Apple SEO Strategy Brief
Strategy briefs are bite-sized examples of how to apply my organic growth strategy approach to large enterprises. While they are inherently limited by being developed only with external insights, there are still great learnings to derive from the exercise. In this post, we’ll be focusing on Apple.
Everyone knows Apple – their brand and products are ubiquitous in modern life, and closed out their fiscal year 2022 with annual revenue of $394.3 billion, an 8% increase YoY.
But even a Fortune 10 brand needs a powerful organic growth strategy to maintain and grow their brand – and this strategy brief will outline a potential path forward for Apple.
Defining Apple's SEO Strategy
Apple's Business Strategy
The core of Apple’s business remains the iPhone – and represented 52% of its revenue in 2022. What may surprise people is that their second largest source of revenue isn’t any of their other physical product lines – it’s Services like the App Store, Apple Care Plus, Apple TV, and Apple Arcade.
Apple has invested billions into building out their Service offerings, which makes sense – not only is their Services line growing extremely fast (126% over the past 5 years, per Statista), the margins are better too; their Product margins are 36%, while Service margins are 72% (margins calculated based on Q4 earnings data).
Current state of Apple's SEO
According to SEMrush, Apple drives an estimated 922.9 million monthly organic site visits worldwide – a staggering figure. Over the past 10 years this traffic has grown steadily, but spiked in December of 2020.
From analyzing their keyword portfolio, two things stand out:
- More than half of their organic traffic comes from branded searches (which makes sense, given how popular the brand is)
- The majority of their non-branded rankings comes from the App Store subdomain, which has top 3 rankings for searches like ‘Facebook’, ‘TikTok’, and ‘Google Translate’. Other top traffic-driving subdomains are support.apple.com and podcasts.apple.com.
Bringing it together
Based on a brief look at Apple’s business strategy and the current state of their SEO, I would likely recommend the following strategy summary:
Goal – Increase Apple’s organic-driven service revenue by X%
Core Insight – Apple’s service revenue has more growth potential than product revenue
Specific Deployment of Actions – Analyze current organic visibility of Apple’s various services to determine prioritization; develop a content roadmap to target striking distance keywords, with an emphasis on FAQ content on support.apple.com; test updates on App Store landing pages to outrank the Google Play Store; work with media partners to grow brand awareness for lesser-known services (based on traffic and trend data)
In a single sentence, Apple’s SEO strategy should be:
Our strategy is to grow organic service revenue by X% by establishing greater visibility for high-performing services, and growing awareness for lower-performing services.
Making Apple's SEO Strategy Better
How could we make this first draft of a strategy stronger? Beyond the obvious answer (getting information from various experts within the company), the strategy should be
- Aligned with the broader business strategy
- Compelling to key decision-makers
- Credible and well-supported
- Easily understood and memorable
Based on the available information, I would argue that my strategy proposal is indeed aligned with the broader business strategy of growing service revenue. It’s also a very simple strategy that can be boiled down into a single sentence, making it easy to remember.
What is lacks at the moment is credibility, and a sense of how to make the ultimate strategy presentation compelling to key decision-makers.
To make the strategy more credible, I would do more research into the specific keyword and traffic opportunity being missed out on currently, to quantify why some of the proposed tactics, like building out more FAQ content, would drive meaningful results.
To make the strategy more compelling, I would need to first figure out who the key decision-makers are that I need to convince to execute my strategy, and then determine what they respond best to. For example, Product leaders in charge of the App Store team might be motivated by competition, so I could highlight Google’s App Listing page’s organic dominance as a compelling reason why we need to update our own App pages.
Conclusion
While this is a very high-level approach to determining a potential strategy for Apple, using a clear framework helps to focus and speed up progress, and get you to a first draft of your strategy sooner.
For a deeper dive into my organic growth strategy framework, I recommend reviewing my guide for more details. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to contact me here.