The world of mobile apps is getting so dominant that many companies consider making the full transition of their digital properties towards the mobile environment. In other words, they are prepared to give up maintaining and updating their website, and replace it permanently with a mobile app.
In support of this train of thought, it is true that people use mobile phones more frequently and in a greater proportion than desktop computers to browse the internet. The major social media and email platforms have successfully implemented mobile apps to help smartphone users access their accounts without having to use a web browser.
What Do the Major Players Do?
In this situation, logic would dictate that the owners of these digital properties would stop developing their websites and focus all their energy and resources into the mobile apps. In reality, the interfaces, functionalities, layouts and designs of these popular platforms are constantly updated both for the websites and the mobile apps.
This is a clear signal that web is not dead and will not be for a long time. Because, despite the growing trend of doing everything on their mobile phones, people are not yet ready to give up their desktop and laptop computers. Although this is a generic reason, it is a valid one to determine companies to continue maintaining and improving their websites. Here are five more others:
- There Is No SEO for Mobile Apps
For the moment, there is no way of getting more search results for your business through the mobile app. SEO is still restricted to websites when it comes to on-page keyword strategies. No matter how well you optimize your content for the mobile app, you will not get any Google hits from it. The most popular search engine in the world still looks out for your web pages in the attempt to give relevant answers to people’s queries.
- You Cannot Incorporate Too Many Features in an App
Imagine every type of content included in your website squeezed into a mobile app. It would be a huge app which would take up a lot of storage space and it would be difficult to use. There are so many functions in a website which cannot be replicated into your app. You cannot host your blog, your e-commerce store or your main presentation pages in an app, because it would be so complex and difficult to use that people would simply give up on it.
- You Still Rely on Website Landing Pages
Coming back to those people who are still browsing social media from their computers (there are a lot of them, and for certain niches they are the typical potential customers), your social media campaigns, ads and offers would not be effective if you send people to a mobile app instead of a web landing page. It is hard to believe that they would be so excited about your offer to stand up from their desk, grab their smartphone and start browsing Facebook or Twitter on it until they encounter your ad.
- Web Pages Are Better for Blogging
Although they are very busy, people still enjoy reading a good article or blog post, even if it is longer. It is quite annoying to do that in an app, with endless scrolling on the screen. People may get the notification on their smartphone about your new blog post, but they will probably wait until they reach their computer to read the whole article and enjoy the graphics (if any).
- Maintaining and Updating Websites Is Less Expensive
If you focus all your marketing, promotion, presentation and blogging efforts in a mobile app, you will have to apply frequent updates. This is not only annoying for the users, it is also costly for your organization. Mobile apps have a lot of ongoing associated costs, because each update requires specialized work by the developer. In the case of a website, modern CMS platforms are intuitive and easy to use, allowing your organization to perform content editing in-house, through your marketing department.
These are five very powerful reasons which allow us to confidently state that web-based digital properties are not dying out – they are just as relevant and useful for your company’s marketing, branding and customer acquisition efforts.