What are Accelerated Mobile Pages and do I need to redesign my website yet again just so Google will keep my website in the top of SERPS? ( for crying-out-loud I just got a responsive website! )
Spoiler alert – No. relax. You do not need to do anything. AMP has a very small audience ( at the moment anyway ) since it is not usable for business websites – and your competition will not likely migrate their website to AMP. So there is no MAD imperative here.
AMP has been around for a while actually, and most people are just becoming aware of it. What is it? https://www.ampproject.org/ AMP is just a stripped-down version of a normal website. It has restricted functionality in exchange for loading speed with mobile devices in mind. As the creators point out below, it is designed for “reading” content, not things that require interaction. Therefore AMP is not a consideration for most businesses. As time enables more functionality into AMP designs, it may become a consideration.
AMP HTML is a subset of HTML with only specific JavaScript “components” available. It’s designed for creating “reading” content, rather than anything interactive. It is already designed to have ad units included and is going to have a standardized way of including analytics code, but it drastically limits the use of JavaScript. https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-do-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp-from-google-work/
But can I optimize AMP? Accelerated Mobile Pages are philosophically search engine optimized (SEO) already. That just means optimized for speed. So the answer is yes, Of course you can optimize other things that are not related to AMP – such as the content of the page, which can still be crafted for search engines. ( remember Grasshopper, 2500 words! )
If you want to transition your website to an AMP platform, get started here https://wordpress.org/themes/search/AMP/