Google AMP is coming to organic SERPs

Six months ago, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative was only available in the upper carousel of its results pages. This week, Google announced that the feature will now be rolled out across the entire organic search page.

In a blog post published earlier this week, Google previewed exactly how the new layout will look.

In fact, if you’re currently browsing via mobile you can click the following link for a live demonstration: AMP Demo.

If you don’t want to click through, mobile users will soon see content in results with the familiar AMP lightning logo – indicating that chosen content is available in the format.

For those hoping for a sneaky ranking boost from AMP – don’t get your hopes up. Google has confirmed that enabling AMP won’t automatically make a page rank higher.

Google sees the open-source initiative as a way to boost the mobile web, and to deal with consumer objections to aspects of the mobile user experience, such as slow-loading pages and annoying ad formats. AMP competes with Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, however it has expanded well beyond news into other categories, including e-commerce.

Google is hoping to address UX concerns by exposing more users to AMP and its benefits. Benefits include:

• AMP pages are 4x faster, use 10x less data compared to non-AMP pages
• On average AMP pages load in less than one second
• 90 percent of AMP publishers experience higher CTRs
• 80 percent of AMP publishers experience higher ad viewability rates

To date there are more than 150 million AMP pages in Google’s index, with more than 4 million being added every week.

But if you’ve yet to enable AMP for your website, don’t worry. Google’s announcement is designed to be an early warning before the feature rolls out more broadly later in the year.

Looking to implement Google AMP on your site, but struggling to get things up and running? Connect with us.

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