Whether or not you are new to the property management world, you’re probably familiar with the use of inbound marketing as a critical part of your marketing efforts. Using inbound marketing as a tool to grow your property management business puts you on the hook for two essential tasks:
- You need to create valuable content that can attract leads and convert them to clients
- You need to deliver that content to your audience.
You might have the most well-written content the web has ever seen sitting proudly on your website—and that’s half the battle—but if your audience can’t find it, or your virtual spaces are unusable, then you may as well have no content at all.
This task is more complicated than it was a decade ago: in the not too distant past, anything done online was done on a personal computer. Web design was geared towards this reality, as the earliest web browsers were "bare bones"—and bandwidth over early connections wasn’t exactly robust.
It wouldn’t have been weird to hear the phrase “Who would want to use the internet on a phone?” during this era. The divide persisted for a while, but with the ubiquity of smartphones, wi-fi networks, and robust cellular data plans, it’s not uncommon for many people to only use the internet on a phone.
If web infrastructure did not keep up with the change in how users accessed the internet, the “mobile web" could be slow and painful to access. This can be a big problem for your property management website: if a significant portion of your audience is accessing the internet with a mobile device and their experience is challenging, it can be impacting your ability to draw them into your content effectively.
By now, users have come to expect nearly instant access to a webpage—regardless of how they’re accessing it. Some estimates state that for every 100 ms it takes a webpage to load, a business can experience a 1% loss in revenue.
The rate at which users decide to abandon a website is known as the “bounce rate." The bounce rate can be the result of poor performance as well as unappealing content. Your property management website could experience a bounce rate of 10% with even a two-second delay—with that rate rising to nearly 33% with a delay of seven seconds or more.
It’s a prudent idea to keep your bounce rate as low as possible to maximize traffic on your web content. Google’s solution to this issue is known as the AMP Project, short for Accelerated Mobile Pages.
What Is AMP?
Fundamentally, AMP isn’t a revolutionary new technology. AMP is, however, a set of standards or a framework meant to improve the experience of internet users on the “mobile web.”
The AMP project’s goal is to allow developers to create websites that load in under a second and use significantly less data than traditional sites. Google announced the AMP project in 2015, and the first pages started to appear in 2016. Since then, the web has seen over 1.5 billion AMP pages published by 25 million domains.
How Can I Use AMP?
Harnessing the advantages that AMP brings to the table is pretty simple:
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You’ll need to create a version of your property management website that follows the AMP project’s specifications and then validate it for publication.
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The site will receive its URL and is accessible with any web browser after that.
There is no need to embed an AMP page on a specific platform. It’s worth noting that because AMP is a Google project, visiting an AMP page through a Google search will yield the best results. Google will host and deliver the content on its servers in this scenario.
So, What’s the Bottom Line?
For your property management marketing efforts, this equates to a smooth and fast user experience.
- As more of your audience interacts with your content on a mobile device, a mobile-friendly framework will allow greater engagement (and a better conversion rate).
- Using AMP pages can also affect your site’s search rankings in a couple of ways (and can help your SEO efforts).
- An AMP page’s better mobile experience and speedier load times can increase traffic.
- Google is known to give AMP pages some preference in its search rankings.
All of this is good for you! AMP should allow you faster load times, better engagement, reduced bounce rate, and improved mobile ranking.
Keep in mind, however, that AMP isn’t a silver bullet for your inbound marketing efforts: using AMP websites won’t make boring content better. A high bounce rate can be the result of poor content just as quickly as sub-optimal web design. It’s best to think of AMP as a delivery vehicle for your content: it can help your good content reach a wider audience and keep them engaged.
Getting your inbound marketing right is essential: you want to see your efforts pay off and watch your business grow. To do that, your website must be competitive. Staying competitive can be tough—even if you have a pretty robust web presence already.
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