If you’re a lawyer and you’ve been paying attention to the online marketing world, you might have heard about Google AMP. News about Google’s most recent project is everywhere. However, it’s not very clear what, exactly, Google AMP is or does.
We’re here to tell you not to worry too much about it: Google AMP is something that law firms can comfortably ignore and do just fine.
What is Google AMP?
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project, or AMP, is one of the most recent attempts by the mammoth search engine to appease their customers, give those customers a good user experience, and, most importantly, make them come back to Google the next time they want to search for something online.
While Google’s number one method of appeasing their customers is to give them results that are both relevant and important to the search query they entered, there are also other pieces of the puzzle that Google is concerned with. Two of those are giving web searchers results that load quickly, and that work well on mobile devices. After all, slow websites are a great way to turn off otherwise interested viewers, and around 58% of online searches are done on mobile devices.
The Google AMP project focuses on both of these collateral interests, simultaneously.
How Google AMP Speeds Up the Internet and Makes It Mobile Friendly
AMP is an open source framework of computer code for creating web pages that are designed specifically for mobile devices. Basically, AMP is a bunch of HTML and JavaScript that, when put together, make a fast, adequate, but most importantly fast mobile version of a website.
The AMP project is not made to be a stand-in for a good computer programmer and website designer. Instead, it’s made to give businesses the option of creating a simple, basic, but still fast website for potential customers to find on their mobile devices.
Why Google AMP Won’t Impact the Legal Field, Much
Simply put, the legal field is not based on mobile searches like much of the rest of the internet is. The decision to hire an attorney, and which one to hire, once that decision has been made, is not on the same level as which restaurant to eat at. For people trying to figure out which Mexican place is the best, a quick session of web surfing on the phone is enough. For those who need legal help, though, it isn’t and you can count on them taking more time before they make the decision.
While there are no hard numbers of statistics to back this up, there’s a commonsense to it that is difficult to refute. It’s also why we at Myers Freelance think that legal websites should be mobile-friendly, but that you shouldn’t go overboard to cater to the mobile crowd.