How Apps Could Replace Search Engines
In digital marketing, you’re only as good as your next big idea. So while we spend a lot of our time focused on our present goals and objectives, there’s always a side of us that has one eye turned towards the future.
And for the immediate future, it is most likely that browsers will maintain their dominance over how we browse the internet, whether that be on your computer, phone, or tablet. After all, with over 816 billion websites currently in existence with trillions of pages, only a minute fraction of those have an app counterpart. Simply put, it would take a herculean effort on the part of developers to recreate their web content into an app environment.
Furthermore, it’s nearly impossible to search for content online using an app and app content itself has just recently begun to be indexed by Google and Bing so that app content appears in search results. And to rank that app, the search engines require a companion website that links to content within the mobile app.
In addition, apps aren’t really built to efficiently browse the web yet. While browsers can download each web page they visit within a second or two, with apps it can take up to a couple of minutes and the content takes up valuable screen space and hard drive memory.
However, Google has revealed that they silently acquired a startup called Agawi last year that essentially streams apps, much in the way that YouTube streams video. Currently, Google is positioning this technology as a way for users to try an app without having to download the full file.
However, some analysts are arguing that this is setting up the path for Google to make mobile searching quicker and less cumbersome on memory than it currently it. With the use of mobile increasing by 400% in the past 8 years and recently overtaking desktop computers in the amount of time spent online, Google knows it’s going to need an edge to compete in a mobile world.
Thus, as digital marketers, we need to take into consideration the rise of apps as they relate to websites and consider the very possible future in which they will need to focus on optimizing and marketing apps alongside, and eventually instead of, browser-based websites.
While this is simply a hypothesis, it would likely do you and your team a great deal of good to start strategizing how to pitch to clients the need for succeeding in the app-based internet. By researching and better understanding how apps are indexed by search engines, you will prepare yourself and your team for a future shift toward app-based browsing and keep your clients on the top of the search results pages.