Google AMP: 4 Critical Answers Hotels Need to Understand Accelerated Mobile Pages
Want to know the cold, hard truth about website load times? If your hotel website doesn’t load quickly, you’re setting yourself up for failure in the form of soaring bounce rates, plummeting conversions, and your competitors outranking you in search results. Fortunately, our good pals at Google released a solution to the slow website woes which can significantly boost your website speed and help optimize your site for mobile. Say hello to Google Accelerated Mobile Pages and why hoteliers may want to care about them.
1. What are Google Accelerated Mobile Pages?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are a Google-backed content delivery service. Designed as an open source initiative for web publishers, AMP improves the loading speed of pages on mobile devices, and in turn, improve the mobile user experience.
AMP is a whole new way of creating web pages that allow a much faster load time than regular HTML. It also speeds up the delivery of content on mobile devices via a Google-hosted cached version of your website, rather than loading the original version from your server. When searching on a mobile device, websites that have valid AMP versions of their pages will be delivered to users in a ˜carousel’ that sits above the results, giving them the top ranking position.
For hotels, having a valid AMP version of your site could float your hotel to the top of search results.
2. How does Google AMP work?
When selecting a search result on a mobile device, users aren’t sent directly to a web page. Instead, users are taken to a cached version on Google’s servers. Google AMP removes the ˜slow’ parts of HTML by using a stripped down code called AMP HTML, essentially creating its own version of the page, limited to the most basic and fastest webpage technologies.
3. Why is Google AMP important for your hotel’s website?
In 2015, Google released an algorithm update that focused on ranking mobile-friendly websites higher in search. Google’s recent integration of AMP listings into its mobile search results takes this one step further. And we’re now seeing AMP optimized sites rewarded with higher rankings as well.
Mobile devices have taken the number one spot for travelers when booking vacations. So mobile-friendliness should be a top priority. If your hotel’s website is not optimized for AMP, you could be getting outranked by your competitors in mobile search results. In turn, you could be missing out on hundreds of potential guest bookings.
In addition to increasing your ranking in mobile search, AMP pages load on average 30 times faster than non-AMP pages. So your visitors are less likely to abandon your hotel site due to slow load times. This will help to significantly reduce your bounce rate while creating a much more user-friendly experience. It also ensures your potential hotel guests receive a quick and easy path to purchase for mobile bookings, resulting in higher conversion rates.
4. How can you optimize your hotel’s website for AMP?
Essentially, you’ll need two versions (the original and the updated AMP version) of the pages on your hotel’s website. To do so, you’ll need to enlist the help of an experienced web developer or someone who knows their way around a website.
Due to the restrictions that come along with Accelerated Mobile Pages, you may need to rewrite your website templates. And you should take note: multimedia or images on your site will need to be reconfigured to suit AMP criteria. For Google to detect the AMP version, you’ll also need to make some modifications to the original page. If your site uses WordPress, however, an AMP plugin now exists which dynamically generates AMP compatible versions of your posts.
Up next, discover the must-know Google SEO marketing tips for hotels.
Do you think Accelerated Mobile Pages will have an effect on your hotel website? Sound off in the comments or on Facebook.
