Importance of AMP On Google Ranking

Who wouldn’t want to see their website soaring up in the search results & be available in the first 10 Google search results? To do this, we opt to use a number of WordPress SEO tips for beginners, tricks & methods. And whilst they all help in some way or another, the growing competition makes it harder to achieve the goal. But sometimes, Google paves a way for you to increase your google ranking rather easily. One such way has been via Accelerated Mobile pages or AMP. Let's see what is the role of AMP on Google Ranking.

Where google never claimed AMP to be a ranking factor, it has still secretly been called one. So, what exactly is AMP & can it really help improve your google ranking?

Let’s see.

What is AMP?

Back in October 2016, Google started a project called the Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. It is essentially an open-source framework that enables a user-first format for the content on the web. It was done as a way of ensuring faster loading pages, especially for those, who are accessing the internet on their mobiles.

AMP gave importance to information & thus allowed pages to load much faster than other websites. But on the other hand, lost a few special designs & effects along the way. Since readability was the protagonist of the story here, Google didn’t pay much heed to these apparently trivial  factors. Many developers claimed that AMPs loaded at least 4 times faster than the regular HTML pages.

How Does AMP Affect Your Google Ranking?

Now that you know what AMP is, let’s talk about how it helps your website.

Though Google has time & again said that there is no direct link between AMP & google ranking, one undeniable fact is that AMP helps make your website load much faster than others, thus making it a prime choice. Where an AMP page loads in 0.7 seconds, an average website takes around 15 seconds to load. You can judge by the numbers, just how fast we are talking about. Now, another factor is that a delay of 1 second can affect your conversion rate by up to 20%.

The math here is rather simple. AMP gives your reader a better experience by helping your websites load faster. This impacts your ranking on google too. So, in a nutshell, by opting to AMP, you can improve your google ranking. Not to mention the fact that AMP-optimized pages appear at the top in the form of a grid, enhancing their availability & making it possible for readers to read them sooner.

AMP 2014 & AMP 2020. What Has Changed?

Time changes everything. This has proven true for AMP too. When it was launched in 2014 & where it stands in 2020 are two different aspects all together. As mentioned earlier, since AMP concentrated on readability, factors like special design & effects were overlooked. Besides that it didn’t allow any third-party Javascript, had connection problems with analytics, no social sharing options or sidebar or navigation or even an option for comments. Due to this, the pages appeared quite like a very diluted, basic version of the original page. So, the time increased, but it took a toll on the appearance.

Thankfully, with time AMP has grown a lot in a number of aspects. New administrative & design components have been introduced & features like navigation, forms & analytics are now possible. It also supports JavaScript up to 150 kb. It is less, but it is a start. Though nothing big has been announced in reference to AMP in the past few years, there has still been major changes to enhance the look & feel of the loaded page.

Thus, AMP is an indirect factor essential to enhance your Google ranking & by enabling it for your web pages, you can increase your chances of being on the first page. It becomes even more necessary if yours is a news site. Opting to AMP is definitely a good idea for you & if you haven’t enabled it, I don’t know what you might be waiting for.

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