Google AMP: How Does This Affect Content Marketing?

Mar 4, 2016 | SEO

Have you ever come across an article on the Web that features a tiny lightning bolt at the top corner? Did you notice how fast the page loads and how easy it is to navigate? Many publishers and business owners already know about it, but some others have no idea what it is and what it is all about.

It’s Google AMP.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is an open source project initiated by Google to enhance the experience of online readers, specifically mobile users. According to some resources, this move is the search giant’s response to Facebook Instant Articles, a feature designed to make articles load as much as 10 times faster than average web pages. Google AMP boosts the article’s loading speed up to four times.

With AMP, publishers can control what they want to place on their pages. Instant Articles doesn’t allow publishers to do this, as it controls what appears on the pages included in the article.

So how does it affect content marketing and what can marketers do to cope with the changes?

Based on reviews from those who have used the latest Google update, AMP is a promising feature. But there is a challenge: it will take time and effort to implement the change. Webmasters must be proactive and diligent to achieve the best results. Here are some of the things they need to do to ensure a smooth and successful transition.

Prepare Two Versions of Each Article

Traditionally, publishers upload just one version of their content. With AMP, they need to use a streamlined version to achieve what Google claims “lightning speed”. The AMP version has no JavaScript and embeds, so comments and forms won’t appear and the page will load faster on mobile devices.

Update Visual and Video Content

Webmasters must use a range of features to allow images, GIFs, and videos to adapt with the AMP infrastructure. These include custom amp-ing elements, amp-video, amp-anim, and amp-youtube tag.

Modify Original Page Versions

Webmasters and site owners need to alter some code and validate their pages so that Google can recognize their AMP content. They can do this by adding “/amp/” to the permalinks of their pages. Here’s an example:

<link rel=”amphtml” href=”https://www.domain.com/blog-title/amp/”>

There’s so much to learn about Google AMP. The implementation of the “big” change involves a lot of work, but the results, according to experts from a leading Denver SEO company, are quite convincing. Those who have built or are planning to build AMP sites have great things to look forward to.

One thing’s for sure: Google is still doing their best to improve mobile experience by reducing the page load time of pages containing featured articles.

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