AMP Survey: Window of Opportunity for SEO’s Offered By Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages

Anyone who has ever used the web on a mobile device will agree that it can be a frustrating experience. Long load times, clunky interfaces, and little of the rich interactivity we are used to on the desktop all make for a difficult and slow experience.

With the launch of its new accelerated mobile pages open standard protocol (AMP), Google is looking to change that.  Mobile sites that implement AMP will load roughly four times faster and use one-tenth the data of pages that are not AMP-enabled.  As of the end of February, Google is linking to AMP pages in mobile search results.

In its standard response to questions about how its ranking algorithm operates, Google declined to specify how AMP would affect mobile search rankings.  But a Google representative did say that “load time and page speed are ranking factors” — essentially confirming that AMP would affect rankings but not clarifying to what extent. Search Engine Land columnist Greg Sterling has observed that  “I would expect Google to eventually reward AMP pages in search results, just as it has with ‘mobile-friendly’ sites.”

Study: SEO Professionals’ Respond to AMP  

Given the potential significance and impact  of AMP on mobile search rankings, SEO Powersuite designed a study to identify awareness of SEO professionals and how they  plan to respond to it.  We surveyed 365 SEO professionals, a mix of respondents from both North America and Europe.  Our group represented a mix of in-house SEOs, SEOs who work for their own companies, agency SEOs, and outside consultants.

The study aimed to identify SEOs’ awareness of the AMP launch and to specify the impact they believe it will have on mobile search results and the actions they plan to take as a result.

Most SEOs Are Aware of AMP

In our first key finding, 75% of SEOs expressed some awareness of AMP, with 18% saying they had deeply researched it.  In other words, less than two months after Google’s AMP launch, fully three-quarters of SEO professionals were aware of its existence.  That fast rate of industry penetration suggests that AMP is an important industry innovation, and one that is being closely followed by the search community.

Overwhelming Majority of  SEOs Expect AMP to Affect Page Rankings

Eighty percent of respondents expect AMP to affect their ability to rank in mobile search results either significantly or somewhat.  Although Google positioned the new protocol as “open-sourced” and available for use by any search company, SEOs across the industry clearly believe that Google will be doing everything in its power to encourage adoption, including giving AMP-enabled sites priority in search results.

More than Half of SEOs Implementing or Planning to Implement AMP

Given their expectations about AMP’s likely impact on mobile search rankings not to mention the fast rate at which mobile search is growing, 52% of SEOs are implementing or planning to implement AMP on their websites in the next six months.  Another 42% plan to research whether to implement AMP, while only 5% say they have no plans to support it.

**n=334 (excludes those who say the decision to implement is not theirs)

Importantly, only 23% are actually implementing AMP now, while the balance of those planning to implement it are going through the “research and planning” phase that is a predictable corporate response to any new protocol launch.  Although this is an understandable reaction, it offers an opportunity for  agile marketers to get ahead of their competition in mobile search by implementing AMP immediately.

This first-mover advantage does not simply result from the time it will take for competitors to catch up and implement AMP.  As any SEO professional working to overtake competitors knows, Google’s institutional memory is long.  It can be difficult to get the search behemoth to “forget” (i.e. to stop ranking) brands it has mentally defined as industry leaders  and therefore deserving of higher ranking because of AMP support.

Conclusion: Early Adopters Can Grab First-Mover Positioning

According to our survey, SEO professionals clearly perceive the launch of this new protocol as likely to have major impact on the mobile web experience. AMP has already caused SEO professionals to sit up and take notice: Three-quarters of industry professionals actively engaged in SEO are aware of AMP’s launch, and eighty percent believe that AMP-enabling their sites will affect their ability to rank in Google’s mobile search results.  At a time when, according to Google, mobile searches have overtaken those on desktops, more than half of SEOs understand that implementing AMP in the next six months is important.  Despite that understanding however, only 25% of SEO professionals in our survey have  taken concrete actions to implement the AMP protocol now.  That gap creates a window of opportunity for agile marketers to use AMP adoption to build significant advantages over their competition.