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If you’re an app developer (or if you work for a brand that’s trying to launch a successful application to go along with its website), then discoverability is going to be an important concept for you. It’s not enough to have a killer app—you also want to make sure you have a visible one. Otherwise, how are people going to find your app and use it? When applications were a relatively new phenomenon, people could be relied on to dig deep for the best examples. However, with so many apps available today, developers need to work harder to make sure their creations stand out from the crowd and get picked up by users.
Standing Out from a Crowded Market
Apps are still relatively new, having only really caught on less than 10 years ago in 2008. However, there’s already about 5 million apps between Google Play and the Apple App Store alone. This makes it difficult to ensure that your app can be found by your target market. Chances are, there’s already at least a few other apps out there that are similar to yours, and you’ll need a way to make sure people find the one you’ve created instead.
Old Tricks with New Uses
The best way to make your app discoverable is actually not the newest. In fact, it relies on technology that has long been a part of successful website building: SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a term that until recently has been exclusive to websites. However, recent developments have also made it an essential part of any smart app developer’s toolkit.
Why SEO Matters More Now
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SEO was originally meant to help websites appear to a brand’s intended customers on the front page of popular search engines like Google. More recently though, Google has started to include search results for apps in its mobile searches. This means that app content can now be crawled by major search engines when accessed from smartphones. Since an increasing number of searches come from mobile devices, this means app developers will have to pay more attention to content that search engines can access if they want to remain competitive.
How to Inject SEO Content Into Your App
One of the best ways to oversee and tweak the content of your application is by using a Software Development Kit, or SDK. SDKs make it easy to add crawlable content to your app. For example, you can use an SDK to add various marketing analytics tools to your app, which can use SEO content to make it more visible. If you have a website related to your app, you’ll even be able to implement deep linking, which will allow features like Google On Tap to find your app at the user’s touch of a button.
The problem with a lot of SDKs is that they can be difficult to implement. Typically, putting an SDK into your app can take hours, maybe even days. To make the process happen faster, certain platforms are available to inject the code for SDKs directly into your app. A task that would otherwise take considerable amounts of time is thus completed at the touch of a button, giving you an easy way to make sure more people find it through mobile searches.
Make no mistake about it: SEO matters now more than ever, and especially for app developers. More people are searching the web than ever before, and increasing numbers of them are doing so from mobile devices. To take advantage of these users, make sure you’ve done the work to make your app easy to find.