Adding AMP will allow you to improve your mobile Core Web Vitals and Page Experience scores, two massively important factors for boosting your SEO. Ever since Google rolled out the mobile-first indexing update in 2019, mobile speed has become a huge factor in Google rankings. In 2021, Google is also rolling out a "Page Experience" factor, which measures Core Web Vitals as well as other factors such as avoiding intrusive popups and making sure you have good mobile usability (all things that AMP solves out of the box). In this post, we'll discuss how this looks in your Google Search Console and how AMP benefits these metrics.
The AMP tab
Once you've published your AMP pages, after about a week you will start to see the AMP tab appear in Google Search Console. This tab will show your Valid, Valid with warnings, and Erroneous AMP pages.
To view your valid AMP pages, be sure to click the "Valid" button at the top (here shown in green). Clicking on the large buttons at the top labeled "Error", "Valid with warnings", and "Valid", will allow you to see each of the pages that fall under each status
This tab gives a graph of how many AMP pages you have indexed over time. It's quite normal to see this number rise and fall as Google updates AMP pages quite regularly as they crawl your shop.
Further down the page, clicking on an individual row in the "Details" section will show you exactly which page URLs have been indexed for each status type.
If you see this tab appear, fantastic! That means that Google has already started picking up your AMP pages and giving you the AMP "Enhancements" in Google Search Results.
If you don't see the "AMP" tab appear, please check our article on how long it typically takes to become AMP indexed. And if you're curious why you don't see every single one of your pages indexed as AMP, please check our article on why might all my products not be indexed on AMP (hint: it just depends on how many pages Google is actively crawling for your corresponding non-AMP site. We've also written about tips on how to improve the chances of being AMP indexed).
When you're just starting out with AMP, it's typical to see the number of indexed AMP pages rise gradually over time and then level out to a stable medium, as seen in the picture above.
Core Web Vitals
Where AMP really shines for your SEO is in Core Web Vitals. After adding AMP, and becoming AMP indexed, you'll start to see this reflected in your Core Web Vitals scores. You can follow along with your Core Web Vitals scores using Google Search Console
Important:
It may take a few weeks after being AMP indexed to see AMP being reflected in your Core Web Vitals scores. You will know which URLs are AMP because they will be shown with the unique AMP URL structure, which by default is /a/s/.
Identifying Good AMP URLs
If you click on the "Core Web Vitals" tab, and then click on the "Good" button at the top, you will see a "Details" section, below, with each page type. Click the "Good URLs" row to open up a list of your Good performing Core Web Vitals URLs.
After clicking this, Search Console will list the URLs, often with a column showing how many "Similar URLs" you have to this one. Instead of listing each URL in this list, oftentimes you'll see a single product page URL (or collection page, or blog page) and then a number of similar URLs, indicating that there are more of this type of page also performing well.
You can tell that these are AMP URLs because they will contain the unique AMP URL structure that we add to each AMP page. By default, this is the subdirectory /a/s/.
If you don't have any AMP pages here, yet, it's likely because Google hasn't started revalidating your old URLs into AMP URLs. Next, we'll give you a tip on how to make that happen.
Revalidating "Bad URLs" after adding AMP
Once you've added AMP, and become AMP indexed, you might be eager to see your Core Web Vitals start improving. This will happen over time, automatically, or you can nudge Google to revalidate these URLs.
Within the Core Web Vitals > Mobile > Bad URLs section of Google Search Console, you can click on one of the reasons for failing Core Web Vitals, and ask Google to "Validate Fix".
You will also know that these Bad URLs are not AMP URLs because they do not contain the unique AMP URL structure, which by default is /a/s/.
If you have AMP active for these pages, what will happen is that this validation phase (once complete), will change these pages from "Bad URLs" to "Good URLs" indicating that they have now been validated and you're good to go!
Important:
Only your published and indexed AMP pages will be able to change from Bad to Good as a result of AMP. If you have just started becoming AMP indexed, we recommend waiting some time until the number of indexed AMP pages has leveled out.
Google can be a bit slow to validate pages, but we find that it often takes 1-2 weeks for the validation phase to complete, after which you'll get an email from Google notifying you of the results.
Once Google has validated these URLs, you can return to the previous step "Identifying Good URLs" and see the impact of AMP on your Core Web Vitals results!
Summing it up
AMP by Shop Sheriff has helped thousands of Shopify stores get set up with AMP, and ultimately improve their Core Web Vitals scores, which becomes a huge improvement to their site's overall health, indexability, and SEO. Using the Google Search Console is the best way to measure the impact that AMP has on these scores.
Furthermore, if you're interested in speed, as well as SEO, Google's ability to cache and preload AMP pages gives them yet another massive speed boost when users find your site from a search engine, allowing AMP pages to load nearly instantaneously.
We've published a dedicated article on how AMP improves SEO, so be sure to check that out if you're interested!
Lastly, in order to get the most AMP pages indexed, we recommend checking out this article on how you can maximize the chances of each of your pages being AMP indexed.
Best of luck with your Shopify-powered business, and thanks for using AMP by Shop Sheriff!