Is AMP worth using?
Anyone who has a website knows that getting to page one of Google is hard work and takes a lot of persistence and patience. There are a lot of factors to consider beyond researching the right keywords and you need to put a lot of focus in to search engine optimisation. Well AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages look to help with that.
What is AMP?
AMP is a free Google service for creating super fast mobile pages. They essentially take a super lightweight version of your page and cache it on their servers so that people can access it incredibly quickly on mobile devices. Rather than having to wait a few days for content to be indexed it can be accessed through Google search very quickly.
Whats the benefit of AMP?
You have noticed recently when searching on your phone or tablet that there are now news stories at the top of your Google searches. They generally have a picture, a short snippet of text and underneath will be a little lightning bolt icon next to the word AMP. If you are quick to react to news or popular search terms you can feature in these results. So you will sit right at the top of Google on page 1 and the only thing that will sit above your content are ads in the search results. That means your page will get a lot of views!
Whats are the drawbacks of AMP?
You might be thinking that you can turn those views in to sign ups or ad revenue, but its not that simple. AMP pages do not run Javascript so things like newsletter sign up, conversion tracking, analytics, geolocation, cookies, contact forms and ads may not work. There are ways around this, you can make all of these things work without javascript and even use special ads from Google to keep ad revenue coming in. For affiliate websites you run in to the issue of services like Skimlinks not working as it is run through javascript. But you may find that there are a lot of restrictions that come with using AMP.
AMP Workarounds
There are a who host of plugins that work with AMP articles. Linking out to other articles will then load non AMP versions of the site. So you just need to be conscious of the content you make AMP ready. There are ways to integrate analytics and other features.
Is AMP worth using?
AMP is constantly evolving and now supports features like carousels and video. One of the good things about AMP is that you cab cherry pick pages to make available. This means you can run some tests and work out what is going to be suitable to submit to AMP.
It can be well worth using, you need to weigh up whether the jump to the top of the search results is worth the loss of additional functionality. For somebody just looking to get users to click a traditional link or use a phone number then this is perfect. But for more complex pages you may need to do some research and see if this is going to work for you.
