Last week, I was on a panel at a CTIA pre-conference show in Orlando, and a question that was asked during several sessions at the conference was “what should we invest in: a mobile site or a mobile app?”
I heard this same question in a panel I was on at Digiday Mobile in September 2010, and earlier at the Mobile Search App Opportunities session at SMX West 2010, so it’s clear that this is still a question that marketers and developers are still struggling with, and have been since the opening of Apple’s App Store in 2008.
If you’re lucky enough not to be familiar with the question, brands with limited resources often wonder whether they really need to build both a mobile site and a mobile app, and would prefer to funnel their limited resources into one fully-funded mobile project.
Mobile apps have historically been seen by web designers as the only way to provide a rich user experience in mobile, and they are recommended frequently by CEOs who have been impressed by the user experience of an app and then fast-tracked their own mobile app project.
Why are companies still struggling with this issue after three years of talking about it? I think that’s because it’s a complex issue with more than one right answer depending on your business goals and objectives.
Add to that the countless partisan debates between those who want to sell you a mobile app and those who want to sell you a mobile site and it can be difficult to get to some semblance of truth about what it actually makes sense for your business to invest in.
As an SEO, I’m not selling mobile apps or mobile sites, and I can help you optimize either for more qualified traffic in search, but I’ve seen enough to know that the strongest mobile strategies start with a mobile web site and use it as the foundation for success.
Consider the following problems inherent with betting the farm on a mobile app:
- The most successful iPhone app project, which becomes viral enough to be passed around to every user on the platform, would only ultimately reach only 7% of the total mobile market. A mobile website or mobile web app, on the other hand, has the potential to reach 100% of mobile web users.
- Many iPhone apps require the current version of iOS to run, which can’t be run by first-generation iPod touches. According to Chitika research, these devices account for almost 10% of iPhone traffic, which could lower your reach even more. Android devices are even more fragmented, and could require additional development time to make your applications accessible to the already-limited app market. Mobile websites and web apps built with a progressive enhancement strategy, however, should be accessible to most users regardless of device.
- It’s a myth that users prefer a mobile app experience, largely propagated, I suspect, by those who are looking to sell additional services. Research shows that most users, in fact, prefer mobile websites over mobile apps (Adobe, eMarketer, InsightExpress), and that more people use mobile websites than apps.
- Users of search engines will likely not find your app in Google or Bing unless they’re looking for it. You can optimize the app for app stores and to some extent for Google, but it’s a different process that requires some specialized knowledge for success. As of this writing, it’s highly unlikely that searchers will find your app when searching on high volume, competitive keywords in search engines outside of app stores unless you buy a search ad. Given that 21.4% of mobile users in the United States search on their phones, a brand that wants the content it creates to find an audience would be wise not to ignore traffic from mobile search.
- Most apps are downloaded once and discarded (Pinch Media, Localytics). If you don’t have a good reason for creating your app and don’t ultimately succeed in creating an app that people need to use regularly, it’s likely that your app will suffer the same fate.
- There are very few apps that exist that provide something beyond what a mobile web site can do. If you’re creating a game or an application that truly cannot exist on the mobile web as it exists today, then by all means, build an app. However, given that Safari now has support for accelerometer and gyrometer, there are many things that mobile websites can do now that they couldn’t do previously. Be sure that you can’t build your mobile app as a web app before you build it, as there’s a good chance that you could build something similar with greater reach and engagement.
- Apps drive link equity to iTunes, Android Market, or Blackberry App World, and not to your website, which needs it to help your other content be found in search results. Even mobile websites at m.subdomains ultimately benefit the host domain, which could help you generate more revenue on your desktop, tablet and mobile websites if they’re hosted at the same domain.
- Apps are software. As such, they’re not currently able to be crawled and indexed as individual pages with a separate theme. It’s likely that you will index and rank one or two mobile applications pages for navigational keywords for apps, but you have the potential to rank as many pages as you have accessible pages with web apps. If your app is relevant to more than one concept or audience, building it as an accessible, open web app instead of a native application will give you greater relevance and reach.
There are good reasons for creating native apps as well, so I don’t want to make it seem as though creating a mobile website is all any business needs to reach its mobile target. For example, if you build a mobile website and not an app, you run the risk of alienating your brand from the audience that does prefer mobile apps and uses them regularly.
That audience, though, is the minority target; and if you only have funds to build one experience—mobile web or native mobile app—my recommendation is to build the best mobile web app you can afford, market it as aggressively as possible, and use the money you make and the data you collect to experiment with native apps.
If you can afford it, of course, the best solution is to build both a mobile site and a mobile app, and to enjoy not having to answer this question of limited resources that many businesses are struggling with today.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Mobile Mondays | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Marketing: Mobile | SEO: Mobile Search
Note the Client companies are based in either the US or Canada and the “percentage of traffic outside key service areas” are based on each client’s target market.
For instance, if a client only services the US only, any traffic outside the US would be traffic outside their service area.
