The (live) App Store challenge part 4
Building an app in one week and blogging about it in real time: ASO and Preparing for Launch.
This is the fifth iteration of my App Store challenge. If you would like to know what all the fuzz is about, I suggest reading this article first.
I finished my app a few days ago, so in this post I’ll go through App Store Optimization and the other steps I took to prepare myself and the app for launch. As always, I’ll also talk about where this app (and project) is headed next.
Introduction
In the last post I had just submitted my app to Apple, but used placeholder content for all the necessary iTunes Connect information.
So first and foremost I had to get all of this right. That includes title, description, keywords, app icon, screenshots, and so on. In other words, what you optimize to rank higher in the search results (ASO).
But before I could do all that, I needed some inspiration. And the best way to get that is to look at what your competitors are doing.
Competition research
Competition research is something I usually do before I even start designing the application. However, because of the time limit of this project I put that off until I had finished the first version.
I take competition research very seriously. I believe it’s a key element to succeeding in the app store. It’s important to know what you’re up against, what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, what people are saying about them, and so on.
The first thing I do is find my category on the App Store. I go through each app until the 50th position in both the free and paid sections. If I find an app that is somehow related to what I’m doing (not necessarily a direct competitor, but something similar), I write it down in a spreadsheet. I take note of information such as name, what position it is in, the price, number of reviews, average rating, if it has been featured somewhere (using AppAnnie or Sensor Tower), estimated value (Sensor Tower), and a short description of what that specific app does.
I also downloaded each of the free apps, just to get a feel what it was about. If I found an amazing feature or just something I thought they did well, I wrote that down. Similarly, I also wrote down what I felt they did wrong.
I proceeded to read the first 30 reviews for all the apps, and wrote down keywords as I encountered them, what people praised or disliked the app for, and other cool features as they were mentioned.
I did the same for the descriptions, but I also took notes as to what they talked about, what features they highlighted, the setup (what came first etc.), length, and much more.
Finally I looked at all the screenshots and wrote down in what order they placed what features, how they were designed, and so on.
Ultimately I ended up with multiple documents: One with keywords, one with cool new features, one with things other apps did right, one with things other apps did wrong, one with suggestions for the description, and one for suggestions for the screenshots, in addition to the one with all the competitors.
These will come in handy, not only when doing the ASO, but also when planning the future of this app.
ASO
Using the competitors and their reviews, I already had a spreadsheet of about 80 keywords. But I like to start off any app with at least 100, so I thought of some myself.
I proceeded to do the necessary research for these, which is finding out their traffic, difficulty, number of other apps ranking for that word, and the top ranking app. This can easily be done through a ASO tool, such as Sensor Tower.
Arguably, the keywords you put in the title are the most important. So I wrote down on a piece of paper the most relevant ones, which happened to be the hardest ones as well. These does not necessarily need to be the hardest keywords you have on your spreadsheet, but rather the ones you cannot exclude regardless of difficulty because they are so relevant to your app.
Using these I wrote a description explaining what the app does. This is important both because Apple will reject an app with a random title, but also so the user can get an idea of what your app does without reading the description. This is what I ended up with:
Newsloop — top news from your favorite sources in one place
I realize that a lot of the news sources I support, like ABC, BBC, Fox, etc. are high traffic keywords. So I might add some of them to the title in a later update. But I’ll see how this does first.
When I had finalized my title, I started picking out keywords. It’s a long process to get right, because you have to make the most out of the 100 character space you have been provided by Apple. You can’t pick keywords with too high difficulty or where the top ranking app is something like Google, but at the same time they have to have high traffic and be highly relevant (and usable in multiple contexts, as users mostly search for sentences and not a single keyword).
For the description, I used my notes to write down a few suggestions. I sent them to friends, who picked out what parts of each they liked the most and also gave advice on how to improve them. Using this I put together one final description, picking the best parts of all my suggestions.
As for the screenshots, I figured out what features of my app to highlight and in what order to put them. Because I don’t have my app icon yet, I don’t know what design scheme to follow for the screenshots, so I just took some from the app without editing them at all.
I still have the old app icon because I haven’t received all of the professional ones from Fiverr yet, but I will swap it to the one I like the most in the next version.
Planning ahead
I already have a list of features from before, and now I have one with features I (and other people) liked from my competitors. I combined this into one list, where I sorted it by what version I will implement it in. I feel this is very useful later on, because you know exactly what to implement and when to implement it.
I also have the list of things the other apps did right. It’s not a list of features, but rather stuff like not requiring users to log in, smooth scrolling etc. I constantly check this list to make sure also my app fulfills all these requirements.
I think this is very important, because it’s something people notice. And because I want my app to be the best among the competition, I need to at least do everything they do.
Lastly I have the list of what other apps are does wrong. This could be things like cluttered interface, slow loading, etc. I also constantly check this list to make sure I never do any of it, because again, I need my app to be better than the competition.
Next steps
I have already started development of version 1.0.1. This version contains small improvements over the current version, mainly things I didn’t have time to implement but that are important. This includes the ability to filter sources by language, increasing the cell height (to de-clutter the interface), prompting people to review after certain number of uses, and some way to make the user aware of what’s new at a glance.
The entire point of the app is to let the user quickly glance over the app to see what’s new and what’s interesting. Right now this is too hard, because there’s no way to see what headlines are new except remembering what you already read. I would like to fix this by highlighting new headlines somehow, and I have a few ideas in mind.
Other than that I would like to improve the app in every way possible, making it the best it can be. This is as opposed to just implementing a bunch of new features, because quality is always more important than quantity.
I also planned that version 1.0.1 would fix any bugs that became apparent from using the app. But because it’ll be done already before version 1.0.0 is released, this is impossible. So I have a big decision to make, namely if I should launch 1.0.1 as soon as possible, or wait a week after 1.0.0 is out to fix any bugs users report.
There are major pros to both, so I’ll have to think about it. But I’ll keep you updated in a new post soon enough.
In that post I’ll also go through each detail of 1.0.1, the final icon, the new screenshots, and other things like that.
