Essential SEO Tips for Online Businesses Looking to Maximize Apps

Having a dedicated app on top of a website can be extremely beneficial. With more than 70% of the global population owning smartphones and tablets, apps offer countless and unique opportunities for attracting, connecting with, and engaging more customers. They can further drive business success if you monetize them, such as via subscription or by displaying advertisements. Last year, users even spent $150 billion on in-app purchases.

Your online business arguably has the most to gain from these benefits. Without a physical location to turn to, leveraging apps means you can give customers the freedom to choose how to access your products or services beyond your website. By making your brand more accessible, you can gain a competitive edge in today’s crowded digital space. However, you can’t reap those benefits if your app doesn’t get enough exposure in the first place. With more than two million apps on major platforms like the Google Play Store, it’ll be easy to get lost in the noise. Fortunately, search engine optimization (SEO)—the same marketing strategy that can boost website traffic and engagement—can help maximize the reach of your dedicated online business app. Try these tips to start:

Do your keyword research

Promoting your app starts with defining search intent. Specify the most common problems your users face and use them to estimate the keywords customers will most likely use when searching for solutions that fall under your expertise. Using those keywords in app descriptions, website pages about your app, and related marketing messaging will help your app rank higher on relevant, organic searches so it better reaches your target audience.

Doing your research can help you determine which relevant keywords are the most likely to encourage downloads. The keyword research tools from Semrush can be especially useful if you want to streamline this process. Its global database contains more than 21 billion keywords, and you can easily narrow down your options by using an automated feature that helps instantly isolate those that best match user and search intent in your niche.

Keyword research can even do more than boost your app’s exposure. Using it, the app for the Ampere Business Bank—which boasts a fully online banking system—gained a 1,615% increase in new impressions and over 770% more downloads in 2024. Launched in 2022, it had been struggling to compete with more established banking apps. That shows how simply researching keywords that match user and search intent can help boost engagement and trust.

Promote your app on your blog

The results of keyword research will be best used in creating on-site content related to your app. Writing blog posts that talk about its features and benefits can prove its worth to potential users. It can even establish your brand as an authoritative voice in your industry. That can make customers more likely to trust your insights and check your app out, especially if you provide download links in your posts. In further optimizing these posts for SEO using the keywords you just researched, you can make them—and, by extension, your app—more visible on search engine results pages for added exposure.

To optimize app-related blog posts for SEO, consider starting with best practices like ensuring they’re around 1,500 to 2,000 words long, dividing your discussions into multiple paragraphs and sections for readability, and peppering your chosen keywords throughout. However, do try to avoid excessively using them or placing them too close together, as this “keyword stuffing” technique can lower your search rankings. Finally, make sure to add a call to action in each post to encourage app impressions and downloads.

The importance of a great content strategy for your app can’t be overstated. In particular, a well-rounded content plan helped one online business' sleep app amid a shift from a B2B to a B2C business model attract more users and log over 120,000 monthly organic sessions. That's a 30x improvement compared to the sessions the app recorded before kickstarting its new content strategy.

Build backlinks to app-related site pages

To further increase the credibility of your online business and app, get some of the internet's most authoritative sites to link back to your own. Consider reaching out to reputable domains related to your industry and asking about guest posting or link insertion opportunities. These strategies will allow you to place links that redirect to app-related pages on your site, like the aforementioned blog posts. A good backlink profile built in this way can expand your reach toward specific audiences and indefinitely boost organic traffic to give your app long-term, sustainable visibility.

However, be wary about the quality. Acquiring backlinks from irrelevant domains or those search engines consider to be low authority can hurt your rankings, which is why it is worth investing in professional link building services. It’s important that the agency includes a rigorous vetting process where experts manually select relevant, authoritative sites based on your industry and the metrics you specify, including your target demographic, ideal domain rankings, and preferred regions and languages.

The resulting quality backlinks can significantly impact your site’s overall SEO rankings to give your app-related site pages the necessary exposure to boost conversions. In acquiring high-quality backlinks, your website traffic can increase expontentially to your high value business pages.

Boost success with app store optimization

Of course, you’ll also want to focus on your search rankings in app stores. That’s best done by ensuring your SEO efforts complement your app store optimization (ASO) strategy. For example, leveraging the same keywords you used to optimize app-related blog posts in your app’s name and description can create synergy and consistency across platforms to improve visibility and reach.

In fact, Hackernoon finds that prioritizing keywords over branding—such as by slotting them in before the actual name of your app—can significantly boost your rankings on Apple’s App Store because its algorithm places emphasis on the first keyword used. Meanwhile, App Radar reveals that the Google Play Store takes backlinks into account when determining your search rankings, so you’ll want to heavily invest in link building campaigns if your app is compatible with Android devices. In combining SEO and ASO, ASO services provider PressPad has been able to boost its digital magazine client’s downloads by over 140%.

Keep reading here on JG Mobile Apps for more insights from an independent app developer’s perspective.

Article written by Regina James

Exclusively submitted to JG

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