What is AMP/PWA and should you care?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. The brain child of the folks at Google and Twitter, the AMP project seeks to make the web better by providing open source access to tools that allow for the creation of fast, beautiful and high performing website and ads. Google has gone on the record to state that AMP is not a ranking factor but we question that logic. Google’s algorithm favours speed and premium mobile experiences so it stands to reason that they can help you move the needle.

PWA stands for Progressive Web Apps and in the a world of acronyms and buzzwords, PWA might just be one of the hottest at the moment. The Wikipedia definition of PWA is a web methodology that creates a hybrid of a website and a mobile application that is perfectly tailored to the modern mobile environment. Progressive Web Apps equip businesses with the tools to offer things like "improved perceived performance, seamless page transitions, offline functionality, and home screen installation on mobile devices.” [cite:https://www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/progressive-web-apps-that-dont-destroy-seo/]

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The definitions above should have given you a good picture of why you’d want to get stuck into both - but let’s look at a couple of advantages of each.

AMP

• Load speed: The main benefit of AMP pages is their load speed. The technology has created stripped down pages that feature only the most important elements required for instant rendering.
• Visual: While the initial AMP product was limiting in terms of layout and visual capabilities - modern pages can render just about all the creative elements that we have come to know and love.
• Dynamic: The AMP language allows for a multitude of features that range from image carousels, to video embeds, to social content all wrapped up within a simple to understand language.

PWA:

• Push notifications: PWA serves as a layer between the internet and the browser and routes all browser requests through a script called the Service Worker. This allows for the app to serve tailored messages to consumers - even those who are offline
• Offline experience: Thanks to Service Worker caching in local storage - the whole or part of the PWA can be accessible offline
• Add to home screen feature: While bookmarking a page to your home page has been around for donkey’s years - having offline capabilities makes this action more desirable from a consumer point of view.

So while it is clear to see that both of these are incredibly powerful suites on their own - it’s when you put them together that the magic happens. AMP pages can use many PWA features to serve a richly engaging, interactive, mobile first experience that renders at lightning fast speed. All of which is good for Google and good for SEO.

What about AMP/PWA and SEO?

While the route to success in the SEO space previously was often about working through a long list of criteria that are all perfectly tailored to the desire of search engines - modern search engine algorithms favour a quality consumer experience more than anything. AMP and PWA help shift the needle on any of the important metrics that Google would look for as an indication of quality, things like load speed, bounce rate, talkability, etc and for this reason - it stands to reason that, if this initiative makes sense for your business, that it would be good for your SEO. Obviously though, if you are unsure about anything - be sure to reach out to us at info@cartello.io.

As for the matter of whether or not AMP is good for search or not, we’ll just leave the below here and let you decide.

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