Easy Mobile App Over Search

Mobile apps is becoming more practical for mobile users. The growth is huge and the download continues at an alarming rate. At this time Google search dominates on mobile, but mobile apps, Apple owns 70% of the market.

Apple apps online store opened at the beginning of 2009, they have had over a billion downloads for mobile apps. Yes, many are free downloads, but still the charged ones rolled in at $150 to $300 million dollars as I type this article. Not bad!

We’re not saying to abandon your website on the internet and have it optimized for organic search. For marketing your business you need to get in front of your clients in the mobile industry, because more people are carrying a smartphone/mobile device than a laptop.

That means mobile apps for iPhone, Google Androids, Blackberry/Palm sales will climb due to the directness of the app. Bear in mind for a mobile device/smartphones, and its the simplicity of getting information quickly versus typing into a query box. Here are some examples of iPhone apps:

* looking up a local business category (e.g. “restaurant”) in Google, use the Yellow Pages app, which will even automatically calculate your location via GPS
* looking up a local taxi company when traveling, use the Taxi Magic app on the iPhone (again, it will automatically get your location from GPS)
* looking up local restaurants or a restaurant consultant in Google, you can use the Yelp iPhone app

A final example points to one of the reasons why mobile apps trump mobile search. Mobile search you don’t always know whether the text you click on in the search results will be viewable or optimized on your smartphone. But if you have a mobile app or site that’s designed for that smartphone/mobile device then you can be confident that a search using that app will quickly return results (and links) that are optimized for a smartphone/mobile device.

This is the reason why sites that are mobi optimized works well with mobile apps because the smartphone version is much more focused, easier to navigate, and faster.

Mobile specialized apps (iPhone, Androids, Blackberry/Palm) provides a much more tailored experience than mobile search portals than Google and Yahoo.

Here’s a comment from Jason Hiner Editor-in-Chief of Tech Republic – ” I fully expect smartphones to become the most widespread global computing platform in the next five years, driven heavily by the developing world, where the smartphone will be the primary PC for the majority of users. As smartphones become more dominant, it is going to naturally migrate some power and influence away from search (and Google) and toward mobile computing applications”.

So what does all this have to do with the restaurant business? Everything, as a marketer you want to expose your brand any way you can.

If you have a restaurant website make it mobile optimized for quick loading, and razor focused on topic!