With the accelerating usage of mobiles for accessing the web, increasingly more technology and web agencies shift their focus to creating crisp mobile solutions and applications.

The current landscape of mobile app providers is varied. From multinational companies, all the way down to small studios and independent freelancers.

This report was set out to investigate the current state of internet marketing in the app development industry. The majority of the data included in this report involved in-house research, and the backlink profiles were gathered using SEO SpyGlass.

The focus was not primarily on SEO (despite SEO metrics playing a crucial role), as the aim was to holistically assess the current landscape of internet marketing performance of mobile app developers.

To this end, we gathered a wide range of data points to compile a list o 36 agencies that provide mobile app solutions, and ranked ordered these in accordance to their relative score (first being the highest).

The following metrics were considered:

Search engine optimization

1, Backlinks

Backlinks play a vital role in SEO, and are an integral aspect of digital marketing. We included the amount of backlinks, which were further broken down to nofollow and dofollow, where dofollow backlinks had a great impact on the overall score.

dofollow – these backlinks pass linkjuice and influence ranking and site authority

nofollow – these backlinks instruct engine bots that the link should not affect ranking

2, Domain authority (DA) – is an SEO metric, a value calculated to estimate the power of a domain consisting of 3 metrics: domain age, popularity and size

3, Page authority (PA) – just like DA, PA has been designed by SEO powerhouse MOZ to calculate the probability of a given page to rank

Social media metrics

4, Facebook profile performance – this metric has been calculated using the combination of the engagement value and growth metric 

5, Twitter followers 

Social signals

Social signals represent the human component in SEO. They are the shares, likes, Google+ that act as a recommendation of a website to others in their network. We considered the following:

Google plus 

Linkedin

Stumbleupon 

Diigo 

Caveats to note

Our analysis is holistic, however, still rudimentary. The results don’t reflect actual SEO performance in terms of ranking for app or mobile development short and long-form keywords.

Nor our results reflect the ability of these businesses to carry out digital marketing. This report is a snapshot of the current profile of mobile app development companies.

A further analysis taking account search ranking, the profile of backlinks and other metrics will be published in the future, to accurately account for the actual performance results, rather than displaying the state of the industry.

Download our report if you are on mobile or if you want to access it at anytime.