When it comes to healthcare marketing, you’ve probably already got a strategy that works for you. If not, then you’ll need to consider how you can AMP up your sites for one of Google’s latest rollouts: Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
Maybe you thought we were just being witty, but really, using AMP pages in your site’s architecture may be one of the best things for your digital marketing in a long time.
Face it, the world is going mobile and there’s nothing we can do about it except by preparing sites with whatever SEO nuggets Google throws to us — AMPs are one such nugget.
AMPs and Your Healthcare Marketing Future
The Google Accelerated Mobile Pages Project was announced October 7, 2015 and only really started showing up in SERPs around February 24 of 2016. Essentially, AMPs are a way to display simplified versions of websites on multiple platforms and devices. This is achieved by stripping down the code to its bare essentials. That means styles are limited to 50KB, no user-written JavaScript is allowed, and fonts must be loaded with a link tag or a CSS.
Other interesting requirements include:
- Asynchronous scripts only
- External resources like images required to state their size
- JavaScript must be out of the critical path
- All CSS must be inclined
If that was a little jargon-heavy, head here for a quick briefing on AMP basics.
If you’re already using Google PageSpeed Insights, then you’ll probably be delighted to know that AMPs are going to be enforcing all of Google’s past recommendations over the past few years in one swift motion. This is a good thing for the most part — it means we should stop seeing some bad mobile habits around the web like ads covering content and uncrawlable resources, etc.
So, how exactly can AMPs be used in healthcare? For starters, mobile-friendly hospital websites and related pages will rank much higher on Google than others. AMPs are as friendly as it gets with Google because they ARE Google, so joining in with this now is huge.
One of the more marketing-friendly features that AMPs provide is the ability to display pages on a “carousel,” allowing users to rotate between different pieces of content with ease. This could mean that pages optimized as AMPs will rank closer to the top of SERPs through mobile platforms. Notably, AMPs will not be accessible on desktops whatsoever, so Google won’t count them as duplicates.
AMP: Just What the Doctor Ordered?
For traveling physicians or locum tenens jobs, this could be a huge advantage for healthcare professionals on the move as they shift away from desktop computers.
To really put this in context, it’s been reported that 40% of people will wait no more than 3 seconds before abandoning a website. That amounts to nearly half of your visitors having already left just due to slow load times and/or the presence of excessive JavaScript ads or clunky forms.
As marketers and SEOs, we’ve all repeated the mantra “content is king” for years, but still it holds true that healthcare professionals, already short on time, have little patience for a messy digital landscape. Making sure they’ll be able to access your company’s AMPs without hassle, will ideally lead to more leads and higher conversion rates. Better yet, a WordPress plugin is available to make AMP-enable blogs a breeze.
Of course, some of the setbacks you’ll want to be aware of include:
- Allows only AMP JavaScript functions, meaning your third-party JavaScript might not be supported.
- No browser support for IE11, meaning Windows Phone users are at a loss.
- Could be difficult to implement without being a developer.
As a testament to the viability of AMPs, many large sites such as The Verge, Washington Post, Entrepreneur, and more are already on board. For any brand, AMPs allow a concise representation of everything you need to display, without frustrating users and encouraging them to return to your site.
