What Is a Deep Link?

Many inexperienced link builders only link to a site’s home page. It’s a rookie mistake, to be sure, and one we’ve seen many times.

We understand the reasoning behind it: the home page serves as the site’s welcome mat. It’s the page that links to every other page, and it’s the one that carries the most of your brand’s weight.

Linking to your home page, on the other hand, isn’t always a good idea. It will not only result in some shoehorned links, but it is also poor SEO practice. Building links to your home page may appear to be a surefire way to increase your site’s authority, but ignoring all of the other pages results in an unnatural backlink portfolio.

This article will serve as a guide to help you understand what a deep link is, what a deep link on a website is, how to create a deep link, and what a deep link URL looks like.

Let’s dive deeper!

What Is a Deep Link?

Deep linking is the inclusion of hyperlinks within content that directs traffic away from a company’s home page and other entry pages. In web marketing, the practice is used to direct visitors to pages with more informative and relevant content, including calls to action, which can help businesses improve web conversions.

Deep linking, when done correctly, can help your site rank higher in search engines, drive traffic to your piece of content, and increase your domain authority. It also enhances the user experience by providing more content for them to consume and attain lots of value from it.

Deep linking is a crucial technique for online conversion marketing tactics since it keeps visitors on a page and provides additional transaction possibilities.

Below is a good example of how we have implemented deep links at Loganix:

Why Are Deep Links Important?

Deep linking in SEO campaigns typically entails placing a link on a keyword or phrase that directs people to respective conversion pages or related articles on a site.

Deep linking improves site navigation.

This is critical for engaging audiences and making it easier for them to find information that will encourage conversions, but it is also critical for search crawlers to find and index every page of a website. The more pages search engines are able to index, the more chances websites have of being discovered through search. As a result, around 64% of marketers regularly devote time to search engine optimization (SEO). 2020 (HubSpot)

Helps pages to rank higher in search results.

Links to deep site pages may also help these pages rank higher in search results. While webmasters and marketers argue the extent to which internal linking impacts a particular page’s “votes” in search results, site deep connections still qualify as inbound links going to a web page to some extent. Matt Cutts has explicitly advised marketers to ensure that crawlers can follow internal links throughout a site.

Conversion optimization 

Traffic to these valuable conversion pages should increase as linked keywords and other deep links are embedded in the entry page content. For example, the greatest conversion rate is found on landing pages, the least common type of signup form (24%). Popups, the most common signup form, on the other hand, have the second-lowest conversion rate (4 %).

Deep linking in-app may dramatically boost your conversion and retention rates. Deep linking metrics may be tracked and offer more information about how your campaign succeeds. For example, a common use case when it comes to the different types of deep links for mobile device marketers is found in retargeting campaigns.

Improved User Experience

Deep links are useful for mobile app advertising because they enable you to lead clients and potential consumers to relevant pages within your app rather than browser or mobile web pages. The more seamless the connectivity for your app users, the better the user experience, app onboarding, customer journeys, conversions, and customer loyalty. For instance, 39% of smartphone users are more inclined to explore or shop a company or brand’s mobile app because it is quicker or faster to make a purchase. (Think Google, 2019)

When users are on search engines, social media, SMS, and other platforms, standard and deferred deep linking will assist them to find their way back to your app.

Deep Links FAQ

What is a deep link on a website?

Deep linking is the usage of a hyperlink that links to a specific, typically searchable or indexed piece of online content on a website in the context of the World Wide Web.

The URL contains all of the information required to point to a specific item. Deep linking on websites varies from mobile deep linking, which refers to connecting directly to in-app content through a non-HTTP URI (Uniform Resource Locator / Identifier).

Deep linking is frequently unavailable on websites built with technologies such as Adobe Flash and AJAX. Visitors to those sites may experience usability issues as a result of this. They may be unable to save bookmarks to certain pages or states of the site, utilize the web browser’s advance and back buttons, and click the browser refresh button, which may return the user to the starting page.

This, however, is not a fundamental drawback of these systems. For website designers that utilize Flash or AJAX to enable deep linking to pages inside their sites, well-known methods and libraries such as SWFAddress and unFocus History Keeper are now accessible.

