Talking about facts there are more than 1.5 million applications on the Apple App Store that have been downloaded over 100 billion times. Getting your business app discovered by your customers in this crowded space is an immense job. But once you put the efforts in the right direction then it will pay off big returns for your app. Before we dive further into the techniques used to make your app move its way past the others in competition, it is important to understand what is ASO- App Search Optimization.
What is App Store Optimization?
App Store Optimization is a technique app makers use to improve the visibility of a mobile app in an app store. It’s a similar technique for improving the visibility of mobile apps as is the SEO technique for improving the visibility of websites.
The basics of ASO encompass doing good keyword research, improving your app description, utilizing high quality screenshots, doing competitive research, and ensuring you have many, high quality reviews.
Factors Involved In ASO
There are many tools that you can use for your app to get some actionable feedback on how you can improve your app’s visibility in the app store and keep up with the latest changes in the play store or App store that can affect your rankings. One of the popular tools that we recommend using is Mobile App Grader for App Store Optimization. Moving further with our tips on ASO:
App Title
The most important thing about the title is that it should have a clear title that describes what it does and the brand it represents so that users can read and understand very quickly. Titles within the app store have a greater emphasis when users are discovering new apps. The average number of characters used by the popular apps in the App Store ends up being 23 which can still vary due to truncation of large width characters.
We would recommend that you refrain yourself from using special characters like “$”, “¡”, ”!”, ”&” or adding extraneous things to title like “by CompanyName” , “For Free” etc. if you don’t have to. Most of the times these things make your app look shady.
Keywords
Talking about Apple’s App Store, it specifies a character limit of 100 so that users can use for specifying keywords that app users might be searching for on the App Store. It is very obvious that you have to use this character limit very wisely and on a caution note we have mentioned “character limit” and not the “word limit” and so a space between the words is counted too. We recommend that you don’t use spaces with commas such as (“,” Vs. “ , “) since the former one uses 3 characters while the other one uses 5 characters. And even the users won’t see these characters so you need not worry about that. Another tip from us is that you avoid using long phrases since most users are less inclined to type characters to find an app. To research on what keywords are best suitable for you app, following is the list of tools that you can use:
- App Annie
- MobileDevHQ
- AppTweak
- Sensor Tower
- SearchMan
- Mobile Action
- Appcodes
- Gummicube
- App Mind
Ratings
While most of the apps are ranked between 4 stars and above, ratings have little influence in the discoverability of an app since they’re quite easy to gain. Ratings have been known to influence rankings in the Google Play Store and decrease volatility in rankings later in both- Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
Description
Description should be divided into two parts: one section that should be short, single sentence that describes the gist about your app, while the second part could be a longer nd full description of the app’s capabilities.
Geography
Localizing your app makes your app discoverable in more parts of the world and increases the chances of being downloaded in one particular area. That means: you should use keywords that are locally and culturally influenced, screenshots that show the local people using your app, etc.
Video Previews
You should give your potential app users to discover your app’s usability by themselves. And to do this you should provide a video demo or description or tutorial on how your app works. This looks more professional and gives the chance to users to decide whether to download the app or not.
Downloads
Downloads do not matter too-much for rankings in the long run unless your app is trending on the app store with millions of downloads. We recommend utilizing update cycles to help push your app up in the App store rankings when you launch a new version of your app so that many existing and new users find it with ease and your app is featured in the New Release sections.
