3 Effective SEO Tips for Getting Your Mobile Apps Ranked in SERPs

Having a strong online presence and an SEO reseller program in place is essential for any business that wants to succeed and keep up with the competition. And while knowing how to skyrocket your website and make it visible to your target audience is essential, that’s no longer enough.

According to a report by StatCounter, 54 percent of total web traffic comes from mobile devices, so the only way a business can expect to grow online is to take a mobile-first approach in all of their efforts.

Having a mobile-friendly website is a given, but that’s just a bare minimum – if you want to provide the best experience for your mobile prospects, a mobile app is the best approach for giving a personalized experience and providing customized features that allow you to separate yourself from the competition.

But even if you take the time to develop an app, how can you get your customers to use it?

Well, luckily, there are methods that you can use to get your mobile app ranked on the SERPs and become the go-to option in your market.

To help you get started, here are a few of the most important things you must know if you want your app to quickly climb the search engine results pages and become visible to thousands of potential users.

Choose the Right Keywords

No matter how much effort you put in towards app development for your business, it won’t matter if you can’t get your app in front of your target audience with the help of SEO.

And the first step of the process is identifying the keywords that your ideal prospects are likely to type in when looking for solutions – once you know where your audience hangs out, it will be much easier to come up with a strategy to get in front of them.

Although broad keywords may seem appealing because of the sheer volume in queries, they are not a feasible strategy for getting your app users because those keywords tend to be hyper-competitive and are usually dominated by companies that have six-figure budgets.

However, just because you can’t target the most competitive keywords, doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways that you can still become visible to the very best customers in your market.

Instead of trying to reach everyone at once, you should try to be as specific as possible and look to get in front pockets of people that are looking for specific features that your app can offer.

This way you will not only be able to find keywords with little to no competition but will also have a much higher chance of converting those site visitors into app users because you’ll be able to answer their query with a useful solution.

There are plenty of SEO tools that allow you to search for and identify keywords that have the most potential, as well as help you come up with different keyword combinations to get you the biggest reach possible.

Once you know the keywords that you want to target, make sure you focus your app pages around them – you might even consider adding the most powerful keywords into your app’s name to make the connection even stronger.

Use other keywords in the Google Play Store’s long and short descriptions because these do get indexed and can help your app show up high in the results.

Build Backlinks by Monitoring Your Competition

As you might expect, backlinks play an integral role in getting your app ranked high on the SERPs.

Even though Google and other search engines take into account numerous factors when deciding its rankings, quality backlinks will always be something that you need to have to get close to the top of the results pages.

That’s because backlinks are one of the best positive SEO signals that show the search engines that the content on that page is relevant and valuable, so it needs to be displayed more prominently.

But how can start getting backlinks to your app page?

Well, one of the most effective methods for climbing the rankings of your target keywords is to perform a competitive analysis and see who’s already ranking at the top, analyzing their backlinks to check if there are opportunities for you as well.

You need to monitor the competition and find out where they are getting their backlinks from – this will not only provide you insights about the places that typically post links to apps similar to yours, but also give you a better understanding of what kinds of links Google values the most.

We already covered the first step of the process, which is identifying the keywords that you want to rank for. Once you know them, you can start looking at the backlinks of the top pages using one of the many backlink checking tools online.

After that, the process is pretty simple – you need to go through each backlink and figure out how they might have gotten it.

Here are some of the most common backlinks that you are likely to find:

  • A blog comment left under an article or page. In this case, you should simply post a comment yourself, but make sure that it actually contributes to the discussion instead of just spamming.
  • A post on a forum. This one’s also relatively easy to duplicate, as you can just need to register on the forum yourself and contribute to the discussion while sharing your own link.
  • A guest post on a blog. If it’s a guest post, getting a backlink will require the most work – you’ll need to get in touch with the website owner and pitch your guest post idea. The good news is that if they’ve accepted a guest post in the past, they’re more likely to be willing to do so for you as well.

While the process may seem complicated, with time, you will find that it’s possible to accumulate an impressive number of keywords which will help you rise to the top of the rankings, especially if you take the time to find keywords with lower competition.

Positive Ratings and Reviews Are a Must

If you’ve ever searched for an app yourself, you probably noticed that most of the top results usually have an excellent rating.

That’s not a coincidence – customer reviews are one of the most critical ways that both users and search engines measure the quality and relevance of an app, so if you want to have any chance of becoming visible, you need to make sure that your app can deliver the promised results and get positive ratings consistently.

Although one or even ten reviews can be subjective, if you can get hundreds of positive reviews from your users, that will send a strong signal to the search engines that your app can be trusted and should be placed higher in the SERPs.

Once you start to get more reviews, the process will become easier – as your app becomes more visible, more users will use it and so you’ll have an easier time accumulating even more positive reviews.

Finally, the reviews themselves can be a powerful SEO tool, too – as your users leave more reviews, Google will take into account the common keywords that they use and start ranking you for them in the app store and on the search engines.

Since reviews are so important, you need to ensure that you get as many of them as possible, so don’t be shy about encouraging and reminding your users that they should leave a review if they enjoy using your app; most satisfied users will be glad to do so.

In the beginning, when you don’t have many users yet, it makes sense to promote your mobile app on Application Product Listing Websites that have millions of users who love to try out new apps.

Listing your app won’t take much time, and it can help get the ball rolling and help you gain traction that you can build on later.

 

Author’s Bio:

David Henzel – Serial Entrepreneur

David is a serial entrepreneur on a mission to rid the world of bad customer experiences. He’s also the founder of LTVplusHQ, TaskDrive and MaxCDN.