As user demand for optimal mobile experience is increasing, there is an increased need for mobile-friendly websites. To meet the new demand, providers of mobile SEO services offer customized solutions to various businesses including healthcare. Today there are numerous platforms and frameworks for web development that can help create websites that provide a great user experience. Popular mobile web development platforms such as Angular and React offer many innovative features as well as enterprise-level support. Proprietary platforms like AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page), Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News offer ease of implementation and excellent performance. We will focus on these three versatile mobile web development platforms in this blog. Google’s AMP and Facebook Instant Articles have the objective of speeding up the delivery of articles and other content on mobile devices; Apple News is the built-in news app for iOS systems that collects and curates stories and topics from diverse third-party news sources.
Let us consider the features that distinguish each of these platforms.
Google Accelerated Mobile Pages: Google AMP is designed to improve the performance of web content, and also enhances the distribution ecosystem. AMP is built on an open source framework that formats the page for elegance, speed and usability. AMP finds use in various industries due to its many advantages, and it offers added benefits for the healthcare sector. AMP is eliminating considerable amounts of advertising opportunities and mobile sponsorship opportunities in the way it renders a page. Marketers in general may want higher page rankings over more advertising on a mobile page (AMP versions of mobile websites will be granted higher page ranks in Google’s mobile searches). While taking away traditional marketing methods from mobile marketers, Google will offer some benefits for AMP HTML compliance.
Pros:
- Quick implementation
- Excellent performance out of the box
- Pre- built, plug- and-play components
- Easy integration with PWA
- Singe open source platform
- Number of features is increasing daily
- Common components are improved enhanced by web community.
Cons:
- Ads can only be loaded gradually one after another
- Does not support many scroll features
- Limited functionality for fluid ads
- Does not have rich interactive capabilities on desktop
- Limited analytics support
- Limited Header bidding options and vendor support
Facebook Instant Articles: It is a new way to share your content on Facebook that is optimized for mobile users. It has storytelling ability, and customized visual display. Facebook Instant Articles is another version of your web content that loads instantly inside the Facebook app; this makes them more likely to be clicked and read. It allows web developers to create, publish, update, and delete Instant Articles from their content management systems. Instant Articles have a number of interactive features such as Zoom and Tilt images, auto-play videos, audio captions, and interactive maps. You can also like and comment on individual parts of an article in-line.
Pros:
- Performance and speed
- Easy implementation
- High performing relevance algorithms
- Highly optimized ad performance
- Continuous and consistent experience for the end user
Cons:
- Limited analytics
- Ad restrictions
- Set of features is limited
- No header bidding is allowed
- Only available on Facebook platform
Apple News
The Apple News format lets your healthcare content to be in front of millions of Apple mobile and tablet users. It works through the native Apple News app that is installed on all new iOS devices. Apple News articles look very similar to Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles with streamlined text, bold images and videos and very minimal styling. It is an interface that is elegant, fast and engaging.
The three platforms mentioned above use proprietary formats to deliver content to users. They use standards-based elements. AMP is a combination of custom HTML, custom JavaScript, and caching. All the three platforms have WordPress plug-ins to convert the content into appropriate formats. Facebook and Apple offer RSS tools to import existing content. However, Apple News does not allow advertising in RSS-driven publications whereas Facebook Instant Articles needs a custom RSS feed with Instant Articles-specific mark-up.
Why use these platforms to publish to the web? Accelerated Mobile Page and Instant Articles are favored by Google and Facebook respectively and therefore are significant. Google gives preference to AMP results in search, and Facebook favors Instant Articles within its news need. Apple News is significant for publishers whose readers are using it, and Apple is heavily pushing the News app to its users.
The practical way to optimize the use of these versatile platforms is to hire a reliable healthcare SEO service provider. With professional web developers and a good content development team, publishing your content to the web would become easier.
