SEO for Apps: Everything You Need to Know

Helpful summary

Overview: We emphasize the critical role of SEO in boosting app discoverability. Considering the high rate of app discoveries via search engines, SEO is essential for your app to stand out in a saturated market.

Why you can trust us: Our success with Upscribe, a subscription management app, showcases our expertise in SEO for apps. We developed a comprehensive SEO strategy from scratch, leading to a remarkable 4x increase in organic traffic within five months, highlighting our proficiency in enhancing app visibility and performance.

Why this is important: Implementing SEO for apps leads to being discovered by relevant users, tapping into free organic traffic, and boosting app downloads, ultimately enhancing revenue potential.

Action points: We recommend developing a comprehensive SEO strategy, including building a website, keyword research, optimization of metadata, indexing on Google, and creating backlinks. Additionally, improve page load speed, conduct site audits, and ensure your website has clear calls-to-action.

Further research: For more comprehensive strategies and insights, we advise you to explore our blog posts and services, catering to diverse business needs in SEO.

Need help in SEO for apps?

You’ve heard of using SEO for websites, right? But did you know strategizing SEO for apps is just as important? 

In fact, Google data shows that 27% of people discover new apps through search engines and 24% through an app’s official website. So never underestimate the power of SEO for boosting the discoverability of your app. 

The truth is, there’s an app for pretty much anything and everything these days, so using SEO for apps is vital for making sure you stand out. There was a total of 230 billion app downloads in 2021 alone too, so how will you ensure your app is found and favoured amongst a sea of competitors?

Well, we here at Embarque believe it’s all about building an effective app SEO strategy. So here’s everything you need to know about SEO for apps. We’ve even thrown in a few of our best tips to help you maximise the results of your SEO strategy and scale your growth even bigger than you thought possible.

Ready to learn? Good. Let’s begin. 

Why listen to us?

SEO for apps can be a game changer for small businesses, but it's often a complex and misunderstood field. At Embarque, we have first-hand experience handling these challenges. For instance, we worked with Upscribe, a subscription management app. Lacking a clear SEO direction, they partnered with us. The result? We not only developed a comprehensive SEO strategy but also achieved a fourfold increase in their organic traffic within five months, boosting their monthly searches from 450 to over 1,800​​​​​​​​.

Our work with a downloadable app further demonstrates our expertise. We not only recovered their organic traffic but also improved conversions. By producing high-quality SEO content and creating a new SEO content strategy, we achieved:

• A recovery in organic traffic, increasing from 4,000-5,000 to 20,000-25,000 monthly searches by the end of 2022.
• A sixfold increase in the client’s referring domains, growing from 367 in February 2021 to 1,789 by January 2023.

What is SEO for apps?

SEO for apps works in the same way as it does for websites. Its purpose is to boost your domain authority and generate traffic to your app from SERP. It involves things like:

• Targeting relevant keywords and terms.
• Using backlinks.
• Creating high-quality content. 
• Improving the technical health of your app.
• And loads more.

In a nutshell, SEO is all about getting Google on your side and making sure its algorithms see your app as a worthy top pick. You need to know what your audience is searching for and make your app and its content more discoverable under those common search terms.

Once you’ve implemented some SEO work, there are two main ways your app might appear on search engine result pages (SERPs): as a preview or an app pack.

Let’s say you’re a budgeting app like Mint or PocketGuard trying to reach potential customers looking for financial advice or budgeting tools. By optimizing your app, you might appear in SERPs for terms like ‘budgeting advice’ ‘budgeting tips’ or‘ ‘budgeting help’. Here’s a quick look at what an app preview and app pack look like.

App preview  

A snippet that contains your app name, description, average ratings, reviews, and a download button. This might appear if someone searched the name of your app of a relevant phrase or term you’ve used as a keyword. 

App pack

A group of 30 -100 suggested apps that appear when a user types in an app-specific term. It contains your app icon, name, category, average ratings, reviews, and cost. It’s the most common way you will appear on Google results. 

What is the difference between SEO and ASO?

Many marketers looking to invest in SEO for apps often get confused between SEO and ASO—also known as app store optimisation, a subset of SEO. 

Although 40% of app discovery happens on app stores, the remaining 60% takes place across search engines, social sharing, and the websites themselves, so it’s always best to maximise searchability through both SEO and ASO combined. 

They work brilliantly hand in hand. 

In this particular article, we’re going to focus just on the efforts of app SEO.

Why does an app need SEO?

So what are the benefits of investing in an SEO strategy for apps? 

