Google AMP increased my SEO traffic to new highs

As a casual blogger with a professional background in paid media, I have to say I rarely ever paid attention to SEO. As a blogger, I thought content was everything, and that great content will rise to the top, even if user experience was not superb. But as the world shifted to mobile, alongside a gradual loss of attention span, load speed became almost as important as great content. AMP was Google’s way of helping publishers make sure their great content loads equally quickly to be served up to impatient consumers. So today, roughly 3 months since I implemented AMP on my site, I’ll share how Google AMP impacted my SEO traffic, and helped raised it to a new level.

First things first…

What is Google AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, an open source project by Google to help surface great content super quickly. It uses the AMP framework consisting of AMP HTML, AMP Javascript and AMP Cache.

You can’t really use other javascripts within the page itself, and this limits a lot of the bells and whistles that can slow down a site’s load time. But if your site endorses and prefers a simplistic approach where great content comes first, then you should embrace AMP.

How implementing AMP impacted my SEO traffic

Below is my SEO traffic over the last 12 months. It was initially pathetic, even though it had daily visits, they were almost negligible.

You can see on the chart 2 distinct improvements in the SEO area. The 1st came from late 2019, where I started adding rich result snippets to my posts, such as FAQ snippets to surface richer content whenever my posts appear in google search results pages.

The 2nd, much more pronounced improvement came with implementing AMP, as well as changing out my wordpress theme for a quicker desktop experience.

Now look at this chart below. After filtering out to only look at AMP SEO coverage over the last 12 months (of which only the last 3 months will show results), we can see that it overlays perfectly onto the huge ramp in traffic.

AMP SERP as a percentage of overall SERP

Lastly, I wanted to take a quick look at this. Since implementing AMP on my site, how much of my SEO traffic is now coming as a direct result of that?

So, over the last 3 months, my site has gotten 1,980 clicks out of 126,000 google search result impressions. Out of this 1,980, 775 of these came from AMP non-rich results, which is the impact of me implementing AMP across my site.

That is an impressive 39%!

I’m hoping to make incremental gains, and also with a stronger background now with SEO at the top of my mind, here’s to growing the influence of my site even more in 2021 and beyond.

Of course, there are other things you can implement or experiment on your site to increase site speed.

A few more interesting Google Search Console reports

Since I was playing around with Google Search Console, I just wanted to share a few more reports, and see if you guys are seeing the same trends across the board.

Mobile device clickthrough rates miles ahead of desktop

I’m grabbing roughly the same amount of traffic from mobile as I am from desktop, but look at the CTR and the number of impressions I needed on desktop to match my mobile traffic. Mobile is 3X more efficient.

Also, based on the trend, tablet is dead.

Search coverage by country

This report gives me a good idea of where my content is resonating with. There are lots of ways to deep-dive into this, which I may expand on in a future post. For example, deep dive into a country, and look at the queries and posts that each country is searching for, and if that resonates with your overall content strategy, you can then hone in on those types of content to grow your audience in those particular markets.

SEO is fun, and also a gruelling full time job!

Let me know if this article helped you in any way, and what other types of content you’re looking for in the comments below.