Dive Brief:
- All supported Google mobile search results now include an AMP label for pages that are optimized via the company's Accelerated Mobile Pages project, the company said in a blog post.
- The change won’t affect mobile page rankings, but is intended to enhance the user experience by helping searchers quickly access the information they want, with Google claiming load times of less than one second and data use that is 10 times smaller for AMP pages.
- Google said it now has over 600 million AMP documents created by sites from around the world, covering categories such as retail, travel, recipes, general knowledge and entertainment.
Dive Insight:
The news points to the importance of mobile search, with smartphones and tablets accounting for the majority of online searches. Despite this, mobile still commands a lower cost-per-click rate than desktop searches, in part because the smartphone experience can be inferior due to smaller screens. AMP is one way Google is trying to address this issue and drive revenue from mobile.
While the AMP project was initially rolled out to help publishers optimize content for mobile in an open-source environment, Google has been expanding the reach of AMP pages to e-commerce through an initial partnership with eBay, and last month announced AMP for landing pages.
Google is increasingly making AMP part of its mobile user experience, and the more users get used to AMP pages and understand what the AMP label means, the more likely they will prioritize AMP optimized pages while searching.
In August, Google announced AMP would expand to organic mobile search results, coupled with an algorithm adjustment that gives AMP pages featuring breaking news and real-time alerts prominence in mobile search results. Given all these changes, marketers should be actively adopting the technology to ensure solid mobile search SEO.
