There are a few things we all know:
- Google rankings are essential to your business
- Mobile devices drive the majority of Google's traffic
- The on-site experience is important to Google
Here is a picture of you after making Google Happy:
What is AMP and why does it make Google happy?
As more content is consumed on mobile devices every year, on-site mobile experience becomes increasingly more important. To address this, Google and Twitter launched a project called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to deliver content at blazing fast speeds on mobile devices.
AMP is essentially stripped down cached versions of your content that give users an "instant load" experience when viewed from Google search results.
The most important thing you need to know is that AMP content is given priority over regular content. In other words, if you don't have AMP, your content might be suffering. Here are a few drawbacks of not having AMP:
- Your content will not rank better than others who do (at least on mobile)
- Slow load times (especially on mobile) lead to drop off (aka bounce rates)
- High bounce rates might not directly impact Google rankings, but we know they want searchers to find the right content and fast
Here is a picture of you not keeping Google happy:
We should dig into the impact AMP had on businesses that followed Google's protocol.
How do Accelerated Mobile Pages impact ranking and traffic?
According to a Perficient study, "Thrillist saw a 70 percent lift in traffic, with 50 percent of that growth coming from AMP."
Woah. Granted, AMP started in media with Google's Top Stories, but this proves the impact AMP can have on Google's search results.
What is the impact of slow load times?
Amazon once published a study that for every 100 milliseconds their load time slowed they lost 1% of revenue. That is $750,000,000 in revenue for Q1 2020 and $890,000,000 in Q2 2020.
Google has stated a similar stat. They saw a 20% decrease in conversions for every 1-second delay in mobile load times.
Load times are vital and AMP pages help improve them and the user experience.
How do Accelerated Mobile Pages impact bounce rates?
Interestingly enough, AMP pages sometimes get a bad rap because of an increased bounce rate. Luckily this unbiased source Amp.Dev does an amazing job explaining why with the concept of survivorship bias.
Basically, AMP pages are falsely accused of having a bounce rate that is higher because they are loading faster, making your non-AMP analytics miss 20% of their bounce rate.
Have no fear AMP will lead to increased engagement, lead to billions of revenue (if you are Amazon), and 70% lift in traffic (If you are Thrillist).
To make sure our clients are able to realize the results above, we launched AMP-enabled content. If you are a Full+ customer, we will automatically make AMP versions of your content available to Google, so they begin to cache your content and rank higher in Google search results. If you are not a customer using AMP Pages, you might be missing out on $700,000,000 in revenue per quarter due to latency.**
**This is only if you generate 70 billion a quarter and have the same conversion rates/customers as Amazon.