Paul MorrisBing recently announced that they’re all set to implement new search features that will allow users to find content within apps. For a while now we’ve also heard rumblings about Google requesting that developers tag content within their apps so that it can be searched for and displayed in search results. So it seems as if the way we discover apps might be changing, and that might mean a new role for SEO specialists too. Let’s take a closer look at what’s brewing.
Balance Book for iPhone by jtbrennan licensed under Creative commons 4
Link to the past
Those of you with a long memory might recall the days of the internet where it was fairly difficult to find something you weren’t specifically searching for – i.e. you had to know the domain name, or have a fairly well defined category for the thing you were searching for. This might sound painfully primitive to the post search engine revolution world, but when you think about it, that’s the kind of position people are in these days when it comes to browsing apps. It’s fairly hard to stumble across the content they contain in a standard search, and that means people tend to stick to the same narrow group of popular apps rather than getting out there and discovering new things.
Back to the future
So these first steps that Bing and Google are taking into the world of crawling through individual app content might be the start of something big. Bing already have actions incorporated into their search, so that users can specify how they want to use the content they’re looking for – watch, listen, read – and results will pull up apps that fit the bill. It’s still early days, we can’t stress that enough, but if this takes off, it could mark a move towards apps becoming the dominant force in how people experience the web.
Making a wider range of app content easier to discover and creating an index of apps that can be searched easily all points towards a diversification of the way we experience apps, in the same way modern search engines diversified the way we view the web.
Reality cheque
So now we come to the big business potential of all this for smaller app developers, and the need for SEO specialists. If you can appear on rankings via the content of your app, without having to put yourself forward with expensive advertising, that means there must be a complex algorithm for crawling that content. If there’s a way to impress this crawler, there must be potential for optimising your apps in order to appear higher up the rankings.
Basically, it seems increasingly likely that SEO will begin to have a major place in app marketing, even across the range of smaller developers. It might not be something that’s going to happen tomorrow, but at Superb Digital, we’re well aware of the importance of keeping up-to-date with whatever the future holds. We might be seeing another web shakeup on the way – watch this space for more SEO tips and advice related to it.
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