How an Amateur Increased App Downloads with App Store Optimization: Lessons from an Amateur Appreneur Part 2

(This is a guest post by Parag Jain of Gamifyd. If you would like to guest post on our blog, contact us here.)

More than 60% of apps are discovered through search. Discovery of your app depends either on high rankings or its searchability in the app store. Implementing a smart app store optimization (ASO) strategy helps you immensely improve your app rankings and get organic downloads in app store search results.

What is App Store Optimization?

ASO is the process of optimizing the description of your app to make it search friendly and rank higher in search results, leading to more downloads. App store rankings are important to gain visibility among potential buyers and attracting traffic to your app store page.

It’s a pre-launch task that should be done before you put your app live in app stores. Google Play allows for description changes after the app’s launch, but in Apple’s app store, you can’t make immediate changes: the content first goes through an approval process, which generally takes a week.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step to effective ASO. To get a decent set of keywords to compete with other high-ranking apps, find high-ranking keywords, monitor their rankings, and try out related keywords. Short list the most relevant and effective ones to include in your description.

SensorTower.com is an incredibly effective tool in helping you do this. It generates all the relevant data for your most important keywords.

Using this tool is easy. On the homepage, enter the name of your app and it redirects you to the page that has all the information you need related to your app’s keywords and competitor’s keywords. Above is the analysis for some of the keywords it gave us for our game Burt Destruction.
Along with traffic, the tool helps measure difficulty of particular keywords on iPhone and iPad, and also ranking for your app on different devices. Checking this tool on a regular basis keeps you updated on the keyword status of your app.

Keyword Implementation

Implementation is an important step after finding your app’s high ranking keywords. Each section of the app description, even the title, can be optimized for keywords. For iOS, the key is to optimize the 99-character keyword field your allotted because this is the only thing the App Store scans when considering rank based on keywords. For Android, the actual description is more important. Either way, each time you update your app and its description, discard lower-performing keywords you’ve integrated and leverage the best performing ones.

• App Title

The title of the app should be descriptive and would ideally have one of the top ranking keywords in it to influence search rank – just don’t change the title once the app has launched. Your app’s popularity will be associated with its name, so you need to keep it.

• Body Description

What your app does should be clear in the first two lines of the body description or no one will download it. Use 2-3 short sentences to stay ‘above the fold’ that give the best description possible for your app. Use the ‘More’ section to write everything else. Sprinkle important keywords throughout the description to increase your rankings.

• Read More: Detailed Body Description

Use as many high quality keywords as possible (without keyword stuffing) in the rest of your description. Keep in mind that while Google Play scans through all of your content for keywords, the iOS store doesn’t. So all the keywords which have been used the iOS store description should be intelligently put in the Google Play description 3-5 times to rank high for those particular keywords.

• Features

Features, generally placed below the description, should always be in bullet points. Bullet points are easy to glance through and most app users prefer them. You can also implement some keywords here.

• Notes

Another piece of content that you can add below the ‘features’ in your app description is notes. Mention anything unique about your app, its pricing strategy, or a fact related to your app you want users to know. This is more relevant in Google Play because you can use this content to infuse keywords and get higher rankings.

ASO: Beyond Keywords

While doing App Store Optimization, keep in mind some important factors:

• Your app will be available on multiple app stores and will cater to audiences worldwide. The content that you use in your app must be legible and culturally inoffensive.
• ASO takes time and you must wait for results patiently. You must monitor and tweak it constantly to derive better results.
• Along with ASO, you must focus on good ratings and reviews. These help boost the overall search ranking.

See below a small table with basic differences in two of the most popular app stores – iOS App Store and Google Play:

Expediting App Downloads

App store optimization is surprisingly one of the most democratized steps that can provide results instantly without putting in lot of marketing dollars.

Putting in the effort to tweak the keywords in your app descriptions will give both short-term and long-term results in prompting more app downloads. We’ve seen it for ourselves – optimizing one of our Burt Destruction’s app description got us almost instant results, which motivated us to tweak it further and experiment with its rankings.

Have you experimented with ASO? What results did you see?

Discover some smart app store optimization strategies to effectively improve your app rankings. Work with an excellent team of Click Labs that can assist you in app store search optimization. Get In Touch to seek advice from our experts on how to make your app more search friendly and rank higher in search results.