We've been encouraging you to make your law firm websites freaky fast for years. If you're a lawyer who regularly publishes, blogs or covers various legal news topics, now it's time to consider making them even faster.
Last October, Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, for a faster, open mobile web:
Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.
As Distilled's Will Critchlow simply puts it at Moz:
At its essence, it's basically a stripped-down form of HTML, a diet HTML if you will.
There are a variety of reasons to consider implementing AMP. First, people expect your pages to load really quickly. Think about how you use the web. Do you tend to wait for pages to load? If you're like most people, you probably just move onto the next thing.
Second, see all of those people looking down at their smartphones? Many of them are connected to relatively slower connections. So, even if your pages load lickety-split on a desktop browser, they might not be so quick on a smartphone connected to a slower connection.
Finally, Google is favoring faster pages. While AMP isn't a ranking factor today, it's likely to be among Google's many ranking factors in the near future.
(image credit: AMPING UP IN GOOGLE SEARCH by David Besbris, VP Engineering, Search)
Many of the searches people use to find your pages may not trigger AMP Top Stories carousel results now, but again, it's foreseeable that Google may give more preference to these pages for mobile users soon. So, it's a good idea to at least consider amping up your sites.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when implementing AMP on your sites:
If you're on WordPress (and you probably should be), at SearchEngineLand Paul Shapiro (@fighto) provides very useful information on how to get started with AMP in WordPress
Keep in mind that there are a variety web elements that aren't allowed under the AMP specification. Among these are form elements and third-party JavaScript. Therefore, you will have to find workarounds for these (see the SearchEngineLand post for an iframe hack).
Use Google Search Console AMP report to fix errors:
You can see an example of AMP implementation on my blog. Click this link. That's an AMP page. Now, remove the /amp/. This is the non-AMP canonical page. Notice that the canonical page references the AMP page:
<link rel="amphtml" href="https://gyitsakalakis.com/search-stuff/seo-reputation/amp/" />
If you questions or problems with creating AMP pages, feel free to post a comment below. Alternatively, you can contact me directly as I'm happy to help.
