This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
With over 2 million apps in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, you can find an app for anything. However, app publishers can struggle to get their apps to stand out from the crowd. Various app marketing techniques have proven to be helpful in order to improve app store discoverability, the most cost-effective being App Store Optimization (ASO).
ASO is often compared to SEO, as it’s the process of optimizing certain elements in order to rank highly in app stores and increase app visibility. It’s a similar idea to how you would optimize a website to appear at the top of search results.
While both of these practices rely on the same core principles, they still have their differences. They take place in different ecosystems — people searching in the App Store behave differently than when they search the web. Plus, app store algorithms work differently, using their own specific ranking factors.
Given that over 63% of apps are discovered by general browsing or searching within the App Store, there’s no doubt ASO has to be part of any app marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll help you get started with ASO, outlining the most important elements that you need to optimize and their best practices. We’ll also provide you with some tips and advice to conduct effective keyword research with the help of useful keyword tools.
Create a Unique App
Before starting to even think about your app’s ASO and rankings, you need to make sure that your app is 100% perfectly designed and has a unique concept. Does your app solve a problem? Is it entertaining? Is your core functionality clearly defined? Does it offer a solid unique selling proposition that separates you from your competitors? Once you’re sure that your app is ready and functional, you can start focusing on optimizing your app’s Product Page.
By optimizing your app’s metadata, you will increase your app’s authority in the App Store and position in the search results. This will increase your app’s organic downloads and, hopefully, your conversion rate.
The first step in building your own strategy is to conduct a deep market and competitor analysis. If you understand your audience and your competitors, you’ll be able to find new opportunities that will increase your discoverability potential.
How Does ASO work?
As previously mentioned, ASO and SEO are easily compared. Search engine algorithms use multiple signals to rank pages in the search results, all weighted differently. These rankings factors vary from one search engine to another. It’s the exact same thing for app stores.
Each store has its own rules and equations to rank apps. So it’s crucial to optimize your app according to the store you’re in. If both Apple and Google give indications on their ranking formula, a big part of the search results mechanism remains a mystery, therefore we can only make an educated "guess" as to how it works, based on experiments.
Just like for SEO, ASO has on-metadata and off-metadata factors ("on page" and “off page” in SEO). On-metadata elements are factors that the app publishers can control and optimize the way they want (e.g: app title, description, etc.). On the other hand, off-metadata factors are totally independent and can’t be controlled, although they can be influenced (e.g: app downloads, reviews & ratings, etc.).
Let’s review each ASO factor having an impact on your app’s rankings and see how you can optimize each of them.
Optimize Your App's Product Page
App Icon
You only get one chance to make a first impression. Don’t ruin it. Your app’s icon is one the first elements that users see when browsing the app store. Visual assets are one of the most influenctial factors, so they need to be perfectly crafted and designed.
Since app users are probably confronted with many other apps similar to yours, you need to focus on your icon’s uniqueness. Your icon is your first opportunity to show off your app’s purpose. Together with your app title, they both should reflect what your app’s about.
Your app icon needs to be appealing, relevant, memorable and eye-catching. All this in one tiny graphic asset. This makes the task quite challenging, so it’s essential to dedicate enough time to it. Try using a single focus point to capture users’ attention and avoid using details or text.
Test your icon against different wallpapers as well. Don’t forget that app icons will constantly appear on your users’ background and that they will be tapped to open the app. A great trick is to use a border to reinforce the contrast with the background.
The Apple App Store and the Google Play Store have their own requirements regarding sizes and rendering. Make sure to carefully follow the iOS Design Guidelines and the Android Graphic Assets Design Material.
App Name
Like your app icon, your app name should be appealing, easy to understand, straightforward and unique. It should be understood right away and reflect your app’s purpose.
App titles are not only important in terms of conversion, they also play a notable role in app rankings. Indeed, both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store algorithms allocate a huge importance to the keywords from app names. App names’ SEO sibling could be the title tag.
Use your strongest keywords in your app title. Apple recently announced that iOS app titles should not be longer than 50 characters, in the aim of improving user’s experience and reducing keywords stuffing.
On Google, the limit is even shorter at 30 characters. Keywords from app titles are therefore need to be chosen wisely.
