2012.08.08
500 Global Team
This is a guest post by Naoki Shibata, founder of SearchMan.com, part of our 2nd accelerator batch. SearchMan helps app developers to make their apps easy to find in AppStore. SearchMan SEO tracks search rankings, analyzes keywords, competes for rankings, and optimizes everything. Follow them on Facebook and Twitter for more content.
Problem: Creative app developers pursuing the huge long tail of mobile app revenue, will continue to out-innovate each other. That may be why there are 1,899 flashlight apps in the App Store. Some of them rank among the top 25 in the App Store categories, but most don’t. To enjoy a fair slice of the App Store marketplace’s revenue opportunity, discoverability is key. But how? Buy advertising? It’s too expensive. Even more so now, with profitable social gaming apps with strong virality and gross margins bidding up the price of mobile advertising to unaffordable levels. So what is an indie developer with a brand new app supposed to do in order to win the attention of millions of smartphone users?
Solution: A little known fact is that more than half the world’s smartphone users discover new apps by entering a search keyword into the search box inside the App Store. An improvement in search ranking could increase organic (free) downloads dramatically for a fledgling indie developer.
Check out SearchMan.com’s how-to guide on getting started with mobile SEO.
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