iOS 9 is not going to kill the ad indus­try, but it will change the way you opti­mize to be found. This and oth­er sen­sa­tion­al thoughts and head­lines have been bom­bard­ing my inbox for the last week or so. I’ve been around long enough now to have a knack for fil­ter­ing out what is noise and what I need to take note of and this was cer­tain­ly some­thing my nose said I need­ed to take a look at. So here’s what you need to know and do now.

Back in August Apple announced a new fea­ture to its devel­op­er ecosys­tem:

“The new Safari release brings Con­tent Block­ing Safari Exten­sions to iOS. Con­tent Block­ing gives your exten­sions a fast and effi­cient way to block cook­ies, images, resources, pop-ups, and oth­er con­tent.”

Why? It wants users to have a much faster and bet­ter user expe­ri­ence. If the user expe­ri­ence is bet­ter with Apple and Safari, users will use Apple and Safari.

Once upon a time there were search engines like AltaVista and Hot­bot. Then a small start­up called Google came along with a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence and bet­ter results. The rest is his­to­ry. So there’s a pret­ty big prece­dent for what offer­ing users a bet­ter faster search expe­ri­ence can do for a busi­ness.

Do Users Really Want To Block Ads?

Yep. Some do, but that num­ber has­n’t been increas­ing.

Ad block­ing is a thing, but it has­n’t been caus­ing sleep­less nights for the ad tech indus­try or Google.

Ads Will Be Selectively Blocked By A Few

The mar­ket leader in ad block­ing is the apt­ly named Adblock Plus. They allow you to block ads via brows­er plu­g­ins and via their own brows­er if you’re using a mobile device.

So what’s the demand for the lead­ing ad block­ing brows­er?

The search vol­ume for “adblock brows­er” is small at 720 search­es a month. The num­ber of down­loads of the brows­er from Google Play is less than 50,000.

Again, I’m not see­ing a stam­pede of con­sumer demand for this tech.

What’s more inter­est­ing is what they block, or more specif­i­cal­ly, what their user base has moved them toward block­ing. It’s all the ads you’d expect. The annoy­ing pop­ups and ban­ner ads. It’s not AdWords when you search using Google.

So my con­clu­sion here is some peo­ple will choose to block ads, but the sta­tus quo at this point will remain rel­a­tive­ly sta­ble.

How­ev­er, then I start­ed to look fur­ther.

The BIGGER News: The Birth Of App Search Optimization

There’s no doubt that mobile search­es are on the rise. In fact, there are now more search­es on a mobile than on desk­top.

What’s often over­looked though is most of the time we spend on our mobile devices is inside apps. In fact, For­rester think this is as high as 85 per­cent.

Then I found anoth­er part to the recent part to the Apple release that is not get­ting much air­play.

Apple says:

“Search in iOS 9 gives users great new ways to access infor­ma­tion inside of your app, even when it isn’t installed. When you make your con­tent search­able, users can access activ­i­ties and con­tent deep with­in your app through Spot­light and Safari search results, Hand­off, and Siri sug­ges­tions. Using APIs relat­ed to search, you decide what con­tent gets indexed, what infor­ma­tion to show in search results, and where the user is redi­rect­ed after tap­ping a result from your app or web­site.”

They are also pro­vid­ing ways of cre­at­ing a more seam­less user expe­ri­ence by also index­ing and con­nect­ing web con­tent. Accord­ing to Apple:

“If some or all of your app’s con­tent is also avail­able on your web­site, you can use web markup to give users access to your con­tent in search results. Using web markup lets the Apple­bot web crawler index your con­tent in Apple’s serv­er-side index, which makes it avail­able to all iOS users in Spot­light and Safari search results.”

This means that search­ing via Safari and Siri is going to change and the results they serve might be dic­tat­ed by Apple and how you opti­mize your apps and web con­tent for Apple, not for Google.

This means that not only is the search expe­ri­ence going to change, how we think about the opti­miz­ing to be found and the sub­se­quent user expe­ri­ence is also going to change.

This might see the con­ver­gence of SEO and app store opti­miza­tion. Some­thing that’s been slow­ly hap­pen­ing under the sur­face for a while now. And the birth of app search opti­miza­tion.

The User Is King For Apple & Google

At the same time as the iOS 9 devel­op­ments a client came to my team ask­ing for insight into recent rank­ing drops that were impact­ing the busi­ness. These rank­ing drops had been grad­ual since mid July.

When look­ing at poten­tial caus­es expe­ri­ence point­ed to the things that Google’s Pan­da 4.2 update was con­tin­u­ing to impact. Con­tent qual­i­ty. And more specif­i­cal­ly in this exam­ple per­haps not sat­is­fy­ing this Google qual­i­ty require­ment:

“Some Low qual­i­ty pages are unsat­is­fy­ing because they have a small amount of main con­tent for the pur­pose of the page. For exam­ple, imag­ine an ency­clo­pe­dia arti­cle with just a few para­graphs on a very broad top­ic such as World War II. Impor­tant: An unsat­is­fy­ing amount of main con­tent is a suf­fi­cient rea­son to give a page a Low qual­i­ty rat­ing.”

It’s wide­ly believed by the SEO com­mu­ni­ty that fac­tors like click-through rates from SERPs and engage­ment are now part of Google’s algo­rithm, a black box cal­cu­la­tion that has always been focused on giv­ing searchers the best con­tent on the web for a par­tic­u­lar query. These are the lat­est in a series of what are great rank­ing fac­tors from the per­spec­tive of the searcher and the indus­try.

The com­mon thread for all of these and future devel­op­ments: the user – regard­less of device, brows­er, or appli­ca­tion – will increas­ing­ly be served with what com­pa­nies like Google and Apple hope is the best user expe­ri­ence. They hope to con­tin­ue to earn your loy­al­ty and eye­balls by doing this. As it’s those eye­balls that they are world class at turn­ing into hard cash.

What Should You Do Now?

If you’re in charge of mar­ket­ing for any com­pa­ny that relies on dig­i­tal, you should focus on the fol­low­ing:

1. Know the medi­ums and devices peo­ple are using, or want to use, to engage with your com­pa­ny, prod­ucts, and ser­vices. This means under­stand­ing respon­sive and adap­tive web­site design and app cre­ation, and how to thread them togeth­er to make a seam­less user expe­ri­ence.
2. Make SEO, app store opti­miza­tion, and app search opti­miza­tion a big pri­or­i­ty.
3. Set the bar even high­er on con­tent. Know what users want to find (this means world-class key­word research) and aspire to pro­vide them with the best con­tent on the web that sat­is­fies it. With the best being defined by char­ac­ter­is­tics like a high lev­el of exper­tise, author­i­ty, and trust­wor­thi­ness.
4. Mea­sure the suc­cess of your con­tent in engage­ment, not just rank­ings, vis­its, and con­ver­sion paths.
5. Lever­age your supe­ri­or con­tent to use all the media chan­nels avail­able to get that demand to your con­tent and nur­ture them through their pur­chase jour­ney, as they move between chan­nels, devices, and medi­ums through-time. This will include AdWords, dis­play, and per­for­mance media. All of these media are still crit­i­cal to ensur­ing you’re there in the moment.
6. Make sure you’ve got the best prod­uct or ser­vice in your mar­ket. Why? Because CTR, engage­ment, and rep­u­ta­tion will increas­ing­ly dic­tate what gets found.

Want to learn more about mobile search? Down­load our free ebook Mobile SEO Now.

Do you have any oth­er con­cerns fol­low­ing the iOS 9 announce­ments?