The best practice is to use a nice, simple brand name with 3 - 4 keywords creating a relevant sentence. Don’t forget to use URL-friendly characters so that the App Store can properly scan your keywords.
Keywords
Keywords certainly represent the biggest challenge in ASO. Whether on Apple or on Google, apps need to target specific keywords they want to rank in search results for. App keywords can actually be compared to the page content tag in SEO.
Here again, Apple and Google work differently. Apple provides app developers with a 100-character iTunes Connect keyword field while Google scans keywords from the app description. Other keyword placements are also taken into account. Indeed, keywords from the app title, the app publisher name, the in-app purchases and the app category are used to rank apps as well.
For the App Store, it is important to use all the available characters and to separate each keyword with commas instead of spaces. It is also highly encouraged to use single keywords instead of longtail keywords because it gives the algorithm more possible combinations.
For Google Play, the mechanic is closer to SEO. Repeat each targeted keywords (choose about 10) 4-5 times and scatter them throughout your marketing-oriented copy, combined with various other keywords. Pay attention to keyword density and avoiding keyword stuffing.
A great keyword is a keyword that is relevant to the app with high search volume and low competition. Indeed, the whole difficulty is to find keywords that users would type but at the same type would not bring too many app results.
A great way to find effective keywords is to use the help of an online keyword tool. There are a lot of tools that you can use. Google provides the AdWords Keyword Planner, and although it focuses on the web, it can already give you a lot of ideas.
Our personal favorite is AppTweak, the "WooRank of apps". AppTweak provides a complete ASO report reviewing any app’s ASO performance as well as the tools and data required to find the best keywords for your app. The volume estimation relies on multiple parameters taken directly from the App Store.
AppTweak also provides the KEI (Keywords Efficiency Index) for each keyword. This is an indicator between 1-100 that helps you understand keywords performance in terms of ranking difficulty. The higher the KEI, the higher the chance of ranking for the keyword.
AppTweak also provides a lot of keywords suggestions such as the most used keywords in the app’s reviews; the app’s top ranked keywords; the app’s category top ranked keywords; auto-suggestions from Apple or Google and much more.
Keyword research should always start with an in-depth competitor analysis to understand how your competitors are positioned in the store. Examine all the keywords present in their app name, description (for Google Play) and use the "Ranked Keywords" feature from AppTweak to check their top ranking keywords. These are certainly some of the ones they target in the iTunes Connect Keyword field (or description).
The best practice here is to analyze as many keywords as possible (at least 100 per app and per language). Basically, any keyword that could be relevant to your app and that is more or less close to your app’s universe.
From there, remove keywords that are too generic or popular. Make sure to avoid small KEIs and those you tried to rank for but never succeeded.
A great strategy to annoy your competition is to take keywords for which they are ranking well (between the 1st and the 50th position) and use them in your app title, description or keyword field. Try using this strategy with apps at the same level as yours. If they’re ranking for these keywords, why wouldn’t you?
However, it is also important to distinguish your app from your competitors by targeting keywords they don’t. You’ll need to find the right balance.
The most important aspect to understand is that keyword rankings change often according to trends, app store changes or the competition. So it’s important to regularly monitor your keyword rankings and adapt your strategy accordingly.
App Description
Your app description will appear truncated on your app’s Product Page. If users tap on "more," they’ll be able to view it entirely. This is why it is very important to maximize your efforts on the first lines of your copy.
Make sure that it depicts what your app offers and its main features in just a few lines (2 - 3). Place a strong CTA there. Your app description should be customer-oriented, as it is a powerful conversion tool.
Users don't usually read app descriptions all the way; they’d rather quickly scan so make it as easy to read as possible. Using bullet points (or dashes) to list your unique features and benefits is a great trick to use.
Do everything you can to convince users to download your app. Don’t forget to include your contact details at the end.
Regarding the algorithms, Apple does not officially index keywords from app descriptions but it seems that they might have a small impact. However, iTunes app’s pages are indexed by web search engines, so make your Apple description SEO friendly.
On Google, app descriptions are very important in terms of ASO and therefore should be optimized accordingly. As mentioned above, try targeting about 10 keywords and repeat them about 5 times each, combined with various other keywords.
Don’t forget to update your description with any new features, changes or keywords.
Continue reading %Your Guide to App Store Optimization (ASO)%