What is app indexing?
App indexing is the act a search engine performs when it stores and organizes content it finds in an app, just like it does for webpages. App indexing is important for mobile-first marketing because it allows search results to display important, in-app content with a call-to-action to download the app.
How does Google app indexing work?
Despite all of the marketing hype, app indexing is very simple. It’s a method to turn your website link into a link that points to your native app page. It’s a simple meta tag that you can add to your site which Google can scrape and index for search. Here’s an example:
<link rel=”alternate” href='myapp://open/to/recipe1234'/>
Basically, when the Googlebot hits your website and crawls through the headers, you can indicate to Google what the corresponding, one-to-one mapping of the app link is. They use this to change your website link into an app link.
What does this app indexing mean for mobile developers?
If you’ve enabled Google app indexing on your site, when someone searches for “recipe1234” on Google on Android or iOS, instead of showing the web page search result, they’ll show an app page search result. It’s basically the same thing, except it has an ‘Open in app’ call to action button. Google now provides tools and guidance for indexing contents of apps directly into Google search.
Apple also provides exposure to in-app contents through direct Spotlight Search, allowing developers to index content of their apps to be shown within search results.
Deep linking is a technical requirement for app indexing to work, so it’s no surprise that platforms that ease deep linking for you will also help with app indexing. These platforms facilitate implementation and integration of both mechanics, but more importantly, solve fragmentation. Branch deep linking created a nice out-of-the-box approach that eases the whole app indexing process dramatically. Functionally, if the user has the app installed, and you’ve configured it for deep linking, the user will open to the exact page in the native app. If not, it will load the page in the browser.