain plugins if you have a WordPress site but unfortunately if you’ve done it yourself then you’re going to have to create each page using AMP elements. It’s not incredibly hard but will take a little extra. Trust me when I say though that it is well worth the extra effort. Here’s four reasons to create AMP page sites.

Given that AMP pages are breaking down regular pages into the most basic version of HTML and JavaScript, it should go without saying that with the minimal resources being loaded that they are going to load incredibly fast. The kicker here is that the faster these pages load, the more Google will want to rank the page higher (given the content is interesting and helpful). Remember, the idea behind Google’s search algorithm is to bring a searcher the best content available. As it so happens, if you have the content that someone is looking for and it loads faster than other pages (getting them the information faster), then you can get to the top of the rankings.
Albeit, we just went over this I just want to take a broader look at this. By being able to bring a searcher their information faster you are helping them in their ultimate quest to find an answer to their question. Of course, the focus of Google has always been to bring the most relevant content to the forefront of searches. Apart of this is bring someone the answer as fast as possible. When taking this into consideration, it only makes sense that the fastest pages with the best content will rank higher than others when it comes to answering a question specifically.
In case you don’t know, when you try to access a website anywhere it first has to be requested from the hosting server to send the files of a given website to you, then the files are read and interpreted onto your screen as the website that you eventually see in front of you. This may seem like a slow process but happens incredibly fast, hence why when you go to a site it will load in a few seconds or so. The nice part of having AMP pages (for website owners) is that with less resources to load you are putting less strain on your server (especially if there are a lot of requests for a page) meaning that even with a ton of requests your page will load incredibly fast and give your server the chance to handle more requests at a higher speed.
It has become a standard with modern websites to have them load within a few seconds. Your bounce rate can be severely affected by this, bringing up your bounce rate higher than you may be comfortable with. This is where AMP pages comes into play. By having your pages stripped down, it will ensure that they are loaded as quickly as possible and people will get the information they came for. If they are getting what they came for then there’s no reason for them to leave fast.