The focus of content marketing is to create, publish and distribute content to a targeted audience with the aim of attracting attention to your website, generating leads and, ultimately, driving profit growth.
To improve search engine optimization (SEO), there are several ways that we can go about optimizing content so that search engines such as Google rank it higher on search results. This optimization includes everything from keyword research, writing meta tags, carefully concocting page titles, urls, adding alt tags to images, improving how you display content and many other tactics.
All these optimization techniques are incredibly important for a website’s SEO ranking, yet, pages that do not load quickly could bring all of that work optimizing your content crumbling down.
A slow loading page discourages users from enjoying your content and ruins the user experience (UX).
According to Kissmetrics, 47 percent of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds or less, while 40 percent of consumers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
This is why website speed is a factor that search engines use when ranking websites - even more so when it comes to mobile websites. Mobile friendliness and loading speed is now a significant factor in mobile search engine ranking.
So, how can your business ensure that its mobile content is optimized with fast page loading speeds? Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) could be one solution. Image size optimization is another very important factor in page load speed and we’ll do a blog post on that as a separate topic later. For now let’s just discuss AMP.
What is accelerated mobile pages (AMP)?
Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are essentially lightweight pages that are designed to create mobile-optimized content that loads instantly on all devices. It’s a way of taking a page that’s already mobile friendly, and then simplifying the code (using a code known as AMP HTML) so that it loads instantly.
The google-backed project, is simply a way of creating content pages that load much faster than regular HTML pages.
When searching for something on Google on your mobile device, you will be able to recognize which content is AMP in search results by the small lightning bolt that is displayed next to it. These pages are opened directly in Google search, rather than opening the actual host’s web page, making them much faster to load.
What does AMP mean for your mobile content?
AMP pages are predominantly used to quickly serve content to users on mobile devices, without them having to click through to a website to view the content. That means when you create content on an AMP page, Google will rank that content higher due to its optimal loading speed.
However, speaking to Adage.com back in 2016, Richard Gingras, Senior Director of News and Social Products at Google said websites which adopt AMP won’t “get a massive boost in search ranking.”
While that boost may not be huge, it definitely exists. In fact, there’s a correlation between site speed, page views and reduced bounce rate that may push your mobile search engine rankings up even further.
That’s because when mobile web pages load quickly, users are more likely to view more pages on your website instead of navigating away - reducing your bounce rate and making Google happy.
Here are just a few of the benefits that AMP will bring your Inbound Marketing content:
- A better user experience
- Faster loading speeds
- Improved search engine rankings
- Lower bounce rates
- Enhanced appearance in Google search results with the addition of the lighting bolt icon
Are AMP pages worth creating?
AMP is not directly a search engine optimization ranking factor, but the speed in which a mobile page opens is. That, combined with the technical aspect of its implementation and the time needed to create AMP pages, leaves many organizations wondering whether it’s truly beneficial for them to create AMP content.
Ultimately, AMP is going to give your content an edge when it comes to optimization. If your content is similar to the content of two other companies, then AMP may give your content the edge it needs to rank higher on mobile search.
There are, of course, some cases where AMP may simply not be beneficial enough for an organization to invest time and money into it.
Want to learn more about AMP or search engine optimization? Contact The Brit agency today. Our team of Inbound Marketing experts would love to answer your questions.
