AMP - The what, why and how of it

[Ruchy]

Hi There,

In our company, we never had AMP implemented on sites that we SEO for. We want to start doing that now.

I know the basics of AMP and their requirements, however, I need to know a lot more about it from an  SEO perspective of this before I actually get developers onto it.

I want to know all the  1) risks involved, 2) the best ways to implement it (plugin etc.), 3) why it is worth it.

I also want to know how to see if a developer knows what he is talking about - and really will do it the right way without messing me up? Are there any specific questions I should ask, or information he should be aware of?

Also, is there a way for it it be done for pages that have more than just text like quote forms, sliding headers etc.? Should we only do it for the blog section of our site?

I would greatly appreciate any links to additional resources on this topic, (not why to use AMP, but everything else)

I greatly appreciate you taking the time to answer my question

[bridget.randolph]

Hi Ruchy, I've answered your questions below:

1. Risks involved:

Most obvious is that you're duplicating your pages and therefore you'll need to make sure you correctly indicate that these are AMP versions of your regular content. There is also a risk that because the page loads in the search result, you'll see less traffic directly to your site - but usually (at least for publishers) this is worth it nonetheless because the impressions are higher (due to being featured in the news carousel at the top of the SERP).

2. the best ways to implement it:

Depends on your existing setup. If you have a custom CMS, get your dev team to build it into the next iteration of the CMS. If you use Wordpress, you can use a WP plugin - Yoast has a good post about this: https://yoast.com/wordpress-amp-part-ii/

3. why it is worth it:

It may not be. Definitely worthwhile for publishers or sites which publish content for Google News. For other types of site, I would recommend checking whether AMP is a common feature for your primary keywords, and decide accordingly. Also worth it if you're seeing a loss of general traffic and suspect it is due to AMP being more present in search. As James notes, it can help with pagespeed but that's not enough of a reason to do it.

4. Are there any specific questions I should ask a potential developer, or information he should be aware of?

Has he/she done this before? Can they provide working examples? Do they understand how to make sure it's showing up as AMP rather than purely duplicate content? Are they familiar with what elements are supported and unsupported? Are they able to also implement relevant structured data markup?

5. is there a way for it it be done for pages that have more than just text like quote forms, sliding headers etc.? Should we only do it for the blog section of our site?

You can add things like video, forms etc but bear in mind that the goal is to be as minimalist as possible, so any sort of fancy design element will likely not be supported. I would focus on implementing on news or other types of content which currently display AMP results in the SERP.