Evaluating Your Own Traffic For Relevance
To use our own web design and Internet marketing business as an example, we service both Canada and the US, but were getting 24% of our traffic from other international countries. Big portions of that traffic were companies looking to sell their services to us.
These international visitors would fill in our web forms and call us to inquire, untimely skewing our website analytics data by not giving us a real understanding of how our website was performing to quality prospects.
A solution had to be implemented to significantly reduce the amount of resources we were dedicating to people outside our service areas.
Ultimately, we didn’t want to be contacted from people we couldn’t help. The four possible solutions we considered were:
- Create a custom report in Google Analytics to filter out the unwanted data (reporting related)
- Adjust the content of our website (website related)
- Block the traffic from specific Countries from viewing our website (server related)
- Don’t change anything.
Option #1
When evaluating the first solution, creating a custom report to filter out this data in Google Analytics, this would clear up our analytics data. Implementing a filter would provide a more realistic picture of quality prospects we could service in our geographic area instead of those prospects or solicitors in other counties we don’t service.
This option didn’t run the risk of blocking any traffic or robots that we do want. It’s also a simple filter to add in Google Analytics. We set up another Profile with the country exclusions filters. A new Profile was the preferred approach, rather than going through the extra steps of creating Custom Reports.
However, setting up analytical filters doesn’t fully resolve the issue, since these visitors could still access our site, fill in web forms, and contact us, ultimately wasting resources that we could dedicate elsewhere.
It wouldn’t give us a true picture of what was going on. It also wouldn’t resolve the problem – we didn’t want to be contacted by companies from some outside countries.
Option #2
Updating the website content to say you only service a specific area is another solution that we considered. This would inject more geo-targeted keywords into your site, which would help in local SEO. Adding a graphical map, drop-down options and/or links that allow the visitor to select their country would help qualify visitors.
Some of the downfalls of this option include spending a much higher amount of time to implement versus the other options. The success of this would also be dependent on how honest the visitor is.
Assuming visitors are reading your website content, adding geo-targeted keywords into your site would set a clearer expectation of service area delivery. However, this option still doesn’t resolve the issue of sharing contact information that allows unsolicited visitors to contact us and invalid web form data.
Option #3
How about blocking or filtering visitors automatically based on their IP address? When considering to block website visitors by IP it’s important to first evaluate the reliability of the IP address(es). The accuracy of an IP list is over 99.5% on a country level and 80% on a city level. The smaller the location, the less reliable the IP address.
Internet Service Providers change IP addresses they designate to customers. Some change them more frequently than others, which is why you want to keep the database of IPs updated. Scheduling a monthly update is typically a good routine if city level IP authentication is required. Country level is much more static.
The benefit of blocking the country via IP address would not only clean up analytical data, but also ensure our sales funnel was more efficient and provide a more accurate picture of real prospects in all systems. We needed to consider other issues in this approach.
One concern was the potential for a search crawler coming from an IP in the location we were planning on blocking. For example, there was a possibility that Google’s search crawler would also be blocked if it came from the same country. The implementation of this option is more technical. One would need to obtain a list of IP addresses for the desired locations and update the websites htaccess file.
In our example, the inquiries from some countries became so frequent that we couldn’t ignore it any longer. After much debate, we decided to ban the countries; however, we would only ban one at a time to evaluate the effects.
For instance, one of the largest traffic sources, accounting for approximately 20% of this, was from India, a market we don’t service. These Indian visitors were companies looking to sell their services to us.
We executed the ban in the polite Canadian way. We also implemented the Google Analytics profile with the country filter to monitor future website statistics versus the past.
Those visitors that came from our blocked list would land on a different page that displayed a nice message. It read: “Thank you for visiting. However, we don’t provide services in your area.”
In sum, the tests have gone over very well. Banning the country from our website has significantly cut down the number of unsolicited calls, emails and web form requests. It also gave us a much more accurate picture of how our website was performing within our own target market and service area.
Considerations For Blocking Traffic By Location
If you’re considering this strategy, some factors to consider when filtering visitors include:
- Why do you want to filter website traffic?
- Which locations would you want to filter?
- How much traffic do you currently get from locations outside your service area?
- How important is this traffic?
- How to funnel visitors outside your service areas?
- The accuracy of the IP addresses locations in mind.
- Effects of non-human visitors.
A few months after we implemented this, we received a direct mail package that contained pens with our logo on them from a company that wished to sell us branded pens.
Guess what it said under our logo? “Thank you for visiting. However, we don’t provide services in your area.” We had a good laugh. Someone obviously didn’t read what they printed. It was evidence that our website block was working and a nice souvenir.
The key takeaway, as always, is monitor your traffic and conversions. Track where your quality traffic is coming from and decide for yourself if you should block the traffic of certain countries. Make sure to proceed with caution to ensure that you are not missing some opportunities.
Think outside of the box for other ideas of how you can use that traffic. Perhaps referring the traffic to a partner or creating a unique service for specific markets is another option to consider.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: 100% Organic - Search Engine Optimization Tips | SEO: General
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