Have you heard of Accelerated Mobile Pages or Google AMP?
What is Accelerated Mobile Pages aka AMP? Maybe you’ve heard of Facebook instant articles. If you have, then you understand what AMP is in principle. They are quite similar regarding speed.
However, for clarity, let me explain what AMP is and then show you how it can help boost your traffic and perhaps, improve your revenue.
The term AMP is the short form of Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is an initiative (not owned by, but) sponsored by Google to speed up web pages. This is because most traffic on the web (over 60%) now comes from mobile devices including tablets. Using AMP can improve the user experience and consequently help boost your revenue – depending on your monetization method(s).
- Related: Why Mobile Marketing
How to get your site up and running on AMP
You can get the official plugin to run AMP on your website by browsing through the WordPress repository (if you use WordPress). There are extensions or tricks to use AMP on other platforms. You can talk to your web designer or developer to learn how to use AMP on your site.
How to browse the AMP version of a site
The Accelerated Mobile Pages keep a version or cache of your web pages on individual servers, and these pages are served when anyone browses through a mobile device. To browse the AMP version of websites, users have to come from search engines or add the AMP extension to the links they visit directly. That is to say when users visit your site (e.g., xyz.com) they won’t see the AMP version, unless the user adds “/amp” extension, making it look like this xyz.com/amp. However, as I said earlier when these users come from search engines, they are automatically served the AMP version of your site.
How to improve Website Traffic through Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Using AMP on your site isn’t going to skyrocket your traffic just because you installed the plugin. However, your general blogging or web-mastering practices will help you make the traffic multiply.
The reason is simple.
Users are in love with sites that are mobile responsive and most webmasters know this fact. But AMP makes mobile responsiveness even better. It makes your blog or website pages open automatically upon clicking.
The following ways show how website traffic is improved by using AMP.
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Google adds a lightning bolt and an AMP tag to search results
When you start using AMP to power the mobile versions of your website, Google will show it to users who are served results from your site that you use AMP. They do this by adding a small bolt symbol and an “AMP” tag beside pages coming from your site in the search engine result pages. This makes users favour using or clicking through to your site.
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Improved Click through rate
When users see the lightning symbol and the AMP tag on result pages, they are more likely to click your site, and this improves CTR, which is a significant factor in Google indexing and consequently serving results from your sites. (I think this is worth stressing: In case you do not know, high Click-through rates will skyrocket your rankings.)
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Easy navigation
The AMP version of websites isn’t packed with features. It serves the streamlined and straightforward versions of every page on your website. This encourages users to remain on the site. Today, more is stressful, and less is the new more. Users no longer like being served too many buttons which end up being confusing and frustrating. Sometimes, these buttons are not functional, sometimes, there is more than one button doing the same thing on the same site. With AMP, you eliminate this, thereby indirectly encouraging users to stay.
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More page views
When users visit your site and find navigation comfortable they’ll stay, they’ll visit more pages and read other relevant pages or posts. This further reduces bounce rates. Again assisting with ranking with the search engines.
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Google is biased
The purpose of Google is to organize information and serve them to users in an orderly manner. To do this, Google has a bias towards mobile devices. As earlier stated, more and more people use mobile devices to access the web. It was believed that mobile was the future, well, the future is now. It is now safe to say Mobile is the in-thing today. So to be favoured by Google, you need to go mobile. It is believed the ability to improve the mobile experience is a major ranking factor. And like you know, Google might not broadcast it when they specifically make AMP one of their over 200 ranking factors (but Responsiveness already is).
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AMP pages are super-fast
People are busy, there is no time to waste. There is tons of information needed to be digested in real time. This makes users close any page taking time to load. You’d be surprised at the statistic. People tend to close a page that loads in more than 4 seconds. That’s a crazy figure, isn’t it? Imagine the number of page views you’ve left on the table. With AMP, this is almost a thing of the past. People no longer have to leave your websites. The HTML code helps make only the most essential features to load, and they do so in real time. It’s like magic. Now your visitors can stay.
How does AMP increase Ad income?
At the beginning of this discussion, I said AMP would also help you improve your income. Not many webmasters would agree with that, reason being that the usual AMP plugin only allows AdSense integration. However, many do not know this plugin has a payment plan which lets you pay to integrate other advert networks. With this feature, you can incorporate advert networks which pay per thousand impressions. And because of the speed of the mobile/AMP version of your site, you would get many more page views which will help increase your earnings. Also, the more page views a site has, the more likely ads (including AdSense) will be clicked on. This would also mean increased earnings. Of course, you can also integrate your email forms and get more email subscribers, so you don’t lose subscribers anymore.
Other search engines including Bing, are showing signs of interest in the AMP project. And when widely accepted, it shouldn’t be difficult to help you get an edge over non-users.
All in all, it’s possible to use AMP to improve your traffic and page views to your site. And the few steps above are sure to help you achieve this.
