Latest Take on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Please

AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages – Embarrassment Alert – if you recognise yourself here – good at least you’re reading this.

So I asked my team, what’s the latest on AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages.  I’d actually always subscribed to John Henshaw’s view that we should make websites faster as AMP is essentially a Google ‘thing’ and anything proprietary is fundamentally flawed.

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages are special pages that you create on your website using approved and ‘limited’ HTML, CSS, these vastly skinned down pages are then much quicker to load, added that Google stores a version on their servers, so when they are needed, everything is super quick.

They actually arrived in 2015… but take-up in 2016 when I looked at it was very low… Google seemed to reserve the right to add advertising anywhere on the page they deemed suitable as they were hosting the pages.  A sort of payback that the publisher has no control over.

What we did not want to see is our super-fast eCommerce pages with adverts on them for competitor products… didn’t make them, but it is 2019 now and it’s time to look again. So I asked the team a simple question.  Is AMP  something suitable for our SEO clients?

SEO Response 1

That’s a tough one – they both have merits and non-merits

https://www.ncompass.co.uk/blog/

• More Visually Stimulating and therefore friendlier to the user
• Much better intro snippet for each blog
• It’s a little bit messy though
• Better navigation – more simple

 https://www.ncompass.co.uk/blog/amp/

• Smarter – more professionally looking – thus a little more boring perhaps – even a little too simple.
• Hardly any snippet of the blog – means that it is harder to tell what the article might be about without good headings
• Faster to upload – download -rightload – leftload… Therefore better to share
• Have to click to get to the navigation menu – one click too many?

That’s just my quick observations – as I said they both have pros and cons – essentially – how much faster is /amp/ to /blog?

I personally prefer the /blog/ to the /amp/ site – it is much more of a community centre listing and friendlier and more accessible to the user.

It was a bit limited, to say the least, concentrating on the look and feel, but at least a comparison from a user point of view.

SEO Response 2

Speed.

It’s all about speed.

If 2 pages have identical scores in every regard, then Google will favour the amp‘d page because google can serve that from their own servers, no extra domain lookups, no surprise js payloads, etc.

It’s something that’s always been geared towards content publishing. News websites, publications that generate revenue from ads, the buzzfeed of the world, etc.

I was not really happy with this answer either… Speed yes, but just because AMP was suitable for Content Publishing 2/3 years ago, does not mean it is not suitable for 2019.

My Research

2017 – Negative
https://thirtybees.com/blog/amp-is-bad-for-e-commerce/
“AMP itself is too limited, even if the speed increases that are promised are there, I don’t think I could recommend it because of the limitations”

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/amp-for-ecommerce/211540/
“AMP can potentially create a faster and overall better user experience on e-commerce sites. Faster and better can, of course, lead to more conversions.”

2018 – Maybe or Wait
https://www.yottaa.com/6-reasons-google-amp-not-great-ecommerce/
“Conclusion: eCommerce should wait on AMP for now”

https://www.cloudways.com/blog/amp-for-ecommerce/
“Before you get all excited and make your website AMP-enabled, remember that it doesn’t GUARANTEE higher rankings in the SERPs”

https://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-strategy/ecommerce-can-increase-conversions-amp-implement/
“While AMP does have some limitations that can make some tracking difficult, it’s highly recommended at key points in the buyer’s journey of your e-commerce site to optimize load times.”

2019 – Positive
https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/mobile-ecommerce-seo/#important-factors-of-a-mobile-seo-strategy-in-2019
“Historically, AMP usage on individual websites has required brand development and implementation. Now, all themes on BigCommerce have adopted AMP as standard business practice.”

https://www.veeqo.com/blog/ecommerce-seo-trends-2019
“AMP provides a straightforward way to create web pages that are compelling, smooth and – crucially for SEO – super fast.”

My View…

There is a Reason AMP has its own section on Search Console and also what is the connection between Mobile First and AMP… because if Google is targeting Mobile-First – then they are targetting AMP as well…

We should definitely keep AMP on our radar.

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