Maximising Mobile App Engagement Through Overlooked SEO Techniques
Uncover how SEO goes beyond marketing to cut costs and ensure compliance, becoming a powerful ally in brand discoverability and trust-building.
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Recent events have plunged the global economies into deep and broad change. The pressure to operate digitally and to continually enhance those offerings is overwhelming. But once the hard work is done and the digital product has been intricately designed, tested, optimised, and tested some more, you must (as with every product) decide how you will bring it to market. How will customers discover it?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the art of leading potential users to a digital resource. It has been around for almost as long as the World Wide Web, but its best practices continue to evolve. As important as it is to the digital business, measuring its impact is even more so. Tech teams work with marketing professionals to try various techniques implanted in various channels to drive consumers towards an app. They need to know which works best so they can redouble their efforts in those areas.
Waste not…
Organic traffic will always play a role in the success of an online asset. AppsFlyer research shows an average of up to 20% of app opens can be traced back to an organic search. So, let’s look at how SEO efforts can best be targeted to boost it and, as a result, the success of your app. As you may have discovered, measuring SEO impact is no simple thing. Neither deep linking — where users are taken directly to the app — nor redirection to a mobile website are ideal solutions. Deep linking means marketing teams lose the ability to attribute in-app events to SEO strategy. Analysts need this data to spot when a particular channel brings in higher-value users and make the case for refocusing investment in that channel.
And then there is the redirect strategy, where organisations drive users to a mobile website instead of the app. The problem here is a subpar user experience that may hurt uptake rates. So, the business must empower its marketing team to drill down into the data to discover where successes arise. What SEO approach drives app launches? What stratagem led to a particular in-app event? Enterprises operate in a do-more-with-less environment. The expectation from above is that customers will enthusiastically embrace digital experiences. If SEO budgets are squandered, that waste also applies to the app’s development budget.
As I mentioned, there are SEO best practices designed to help organisations get more from their investments. Here are the main three.
Measure impact
Having established the significant value of organic search, we must acknowledge the need to measure the impact of SEO efforts in driving it. And we must be able to tie specific SEO actions to in-app and down-the-funnel events. Such attribution is a prerequisite for strategy enhancement. You will likely use a mobile measurement partner (MMP) for this purpose, so make sure it covers the measurement of regionally popular search engines and the global mainstays.
Google may be the most popular engine in the UAE, GCC, and Middle East. However, if the business is not watching Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ask, and Yahoo, its marketing team may miss important attribution data. Also, if the company does business outside the region, it should consider locally relevant engines such as China’s Baidu and South Korea’s Naver and Daum.
Leverage the post ‘iOS 14.5’ reality
Next, we must deal with modern realities that stymie remarketing efforts and make them more expensive. Recent studies have shown that half of all downloaded apps are uninstalled within 30 days. We need to put more effort into remarketing to stave off the decline in app retention rates. It is essential to regional businesses’ strategies to compete in crowded markets.
Ever since Apple released iOS 14.5, remarketing has become increasingly challenging. Privacy is now embedded in increasingly more national and international regulations, expanding its reach. SEO is a reliable, privacy-respecting method of user engagement and re-engagement.
Go for zero-budget acquisition
So now you can measure SEO’s impact and use it to respect privacy while boosting retention rates. We can also use it for cost-free acquisition. For example, a user finds your app’s mobile website landing page through organic search and navigates to its download page in the app store. The marketing team’s visibility of this journey begins with the landing page and ends with the download. Anything before that, including the contents of the organic search string, is another country.
Smart scripts can get around this. They allow teams to measure the steps that brought the user to the landing page, which allows the business to analyse the whole journey for insights and provide smoother experiences to guide the user from the Web to the app.
Not just a marketing tool
SEO remains a vital ingredient of a brand’s strategy to build trust between its customers and, ultimately, inspire their loyalty over the long term. But as we show here, search engine optimisation extends beyond marketing alone because, while building a strong reputation in the market, the business is also cutting costs at home and finding respectful workarounds for its compliance obligations. SEO can be a multifaceted ally in the struggle for discoverability as long as you carefully measure what you are doing.
