5 Reasons why Weebly should Start Using Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

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Here are five reasons why you should add AMP technology to your website:

1. AMP is essential for good mobile SEO.

By now, you already know that if you want your site to rank well, you need to make sure that it’s mobile-friendly. That’s also why you need AMP. Think of it as the latest iteration of mobile-friendly design.

With AMP, your pages and blog posts will load quickly on mobile devices. That will not only give your users a better experience, but it will also give Google a good reason to rank your site well in the mobile search engine results pages (SERPs).

But it’s not just about organic ranking with AMP. Your site could be featured at the very top of the SERPs. How? With Google’s carousel that displays AMP pages -- and only AMP pages -- at the very top of the results list.

If you take your mobile device right now and Google a keyword related to current events, you’ll see that the results include a carousel of AMP pages at the very top of the SERPs. That’s where your page could be, but only if you adopt AMP.

Related: Getting Ready for Google's New Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) 

2. AMP is so fast, it will reduce your bounce rate.

Don’t you hate a high bounce rate? When people visit your site, hang around for a few seconds, and then go somewhere else, you’re obviously not doing something right to inspire them to hang around for a while.

One reason people bounce -- the site is just too darned slow. That’s why AMP is so valuable. It will load your pages in a flash so that users will have one less reason to run away.

Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO

3. AMP could help you monetize your site.

Do you know why some sites are agonizingly slow? It’s because they’re loaded up with ad technology. It’s ironic, really. Websites increase ads to generate more revenue, but in the process the increased load times caused by the new ads also cause people to leave the site. That means, in all likelihood, less revenue in the long run.

Of course, some users who really like ad-overloaded websites will install ad blockers just so that the sites load faster. That’s also a problem for publishers because their ads won’t be seen, and they’ll lose revenue.

Enter AMP. It was designed with ad monetization in mind.

Here’s what the folks who started the AMP project have to say about their technology as it relates to advertising. “A goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is to ensure effective ad monetization on the mobile web while embracing a user-centric approach. With that context, the objective is to provide support for a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies in Accelerated Mobile Pages.”

The idea is that mobile pages -- even ones with an abundance of ads -- will load quickly with AMP. As a result, mobile users won’t see any reason to install ad blockers. AMP is great news for advertisers and publishers alike.

Related: Essential Web Skills Every Modern Entrepreneur Must Have 

4. AMP offers analytics.

By now, everybody in the online marketing universe knows about the importance of analytics. Those are key metrics that offer insight about the effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns. AMP offers analytics as well.

Using AMP, you can track important information about visitor counts, new versus returning users, clicks, conversions, video engagement, link tracking and more.

Even better -- AMP analytics offer built-in support for almost every marketer’s favorite analytics tool, Google Analytics. Specifically, you can easily track three request values with AMP -- page views, events and social interactions.

If you’re really a hardcore GA aficionado, you can even use AMP to send custom dimension parameters to Google Analytics. That way, you can track very specific data points. You can see an example of an AMPed-up page with analytics at the Google Developers website.

5. Google loves AMP so you should too. 

If you want to maximize the visibility of your website, then you need to play nice with Google. And Google absolutely loves AMP.

Just within the past few weeks, Google has made it easier to split-test AMP pages, announced that it will display AMP errors to site owners in search results and announced that AMP pages will be added to Google’s organic search results.

And that’s not all. If your site doesn’t support AMP, you might log in to the Search Console and see the following message -- “Google has detected that your site has many pages that may benefit from being served as AMP pages. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are HTML pages that are optimized to load fast on mobile devices. Learn more about AMP benefits in the resources below. Valid AMP pages on your site will be eligible to be shown in search results and receive special badging in search results.”

In other words, Google really wants you to use AMP. Why not get started today?

Get AMP ready now.

It's pretty clear that AMP is here to stay. They are even making AMP possible for ecommerce websites now. 

The good news is that if you are on Wordpress, Drupal, Magento or another popular CMS, it is very easy to activate AMP pages. Weebly?????????????

[Queso]

Hello! Our team here is indeed aware of AMP. Though I'm no coder myself, it's an exciting bit of up-and-coming design I've had my eye on as well!

For anyone reading, 24 has also made an excellent Feature Vote page here, if you'd like to add your weight to the discussion!

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Google is retooling search to put Mobile first | Google accelerated mobile pages (AMP) now a must have for any website SEO

Google is in the process of creating a new index for mobile devices, which will become the "primary" index for search, according to Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes. This means searches from mobile devices will serve up the freshest results as Google will update its mobile index more frequently.

Google has previously discussed such plans but Illyes' comments, which were reported by Search Engine Land, are the first indication that the company plans to roll this out fairly soon. 

A quick refresher on how Google Search works: Google's bots crawl the web tracking more than 60 trillion web pages and the links within them. These pages are then categorized into a massive index based on hundreds of different factors. This index, along with a series of algorithms, enables Google to turn up relevant search results when you enter a query into the search box.

Right now, Google only uses one such index for all its searches, regardless of platform. Under the upcoming update Illyes detailed, though, Google will create a separate mobile-only index that will serve as the "primary" index for search. As Search Engine Land points out, it's unclear exactly how this will work or what the impact will be, but at a basic level it means desktop and mobile users will see different search results and Google will put more resources into those surfaced on mobile.

While some have interpreted this to mean that Google is "downgrading" desktop in some way, there are practical reasons why Google would want to prioritize mobile for updates. For one, mobile now accounts for the majority of all Google searches, so using an index that was created primarily for desktop no longer makes sense.

Think of your own search habits: When you use Google from your phone, chances are, you're looking for an immediate answer to a question you have in the moment. Likewise, if you want to research a topic more deeply — something that requires combing through several pages of results — you probably save that for desktop. So, it follows that Google would want to make its "freshest" results mobile-first. 

The change also stands to drastically improve the user experience for mobile users. Think of how frustrating it is to search for something on your phone only to land on a link that is virtually unreadable because the website isn't optimized for mobile. 

This update, in theory, helps guard against that since Google could prioritize content that's optimized for mobile devices even more than it already does. We've seen signs of this already, particularly with Google accelerated mobile pages (AMP), which allows publishers and others to create ultra-fast loading versions of articles to display in search results. 

While we'll have to wait for further details from Google to find out what the implications of the change will be (Google didn't respond to Mashable's request for comment on the update), it does sound like we'll find out sooner rather than later. The new index should be rolling out "within months," Illyes told Search Engine Land.

[Antiques]

Weebly you guys need to give us some insight on weather your considering this or not! I love you guys but I'm considering moving one of my sites that heavily relies on SEO to Wordpress for this exact reason.

[Brodie]

ksaber, check out the discussion about it here: https://community.weebly.com/t5/Vote-on-Features/Google-Accelerated-Mobile-Pages/idi-p/11905

[brose1]

I just recieved this from Weebly support chat ..."Support Rep Okie dokie, I googled AMP ready. Weebly sites are mobil responsive but it looks like AMP ready is open sourced and Weebly is closed sourced so that is not something that would be added"