Earlier we published a blog entry discussing the important emerging market of App Store SEO (read). What we are learning is that there is a disturbing trend taking place with people who publish apps. Many simply direct users to their apps by phrases like "Go to the Apple Store or Google Market and search for <term>". Of a list of several dozen of these we researched, several of the searches now reveal competing apps are showing up above the vendors' application.
So why is this emerging place so important? Simple. Users search for applications. If you do not rank high enough in any filter query or search, the potential end user will not find your application. Most developers want a wide as possible implementation base of their mobile applications. We have spent a lot of our lives working on SEO. There are several posts on this blog about this topic.
Mobile application SEO is not only an emerging market, but will likely become a large part of an enterprises digital presence. Once again, the rules that determine most of the "relevancy" in various mobile app marketplaces has not been made public leaving us to test and hypothesize. Uberity has now come to understand the evolution of such systems. So what should individuals do? Short of getting an online degree in an effort to understand this, here are some tips.
1. Don't refer potential application users to your application with non-deterministic mechanisms like "search". You have no control over AppStore SEO and it is a dynamic place with new apps being added every minute. A better method would be to use absolute mechanisms to resolve directly to your app such as QR codes or a URI.
2. If you are trying to get a higher ranking in either the AppStore or the Google Android Market, do some research to find out what terms people are actually searching for that are relevant to your application. For example, if you have a financial stock market monitoring application, you might find that people are searching for terms like "Dow Jones", NYSE, Stock Market and more.
3. Use the terms from your research in your applications title and description. Some of these words are used for building a relevancy index for mobile applications.
4. Divide and conquer. Simply put, use your existing web presence to augment the mobile app visibility by creating links to it from your blog, website or other presence. Our initial research has shown some promising trends.
5. Don't use punctuation marks in your app title. This is valuable real estate and most are ignored by the search utilities. For example, searching for a "*" reveals no applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=*&so=1&c=apps) while searching for either "!" or "+" reveal a bunch of Google applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=%2B&so=1&c=apps).
6. Ensure you categorize your mobile application properly. Misclassifying a game as a business app would confuse people.
If you are reading this and want to know more about what we are doing, please contact us at info at uberity dot com or by visiting our website at http://www.uberity.com.
So why is this emerging place so important? Simple. Users search for applications. If you do not rank high enough in any filter query or search, the potential end user will not find your application. Most developers want a wide as possible implementation base of their mobile applications. We have spent a lot of our lives working on SEO. There are several posts on this blog about this topic.
Mobile application SEO is not only an emerging market, but will likely become a large part of an enterprises digital presence. Once again, the rules that determine most of the "relevancy" in various mobile app marketplaces has not been made public leaving us to test and hypothesize. Uberity has now come to understand the evolution of such systems. So what should individuals do? Short of getting an online degree in an effort to understand this, here are some tips.
1. Don't refer potential application users to your application with non-deterministic mechanisms like "search". You have no control over AppStore SEO and it is a dynamic place with new apps being added every minute. A better method would be to use absolute mechanisms to resolve directly to your app such as QR codes or a URI.
2. If you are trying to get a higher ranking in either the AppStore or the Google Android Market, do some research to find out what terms people are actually searching for that are relevant to your application. For example, if you have a financial stock market monitoring application, you might find that people are searching for terms like "Dow Jones", NYSE, Stock Market and more.
3. Use the terms from your research in your applications title and description. Some of these words are used for building a relevancy index for mobile applications.
4. Divide and conquer. Simply put, use your existing web presence to augment the mobile app visibility by creating links to it from your blog, website or other presence. Our initial research has shown some promising trends.
5. Don't use punctuation marks in your app title. This is valuable real estate and most are ignored by the search utilities. For example, searching for a "*" reveals no applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=*&so=1&c=apps) while searching for either "!" or "+" reveal a bunch of Google applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=%2B&so=1&c=apps).
6. Ensure you categorize your mobile application properly. Misclassifying a game as a business app would confuse people.
If you are reading this and want to know more about what we are doing, please contact us at info at uberity dot com or by visiting our website at http://www.uberity.com.
