The use of mobile apps is growing rapidly. By 2012, mobile app store downloads totaled over 45.6 billion. The Apple App Store and Google Play alone offer over 1.5 million downloadable apps.
Mobile analytics firm Flurry reports user time spent on apps has doubled from 1 hour a day in 2011 to 2 hours a day in 2013. While the time spent in apps may be starting to challenge television, Flurry compared U.S. app usage to traditional media and other online audience measurements, finding that “…app usage spikes during primetime to a peak of 52 million consumers.” Does this leave any doubt about the importance of optimizing mobile apps?
Normally, users search for apps in two places: app stores and/or search engines. Optimizing your mobile apps to be easily found is similar to optimizing your website.
Website SEO gets your site crawled by optimizing on-page and off-page elements while building authority through links and social media. However, in mobile app SEO, you want tooptimize the page on which your app resides rather than the app itself, because search engines don’t crawl inside mobile apps. The content on the page hosting the mobile app is what provides context and relevant cues for indexing.
You need to optimize two pages for your app: the app store page and the marketing page on your site.
Optimizing The App Store Page: When submitting to app stores, the descriptive content submitted with the app is very important for your app’s success, as shown below.
Title: This determines the URL and title tag of the webpage the app is hosted on. Choose a title that features the brand and the app’s function. This way, your app can be found by the brand name as well as its purpose (when users don’t know the brand).
Category: Category selection is important as it can provide easy find ability in the SERPs. If an app fits into several categories, choose the one closest to the app’s purpose and one that has fewer competitors.
Keyword Field: This field influences the search results and should be descriptive without keyword stuffing or unrelated keywords, which can get your app rejected from app stores. Use descriptive keywords that are relevant to the app purpose.
Description: As with traditional SEO for websites, the app description should be written for the target audience and optimized with relevant keywords.
Links: Linking the app store page to the official app page on your site and reciprocating that link from the website back to the app store page will assure users they found the official brand app rather than an imposter.
Optimizing The App Page On Your Site: Your app should have a page on your main website for cross-promotion and linking.
As mentioned above, the website should link back to the destination of the mobile app in the app store. Linking between the app store and the website boosts the app’s SEO value and confirms it is authentic.
Other than cross-linking with the app store and using specific metadata attributes, optimizing the content on the app page is no different from optimizing any other page on your site.