The Increasing Impact of SEO on Mobile Apps

Discoverability has always been the goal of successful SEO strategies, but until recently these efforts have focused entirely on web pages. There’s an important new market for SEOs to consider though: mobile apps. Conversely, app developers who want to increase their visibility will need to start developing successful SEO strategies and hiring people who can implement them. Looking at how SEO applies to the app world is useful for competitive marketers and developers alike.
No One Can Use an App They Can’t Find
Websites and apps have one important thing in common: you can use them if you can’t find them. In the early days of smartphones when apps weren’t that commonplace, finding them wasn’t a problem. There simply weren’t that many others to look through. Today though, the App Store alone has over 2.2 million apps available across iOS devices. Google Play has over 3 million. With that amount of competition, it’s important to make sure your app doesn’t get lost in the crowd.
Does My Company Need an App?
Maybe your company doesn’t have an app, and none of this concerns you. It should though, because mobile apps can have a very positive impact on your conversion rates. In certain industries, apps actually outperform mobile websites in their ability to generate conversions. Having a functioning mobile website used to be enough to make a company current, but no more. If you want to stay competitive, having your own app is the way to go.

SEO and Successful Apps
SEO should play an important role in the way you develop your app. Here’s why: many mobile search engines now display results for apps. Since more searches have taken place on mobiles than on desktops for several years, having an app puts your company where many searchers can see it. However, because so many apps exist it’s important to make sure yours stands out from the rest. SEO provides the key to accomplishing this.
Apps aren’t like web pages in that they don’t always consist mainly of text that can be tweaked to contain likely search terms. However, many search engines are accounting for this with a process called app indexing. App indexing gives search engine crawlers the ability to assess the content of your app by looking at deep links to its corresponding website and ranking it accordingly. This essentially means that you can make your app more likely to come up in a search by filling it with metadata and links that are likely to be searched for by users. Using a high-quality software development kit (or SDK) allows you to build apps that contain this information.
To sum up: having an app is a reliable way to boost conversion rates for your business, but people need to be able to find it first. Mobile searches now display apps, and are one of the most popular ways to look for information on the web. As a result, they provide people with plenty of opportunities to find your app, but only if you design it properly. You can use tools like SDKs to make sure your app contains the kind of content that current mobile search tools will find. This strategy should be able to help you raise the profile of your company and acquire more paying customers.
