Google AMP Update

Advice for AMP-curious publishers

Columnist Barb Palser offers a framework to help publishers assess the potential benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Barb Palser on March 17, 2017 at 9:47 am

The Accelerated Mobile Pages project has some big numbers on the scoreboard: More than 860,000 domains are publishing over 35 million AMPs per week, according to stats shared by Google at a recent AMP developer conference, where the company also announced the expansion of AMP to more than a billion additional users in China and Japan. AMP already represents 7 percent of top US publishers’ web traffic, according to Adobe.
As the light, fast-loading mobile format is embraced by leading social platforms, e-commerce sites and content publishers, some digital managers are still trying to evaluate the importance and urgency of AMP with respect to their specific strategies.
The AMP-curious include smaller e-commerce sites, professional sites, blogs, academic publishers, niche content sites and even news publishers in small markets. In general, they like what they hear about AMP’s benefits and are eager to improve search performance — but are also juggling a long list of competing priorities and must be careful about allocation of resources and brain space. Their question usually isn’t whether to implement AMP, but whether it’s important enough to prioritize now.
Any publisher can benefit and learn from AMP at some level; here’s a framework for assessing how meaningful those benefits might be for your site, today.

Will AMP improve your site’s reach?

One reason to implement AMP is to increase traffic to your site — and avoid losing audience to AMP-enabled competitors. This opportunity is significant for certain types of websites and negligible for others.
Today, Google’s Top Stories AMP carousel is the main place where AMP content is explicitly and strongly advantaged over non-AMP content. The Top Stories carousel is an array of AMP-rich results for news-related queries. (Certain types of structured content, such as recipes, are also displayed as AMP carousels, but the Top Stories carousel seems to be unique to news.) The carousel dominates the mobile viewport, pushing down other results. If your content is likely to be surfaced in the Top Stories AMP carousel, then you should definitely be looking at AMP.  read more