AMP – Google Mobile Index – Google is working really hard for mobile web. Recently google introduced separate mobile search index for mobile web. This is really huge for Ecommerce merchants as well as publishers . There is great writeup on mobile first index by google – https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/11/mobile-first-indexing.html
Why Mobile first index is important for for every online retailer – Mobile penetration is huge especially in developing countries like India , indonesia and many others . The reason is low cost mobile device . People are browsing internet more on mobile devices . As google introduced ”
- If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the primary content and markup is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have to change anything.
- If you have a site configuration where the primary content and markup is different across mobile and desktop, you should consider making some changes to your site.
- Make sure to serve structured markup for both the desktop and mobile version.Sites can verify the equivalence of their structured markup across desktop and mobile by typing the URLs of both versions into the Structured Data Testing Tool and comparing the output.When adding structured data to a mobile site, avoid adding large amounts of markup that isn’t relevant to the specific information content of each document.
- Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot.
- Sites do not have to make changes to their canonical links; we’ll continue to use these links as guides to serve the appropriate results to a user searching on desktop or mobile.
- If you are a site owner who has only verified their desktop site in Search Console, please add and verify your mobile version.
- If you only have a desktop site, we’ll continue to index your desktop site just fine, even if we’re using a mobile user agent to view your site. “
So now you can understand why mobile is super important for your business . AMP is another topic which we have described earlier. AMP was initially introduced for publishing networks but not its not limited to publishers only loads of online merchants are already started using it .
Why AMP is important for Ecommerce ? As still its not a ranking signal – Yes for now AMP is still not a SEO ranking signal but AMP offers a lot more than the ranking signal .
Instant page loading – AMP pages are way to fast and loads almost instantly as you click on SERP results . This will for sure increase more Click rates and will leads to more sales conversions .
Better User Experience – UX is something which matters a lot specially for mobile web , most of the people leave the site or abandon the cart because of slow loading time and bad UX . AMP pages are way to fast and content delivers from direct google CDN that leads to way to better UX for customers .
Reduce Bounce rate – for sure if your mobile pages are that fast and content is relevant to the user then for sure bounce rate will be reduced , which is a good sign for your site and customers .
AMP support Micro data- AMP also support microdata as well as per the google article guidelines
- AMP with structured data: [Recommended] AMP pages with structured data can appear in a carousel of rich results in mobile search results. These results can include images, page logos, and other interesting search result features.
- Non-AMP web page with structured data: Non-AMP article pages that include structured data can increase the likelihood of appearing in search results with rich result features or appearing in a top stories carousel.
complete resource – https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/articles .