Want to sell a product, promote a service or boost brand visibility? Share it with your audience in appealing ways — ensuring they can access your offering across multiple platforms, apps, websites, channels and screens. Sounds easy enough, right? Not exactly!
From content production and web design to SEO and UX, there are many different digital-first components to balance for consistent, high-value messaging. Moreover, audiences expect whatever you’ve got going on to be neatly packaged and perfectly adaptable for mobile so they can enjoy anytime, anywhere access.
Thanks to Google and its support for app deep links, consolidating an always-tricky SEO mission has just become easier. Here’s how app deep links are your next favorite mobile optimization hack.
What Are Deep Links?
In the broader scheme of SEO, digital marketing and new media, deep links are specialized Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which use specific character sequences to identify an internet resource’s exact name and/or location. Let’s break it down with an example.
Picture this: You have a website and a newly developed app where you promote your digital marketing and social media services. A potential client searches a relevant query in Google, with the hopes of finding a suitable service offering via a top-ranking site.
Now, imagine how quick, easy, convenient (and downright cool) it would be if that same prospect could click on a search result and land on the desired service page on your app. That’s what deep links enable. They help users navigate beyond your mobile app’s homepage so they can interact with specific in-app content directly.
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Why You Should Care About Deep Links
All good digital marketers know that to unlock high traffic numbers, a loyal customer base and favorable business returns, there are three major SEO markers to hit:
- Elevated user experience (UX) and platform interactivity.
- Improved analytics, consistent performance tracking and precise reporting.
- Targeted promotions and cross-channel marketing.
App deep links, then, provide valuable assistance in the quest to notch all three SEO milestones above. How? First, mobile users can access your content directly in their installed apps. That’s fewer clicks, anytime, anywhere, as is convenient for the mobile app user — your new, potential or returning customer.
Next, deep links streamline your marketing efforts, allowing you to build an in-app navigational landscape where users find exactly what they seek with minimal effort. Whether targeting your audience via creative ad campaigns, informational emails or fun social posts, deep links help users get to their (and your) desired app destinations in one fell swoop.
Lastly, astute user behavior monitoring and app performance tracking are the drivers of strategic marketing and communication. With deep links, you can leverage more analytical tools to help you understand different conversion metrics, app attributions and ad campaign reach. The end goal? Pinning down exactly which metrics and in-app user outcomes work best for you.
What’s the Next Step?
Add deep links to your website to connect relevant app pages to your site’s Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). You’ll need to configure deep links on Android to enable App Links and on iOS to enable Universal Links — both are fully supported on Google Search. Follow this guide to get started.