Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, is an open source initiative Google launched in October 2015 designed to create pages that load quickly on mobile devices. AMP are lightweight pages that use a subset of HTML with few extensions, and are Google’s response to Apple News and Facebook’s Instant Articles. Those AMP pages take out all the nuts and bolts of a web page to create fast-loading, mobile-friendly pages.
So, can AMP help your dealership? The short answer? No.
If your dealership already has a responsive website with good page speed, AMP won’t do much to improve your site. AMP pages primarily benefit sites who focus on publishing and news content. So, if you were running a news site and looking to get your latest article in front of your users as quickly as possible, then AMP makes sense for you.
Google’s goal with AMP is to make mobile web browsing faster. Optimizing your website for speed is a good idea, but you don’t want to sacrifice important data to do it. One issue with these pages is that they’ll block your Google Analytics tracking. When a user clicks the AMP listing within the search results, they are taken to a Google hosted page, not your website. This strips away your ability to track how users interact with your content. It also means that if someone shares your AMP page, they aren’t sharing your website, and you lose any potential SEO boost from that action.
Another issue with AMP is how those pages are branded. AMP sites look like a Google site instead of your brand. You work hard to ensure your dealership’s branding is recognized across multiple channels, and your website’s visibility may be negatively impacted when AMP pages strip out that branding. Creating AMP pages is locking you into a dependency on Google’s tools, instead of giving you the freedom to explore options.
Creating a fast website is possible without AMP. Customers looking to purchase a car or truck are going to spend tons of time researching before they convert. A fast, well-optimized website full of gorgeous photos and loads of details about your dealership and inventory will convert those visitors to buyers. The faster the site loads, the better your customers experience will be, and the more likely they are buy from you. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to see how fast and friendly your mobile site is.
As it stands now, creating AMP pages doesn’t make sense for dealerships. Website providers who are pushing AMP pages are trying to leverage the hype of a platform not designed for dealerships’ success. We are always testing, and if we see a change from Google resulting in benefits to dealerships, we’ll let you know.
