Today’s digital landscape requires app developers to not only understand different marketing channels but to leverage them to generate app downloads. The days of listing your app on the App Store and getting passive users are far gone and the modern developer needs to utilize effective marketing channels to grow their user base. One of the best ways is to rank competitively on search engines by improving your SEO. The average developer is not well-versed in SEO, so in this post, we’ll go after common mistakes and how you can avoid them. This will help you progress faster and ultimately get more users for your app. 

Choosing SEO as the Wrong Primary Marketing Channel

Before even getting into the details of how to do SEO properly, you first need to assess if SEO is the right primary marketing channel for your app. Generally, search engines are the primary ways customers find businesses but there are numerous platforms in addition to Google that include TikTok, YouTube, etc. If there’s no demand on the marketing channel you’re trying to focus on, it won’t matter how much time or effort you spend on it because it won’t lead to leads. 

A great and simple way of assessing if SEO is the right channel to market your app is to check how much search volume keywords related to your app are generating. You can do this by using keyword finder tools such as SEMrush, or Ahrefs. Start by identifying relevant keywords related to your app, search for them on the tools, and gauge the search volume and difficulty of the keywords. 

Here’s a great example from Mustard IT. As you can see, this site’s primary keywords have search volume on Google and they’re not too competitive for a site. If your keywords show extreme difficulty or very low search volume, you might want to reconsider pouring months of effort into SEO.

Overlooking App Store Optimization

Doing SEO for an app is far different than doing SEO for a normal service or product. The final destination of all the clicks your user takes will either be Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store. It’s rational to spend time investing in making sure of the proper optimization of your app on those app stores. So that your app shows when users go to search for it. This includes the following best practices:

• Optimizing your app title and description with relevant keywords
• Using high-quality screenshots and videos that showcase your app’s features
• Encouraging and responding to user reviews
• Regularly updating your app to improve its ranking
• Choosing the right category for your app

Without doing any of these, it’s very difficult to even locate your app on the app store let alone market it. This shouldn’t take too much time and it will make a dramatic difference when done correctly, so it’s important to invest time in making sure your app is locatable before doing SEO on your website. 

Indexing Your Pages

The vast majority of app developers who are new to SEO don’t know anything about Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other tools used to manage SEO on a day-to-day basis. A common and lethal mistake made by developers is not indexing their websites and pages on Google. This can result in your website not ever showing up on Google and your customers will not find your product. 

You can index your pages by submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console, using the “URL Inspection” tool in Google Search Console to request indexing, creating and maintaining an XML sitemap, and using internal linking to help Google discover new pages. When you’re done with this, you can check if your site is indexed by searching “site: yoursite.com”.

This will show your homepage and any associated pages with your site. In general, the more your site pages are indexed, the more Google results you will have. So if you have a dozen pages on your site, you should be seeing 2 pages of Google results. If a specific page does not show up, you can search the URL on Google Search Console and request that it be indexed.

Backlinks

A major mistake developers make when starting SEO for their apps is neglecting backlinks. Backlinks are one of the primary factors that influence rankings on Google. In general, the more and higher quality backlinks you have, the better you will perform on the SERPs. Contrary to what many SEOs will say, it’s extremely difficult for new sites to rank for anything besides low-hanging fruit. The chances that you will rank competitively for your main keyword to generate app downloads with no backlinks is slim to none.

This is why it’s important to prioritize getting backlinks early on. You can do this by reaching out to people you know and asking for a link, writing guest posts, doing digital PR, etc. The quicker you can land your first couple of links, the better your SEO will perform. This will eventually help you rank better for any blog post you decide to pursue.

Forgetting About Long Tail Keywords

Even if your site is new, you can still target and rank for easier keywords like long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases that typically have lower search volume but higher conversion rates. They are excellent targets for new websites because they are generally lower in competitiveness and big competitors often overlook them. Long tail keywords are complementary to your main keywords, so the more you rank for them, the better you will rank for your primary keyword as well. An example of a primary keyword is “email marketing agency” while a long tail keyword would be “best email marketing agency in Los Angeles”

You can find them by using tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush and entering your primary keyword. These tools will help you identify variations of them and you can make a list of long-tail keywords to target. This will help you gain some initial traffic while you build your authority to go after more competitive keywords in the future. 

Avoiding these common mistakes will allow you to get your site up and running along with users to your landing pages as quickly as possible. It’s important to note that SEO does take time, so the work you put in today in terms of backlinks, publishing content, etc. will not fully materialize until months down the road. As long as you stick to the basics and publish high-quality content and promote your content, your traffic will compound and you’ll eventually generate passive downloads for your app each month.