You may have thought that SEO was only for websites. With billions of apps being downloaded every year for popular mobile platforms Android and iOS, mobile-app market is an extremely competitive field. It is predicted that over 200 billion apps will be downloaded in 2017.
Mobile-app marketing, if done properly, can be highly lucrative. This posts tackles the first steps you can take to improve your mobile apps SEO ranking so that search engines can track them faster and place them at the top of the search results.
1. Highlight Your Brand Name
The name you put for your app is very important, as it is the anchor text of the link pointing to the app. If you are keen about branding your company, include the brand name in the name of the app. For instance, look at “Amazon Kindle”, “Google Maps”, “Evernote”, etc. The links you get from Google Play and the App Store tend to be extremely beneficial for your app’s SEO.
2. Create Links to Your App
If you own a website or a blog, add links to your app from relevant articles or pages of your website. Ensure that the anchor text of the link is proper. Better yet, you can come up with a microsite or landing page that is made specifically to promote your apps through your website. Within this landing page, you can create links to all the apps you have and make videos, images, etc., to properly promote your apps.
3. Get reviews
You can also gather highly valuable links from certain third-party sites and blogs that do app reviews. If the app is valuable enough, it can get good feedback from authority third-party reviewers.
4. App Metadata
You have probably named your app already (if not, find some tips here on how to). The name of the app (title tag) forms the most important part of the metadata of your app. There are also other meta elements to consider. Meta description of your app is one. Here, you can provide a brief and effective description of your app that people get to see when they browse it in an App Store or Google Play. The app stores provide a keyword field where you can type in about 100 characters. Ensure that you use those 100 characters very judiciously so as to include the most relevant keywords for your app.
5. The App Design
The design of the app, its icon, screenshots, etc., are not going to create any SEO effect as such. However, a well-designed app can potentially get more downloads and thus more reviews and links. Eventually these links and reviews can help boost the ranking of the app in search.
6. Avoid black hat SEO
You should note that the black-hat SEO techniques that many companies follow are only going to get their apps banned. Google now indexes mobile apps, but not the ones that use black-hat techniques. Apple also has promised to ban any apps that follow black-hat techniques.
Mobile apps are published on an already high-ranking platform, the App Store or Google Play. However, with some tactics discussed above, you can outrank your competitors and get more downloads and sales for your apps.
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