It’s important to highlight the impact this has on user experience. Whilst we’ve all hopefully made the effort to make our sites mobile friendly, less of us will have thought about the pace at which our site loads. Around 40% of people abandon websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load and with more than 80% of people now accessing the internet through their smartphones throughout the course of the average month, it’s more essential than ever that businesses in Devon and Cornwall have mobile-optimised sites.

The opportunity is even greater when we begin to look at Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which Google are rolling out in an attempt to make the mobile web even faster and friendlier than ever before.

You may have already noticed AMP pages appearing at the top of your Google search results; they say AMP with a small lightning bolt next to them.

So what are AMP pages?

Accelerated Mobile Pages pretty much do what they say on the tin; they’re webpages which load content almost instantaneously, hence the ‘accelerated’ term. Without getting too technical, AMP pages are unique HTML pages that prioritise speed and a fast experience for users.

They are created in addition to mobile-friendly webpages, and have expanded exposure across the entire Google Mobile Search results page, including e-commerce, entertainment, travel, news, recipe sites and more. Companies already using AMP pages include The Daily Mail, Guardian News & Media, eBay, Disney, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube.

This means, if you’re searching for something relevant to those websites, their AMP pages will appear at the top of the search results, either in the Top Stories area, in shopping results or in a new Live Coverage carousel, which is currently being developed for real-time events such as breaking news, elections and sports.

Although Google says they will not affect search ranking results, businesses with AMP pages will benefit from having their webpages appear first on mobile devices.

So if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, we’d highly recommend updating it before it gets left behind for good!

Give us a call on 01566 232323 or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk to talk to us about a new mobile-optimised website.

The post Google gives greater prominence in mobile search to AMP – does your website have it? appeared first on MiHiDigital.

Google as a search engine are constantly aiming to improve, tweak and develop their search algorithm in order to provide you with better results. In most recent times we’ve seen the Google Panda update, which aimed to lower the rank of low-quality sites with little content, and return higher-quality sites to the top of search results, and Google Penguin, which in turn looked to penalise and address sites that violated Google’s webmaster guidelines through ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation techniques and mass link building in order to rank higher.

These were both significant updates; Google Hummingbird is a replacement of the entire algorithm.

To place that in to perspective, it’s the first algorithm replacement for Google since way back in 2001 and effects 90% of all worldwide search terms.

Trust us, that’s quite a few searches!

The reason you won’t have heard much about it unless you work within the industry is that it wasn’t released to a great fanfare from Google. It was up and running a month before any confirmation was made from them. It nevertheless doesn’t demean the changes it makes to how your search results are presented.

So what is it trying to achieve for the average searcher?

Google tell us that Hummingbird aims to provide ranking results based on a more intelligent understanding of search terms. What does that mean in plain English? Simply that they want to understand the entirety of what you’re typing into the search results box and not merely look at those words in isolation.

They want to understand what you mean, not individual words you type.

For example, if you are asking a “how”, “what” or “where” question, it wants to provide you with the answer rather than results that closely link to each of the words.

If you’ve ever typed a question into Google and not got answers to your questions then you’ll appreciate the impact a full understanding of your question will have.

With this in mind Hummingbird aims for Google to begin providing you with answers, not results.

Lets hope it does indeed lead to smarter search results and top quality answers!

For information about how MiHi Digital can help your search engine performance please give us a call or drop us an email at hello@mihidigital.co.uk

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