Is it time to start thinking apps?

Just last week, Apple announced that Apps are now available on your iMac or Macbook (exactly like on your mobile or iPad) if you’re running Mac OS X v10.6. 

Google’s Chrome Browser also has its own App store full of free and paid apps which allow you to do anything from playing a game to drawing a fancy Org Chart.

Apps are seriously useful. That little App icon sitting there on your desktop is ready to help with a single click, and is much more convenient to use than searching for a solution at a search engine, or typing in someone’s fiddly URL into your browser.

This could be the beginning of a dramatic shift in the search landscape. Some might call it seismic.

It’s really got me thinking.

If browser use is slowing and the use of Apps is growing rapidly, then it’s pretty clear that ranking client apps highly in the various App store guises could be pretty handy. And lots of global companies are creating their own proprietary app platforms from Samsung to Microsoft.

Let’s say for arguments sake, you develop a Weather App. When someone searches through Apple’s App Store for ‘weather app’ there’s a list of literally hundreds of weather-related apps, free and paid, available for download.

So what influences the ranking order?

When you analyse the results, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason as to why the order of results are the way they are. And there’s very little information about app ranking positions online or from Apple itself.

So we’re pretty much on our own.

Let’s look first at reviews or ratings.

There are results with poor ‘ratings’ ranking highly and others with great reviews ranking lowly. There’s also the issue of the amount or volume of reviews. There are apps ranking highly with hundreds of reviews and apps ranking lowly with thousands. So there’s not much to draw on from this data!

Then there’s the amount of downloads (which Apple doesn’t share).

We know that there have been a lot of Apple App downloads overall (like over a seven billion so far), but only Apple and the app owners know how many downloads they’re received individually. Apple does share the ‘Top Paid’, ‘Top Free’ and ‘Top Grossing’ apps but actual download numbers for each are kept secret.

There’s one person I’ve found who’s been prepared to share the download information and ranking positions, and it does seem that rankings are tightly correlated to how many downloads your app receives.

If it is the amount of downloads your app receives that influences your rank, then promotion of your app to encourage as many downloads as possible will become a huge part of your future marketing initiatives. Once you’re ranking highly (and the quality of your app is good) you’ll probably be making a killing and it will be very hard to bump you off top spot.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Geography or where you’re located globally does seem to influence ranking positions. For example, typing in ‘city guide’ seems to give me a very relevant result with the top app being ‘Melbourne at a glance’ (which is where I’m located).

As always though, niche is great, innovation helps and quality is vital.

Finally, it does also seem that keywords are important, especially around the way you name your app. If your app is about weather, then it won’t hurt to name the app with the word ‘weather’ in it. Try using keyword optimisation in your app’s description too.

So no real answers this week, but some food for thought never the less.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.