75% of SEO specialists aren't prepared for Google AMP
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) – its attempt to help the publishing industry adjust to a ‘mobile first’ world - may be one of the key challenges facing the media industry in 2016, but over three-quarters (76 per cent) of search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists have yet to act on it.
That’s the findings of a recent survey of over 300 senior SEO professionals across the U.S. and Europe, despite half (49 per cent) of all respondents acknowledging that the implementation would have a significant impact on their page rankings.
While half of SEOs surveyed expect AMP to have a significant impact, only 23 per cent have begun to implement it on their mobile sites; 29 per cent plan to implement AMP in the next six months, and 42 per cent say they plan to research it further (see chart below), according to the report from SEO PowerSuite.
Those participating in the industry represented a mix of in-house SEOs, agency SEOs plus outside consultants across North America and Europe, with the research report leader Nathan Safran noting that while a large number of SEOs are aware of AMP, only a small percentage are currently implementing the protocol (see chart below).
“This first-mover advantage does not simply result from the time it will take for competitors to catch up and implement AMP,” reads the report. “As any SEO professional working to overtake competitors knows, Google's institutional memory is long. It can be difficult to get the search behemoth to ‘forget’ (i.e. to stop ranking) brands it has mentally defined as industry leaders and therefore deserving of higher ranking because of AMP support.”