App Links are deep links developed for iOS, whereas Universal Links are created for Android.

How do you create a deep link?

When creating a tracking link for your app, you may configure it into a deep link. If a new user clicks on the ad and already has your app installed, the app will not only open – but it will display specific app content of your choosing, rather than the app’s default screen.

Before you integrate the Singular SDK into your app, you must plan your deep links. Deep links will be implemented by your engineers as part of the SDK integration process.

Here’s Step by Step process of creating a deep link:

1. Plan the Deep Links for Your App

To begin, make a list of all the deep links you want to include in your app ad campaigns.

2. Create a Link Sub-Domain

If you don’t already have any sub-domains, you must create at least one before you can begin creating Singular Links.

You can make a single sub-domain (for example, the name of your company or app) and use it for all of your links, or you can make several for different purposes.

3. Relay Deep Link Plan to Engineering Team

Before integrating the Singular SDK/S2S into your app, your developers must be aware of the deep link destinations (or before they release a new version of your app with new deep links).

When developers use the SDK, they add code that detects whether the app was opened via a deep link and directs the user to the appropriate app screen or content (Step-by-step developer guidelines are available for iOS, Apple, Android, React, and Unity).

4. In the Apps Page, enter the Link Scheme Information.

Depending on the platform(s) of your app and the technology used by your engineering team to implement deep linking, you may need to enter some information in the Apps page (Settings > Apps).

If your app has more than one app site (i.e., it is available on more than one platform), fill out the necessary information for each one.

5. Create the Link

To make the actual tracking link (with deep linking):

• Go to Attribution > Manage Links in your Singular account and click Create Link.
• Enter the link’s information. For additional information, see the Singular Links FAQ.
• After you enable the link for iOS, Android app, or both, fill out the following fields in the Link Settings and Redirects section:
• Finish creating the link and copy the tracking link URL to use in your ad network dashboard.

6. Test the Link

You can easily test the deep link now that you’ve created it to see how it works.

To put the deferred deep link functionality to the test, do the following:

• Copy the tracking link URL from the Manage Links page and send it to a test device that isn’t running the app.
• Click the link from the device. You will be directed to the app store.
• Install and launch the app. The app should show the desired screen or content.

Deep linking provides consumers with a seamless user experience that allows them to easily navigate the mobile web and apps, reducing churn and increases the likelihood of installing.

What is the difference between a deep link and a hyperlink?

Deep links are hyperlinks embedded in content that direct traffic away from a company’s home page and other entry pages. In digital marketing, the practice is used to direct visitors to pages with more informative content, such as calls to action, which can help businesses improve web conversions.

A hyperlink, on the other hand, also known as a link or a web link, is an icon, graphic, or text that points to another file or object. The World Wide Web is made up of hyperlinks that connect trillions of pages and files. For example, “Loganix home page” is a hyperlink to loganix.com’s main page.

What does a deep link URL look like?

This is the basic deep linking URL format. The URL in its most general form is:

http://<portalhost>:<port>/<pathtopage>

Where:

• <portalhost> is the name of the Studio server.
• <port> denotes the Studio port.
• <pathToPage> specifies the path from Studio to the desired page.

The path for a simple configuration is web/application friendly URL>/<internalPageName>.

By default, the application-friendly URL is the initial application name stripped of spaces and special characters. For example, the friendly URL for an application called Sales Discovery Dashboard is sales-discovery-dashboard.

The Application Configuration page allows you to view and edit the application-friendly URL.

Boost Your SEO

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of deep links.

It’s obvious now that your home page isn’t the only part of your website with valuable content. So why would you want it to be the only result in search results?

If you include contact information and calls to action throughout your website, you will encourage people to visit more pages on your site, increasing the likelihood of a conversion.
All of these elements can help your SEO.

Furthermore, the more value you provide to website visitors, the more trust they will have in your brand. When trust is established, your company’s ROI increases.

While your home page is the star of your online presence, all of the other links on your website are equally important. Allow us at Loganix to assist you in developing a deep linking strategy that boosts your entire site content and provides search engine optimization (SEO) benefits such as lower bounce rate, increased time spent on a specific page, increased pages per session, and increased time per session.

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