Google's AMP and how it impacts the publishing media
Improvements in SEO and metrics
¿Qué son las AMP?
Hello! What's going on?
Now that a few days have passed since the legislative storm that most of us have suffered with the changes in the RGPD, it is time to return to a relative normality and make a technical stop and some reflections regarding the contents. We are all concerned about whether our readers will continue to be interested in receiving newsletters, subscriptions and various notifications regarding the news we publish.
As the acronym AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and as you can imagine, Google is behind it, this means optimization, speed and usability. AMPs are mobile-optimized HTML pages for both Android and iOS.
AMP is specially designed for digital publishing media like yours and to serve content at higher speed thanks to technical specifications and Google's cache, in the form of CDN (Content Delivery Network) to deliver all AMP pages previously validated (document + asynchronous Javascript to not block or delay the loading of page elements + images) all from the same server, thus improving efficiency and download speed. The validation can be done in any online AMP page validator.
You must keep in mind that the content you serve to your user in the AMP version has to be the same in terms of extension as the desktop version, otherwise Google will redirect the user to the original content and will warn you in a "friendly" way that you have to improve this practice.
In short, AMP versions are downloaded much faster, which improves the PageSpeed of your page, increases the dwell time, improves the recirculation between contents and decreases the bounce rate, increases mobile organic traffic and generally improves the qualitative metrics and user loyalty to your online publishing project.
Where can I view AMP pages?
AMP pages are intended to improve the user experience from mobile devices, therefore they will be displayed as a standard result of searches performed on Google always from smartphones or tablets or in the carousels of the Top Stories or featured news carousels.
One way to know that you are viewing the AMP version of a news item is to check the URL displayed in the mobile browser, which indicates that it is served from Google's AMP cache, which would be something similar to: www.google.es/amp/s/urldelanoticia_amp.html.
Remember that to be served correctly, in the code of the news you have to link each of the versions, the standard HTML with the AMP and tag each of them to point against the other version and in this way Google knows what to index and what to present in each situation, and what is more important, that Google does not consider the AMP page as duplicate content.
Having or not the AMP version of your content is a voluntary decision, but if you want to improve the traffic of your project, you should seriously consider the implementation of this format since it will improve your metrics in Google searches from mobile, which will increase the number of page views and advertising impressions.
Even so, you must keep in mind that the ads on AMP pages load so quickly that sometimes they do not stay long enough, and this added to the adblockers like Chrome's native one, and the regulations regarding display advertising of the Coalition for Better Ads, you have to adapt to the standards, if you do not want to see your advertising revenue decrease due to insufficient traffic in your digital media.
Do AMP pages improve SEO?
If you are a news publisher that generates content constantly, the answer to this question would be yes, as long as you have a good SEO strategy with the right keywords and as generic as possible, with a very generic search intent and that provoke many queries in Google. This type of searches can drive a lot of traffic to your website, and can place your most clicked content in the carousels of featured news at the top, the Top Stories.
However, to place content in the carousels in this type of search, the news that have a higher CTR (Click Trought Rate), which is the percentage value of the number of clicks on a content with respect to the number of times that the search result of the news has been shown, always start with more advantage.
Sometimes we can also find that for the same search there are several news items from the same media that are better positioned with the prejudice that this represents for the other players, because the news items from the media with fewer clicks are relegated to the last positions of the carousel and become invisible to the user who is always left with the first 2 or 3. The specialization of a media in a specific topic and the amount of content published on a particular topic also have an influence. It is not an exact science, because it is influenced by many factors such as the overall assessment made by the Google algorithm regarding a search, the intention and recurrence of the user, i.e. if it is a unique visit and the quality and originality of the content.
Si tu medio digital necesita mejorar el posicionamiento de los contenidos no dudes en contactar con nosotros y solicitar información de nuestros servicios SEO.
Therefore the previous argument feeds back and is that the AMP version of your content is basic because you can generate them and put them in circulation in the shortest possible time, before your competition to be consumed by the largest number of users in the shortest possible time and for the maximum possible time. This makes your content more attractive to Google, which will also index AMP content very quickly to provide fresh and current content to its audience. In short, speed vs. quality vs. quantity
Finally, news carousels at the moment do not show more specific and concrete keyword searches that represent a lower volume of traffic but in SEO key if they can be a real opportunity to drive traffic to your project but not to the news carousels, not for now ....
Do AMP pages improve advertising revenues?
Nowadays, the metrics audited by advertisers are those related to audience, number of visitors, new vs. returning users, session duration, abandonment rate, page load time, average duration of the visit...
All these metrics are basic to position your digital media in Google and therefore every time an ad is printed the CTR ratio (clicks vs. impressions) increases significantly because the number of visits is much higher and if in addition the usability that brings an optimized content and an almost instant download reinforces user loyalty by the convenience of consuming the information from mobile, then it is really clear that AMP are a priori key factor to improve all qualitative and quantitative metrics and logically also your advertising revenue.
In addition, we do not forget that AMP pages are served by Google from its CDN, thus downloading your web server infrastructure and also including Google Analytics tags, Comscore and the media's own advertising, without losing traffic or revenue.
If your editorial project needs the implementation of AMP pages, do not hesitate to contact us and we will find a solution tailored to your needs.
If you liked the content, you can share this post on social networks and 1 like will also encourage us to continue... it's free and you know that the best things in life always are.... ?
If you want to suggest a topic that adds value to the day to day of your editorial project you can do it here and if you want to subscribe to our newsletter, just leave a name and an email in the field below, and you'll receive the news of our blog before anyone else.
We will continue talking about what we like the most. Will you be there?
¡Hasta pronto!
And finally, did you know...
In the next post we'll talk about FIAs (Facebook Instant Articles) and the importance that today has the publication and consumption of content in the timelines of users' social networks and how it impacts news publishers and the traffic that these channels generate to digital media. We'll talk about all this...