Be discovered by relevant users

Using SEO helps you target the people who are already interested in your niche or might actually need your app. Anyone who’s searching for relevant terms will be directed to your app and enticed to hit the download bottom with the help of Google’s app suggestions. 

It’s basically free organic traffic

It’s important to look at SEO as an ongoing process. SEO might not produce a return right away, but if done right, app SEO will bring massive ROI in the long run from more and more organic traffic finding your app. 

This is where we here at embarque can help. We’re a bunch of SEO wizards who have the expert know-how for taking your growth to the next level. You can pay monthly and cancel an time. 

Start your embarque journey by getting 4 relevant keywords for free! Learn more about our SEO keyword services.

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How to set up an effective SEO strategy for an app

An effective SEO strategy for an app is all about boosting awareness and encouraging more app downloads through search engine visibility. Basically: Get Google on your side and you’re onto a winner. Here are four must-do steps:

1. Build a website

This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised to know how many apps don’t have an official website. Without one, potential customers who are interested in your app have no place to learn more about your app, how it works, and how it can help them, Think of your app’s website as your own salesperson selling the features and benefits of your app for you. 

2. Find some keywords

Once the website and its informational content is drafted, next you need to conduct some keyword research—the foundation of any SEO strategy. In a nutshell, the more keywords you find that are relevant and have high search volumes, the better chance you have to rank higher on SERPs. Here are a few ways you can find the most opportunistic keywords:

• Check which words are already bringing in organic traffic and use them more frequently in our content.
• Look at what keywords competitors are using to get some more ideas.
• Search for relevant keywords that you can build a new site page dedicated around.

For example, if you’re developing a new health and wellness app, it might be good to build a few website pages or blogs based on relevant keywords like ‘local gyms’, ‘weight loss tips’, ‘best diets 2022’ etc. 

Want to learn more about the power of keywords? We’ve written an official guide to help you level up your app’s SEO. Take a read.

3. Optimise, optimise, optimise!

Start by optimizing the three most important meta-data items that search engines look for: your app name, URL, and meta-tags (meta-title and meta-description). Adding keywords into meta-data makes it easier for Google to discover your app and rank it more highly. 

But it doesn’t stop there. Your entire website and its content should be optimized wherever possible including your:

• Homepage
• About page
• Blog content
• Any other product/service pages. 

The key to effective SEO isn’t just cramming as many keywords into your text as possible. The most relevant terms and phrases should be sprinkled into your content naturally and sparingly. Basically, you want the reader to not notice the odd word here and there—only Google!

4. Index your app on Google

You need to index your app to allow Google to crawl your app and choose it to appear on SERPs alongside other pages and web results. The purpose is to widen your target reach and increase traffic to your app.

To index your app, you should use the same URL across your app and its website—and then verify that they’re both you. 

5. Build backlinks 

This involves creating links from other websites to your own, including the use of guest blogs on high-quality authority websites. The purpose of backlinks is to show Google you’re a credible and trustworthy website.

Looking for the right tools to help your SEO needs? We’ve written about six must-have tools you can use to maximise the results of your SEO strategy. Take a read.

Additional tips for effective app SEO

Before we go, here are a few tips and pointers to help your app SEO efforts succeed. After all, you could have the best, most exciting app ever invented, but if nobody’s downloading it, you won’t make any money. 

Boost your page loading speed

Optimizing your website’s load speed is one of the most effective SEO tactics. In fact, Google says your pages need to load within a maximum of 2 seconds or you risk losing a high rank. You can do this by:

• Compressing and optimizing your images.
• Cacheing your web pages (in other words, storing your website’s data in temporary locations ready for future requests).
• Get rid of unnecessary plugins. 

Carry out a site audit 

In a nutshell, a site audit involves analysing the technical aspects of your website to see how well it’s optimized for search engines like Google. It will assess things like keyword quality, metadata, broken links and replicated content that’ll affect the usability and crawlability of your site. 

Ahrefs is a super handy site audit tool we like to use here at embarque. Along with exploring keywords, you can also run an SEO audit to discover the strengths and weaknesses of your site’s technical SEO issues. It takes just a few clicks to find out what might be holding you back from you being high up in Google’s good books.

Enter your domain to start your audit. 

Fill your website with CTAs

SEO for apps doesn’t stop at keywords and links. Remember, the main purpose of your website is to get users to download your app, so fill your content with plenty of download buttons across every page. 

Conclusion

So there you have it, folks: our official guide on everything you need to know about SEO for apps. Make sure you check out our full blog for more tips, advice, and actional insights you can apply to your own SEO efforts today.

In the meantime, get started with our services by checking out our packages. We’ve got plenty to choose from, so rest assured there’s something suitable for every type of business and its SEO needs.

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