How to Increase Your App Store Ranking
My app ranks in the top 10 for a handful of relevant, high volume keywords. After a lot of trial and error, I have learned some vital tips to boost app ranking in the App Store.
App Store Optimization (ASO) is basically the new SEO and, like SEO, it can be hard. App Store Optimization can apply to the App Store or the Google Play store and, for this post, we’ll be talking about the App Store (iPhone).
Appearing in the top ranks can spell the difference between the winners and the losers of any particular category. Obviously the right search terms and keywords are crucial for appearing in the top ranks, but there’s some skill to how you utilize those terms.
Know Your Search Terms
Knowing the most important search terms for your app is critical. You want to find terms with the highest search volume and try to rank for those. Some people will say to focus on the long tail, but for my app, ranking for the main keywords drove more downloads. (Perhaps because my app is already in a semi-niche space.)
The search term I most focus on is meme maker. Beyond that, I focus on video meme maker and a couple other variations of meme maker (creator, generator).
Lesson #1: Know what keywords are important to you, and which ones you want to rank for.
Title, Subtitle, Keywords
There are already tons of posts online about optimizing these areas, but I’ll provide some info that helped me.
Title
This is the first thing your users see. My app title is Meta Meme: Video/Image Maker.
Not putting keywords into my title was one of my earliest mistakes. My app is called Meta Meme, so I simply put ‘Meta Meme’ in the title. Big mistake. My ranking was abysmal. After researching some other apps, I realized that everyone includes keywords in their title. Make sure you do this, it makes a big difference.
Lesson #2: Make sure your app title has relevant keywords and not just your app name.
Subtitle
The subtitle is similar to the title: the keywords are critical, and they affect ranking. The subtitle is the second thing the user sees when it comes to your app so make sure it conveys important information and is well written.
The most important usage of the subtitle is to be able to add some more ranking keywords. Think of this as second tier keywords. Make sure you choose these wisely, and do not duplicate the same keywords in your title.
Lesson #3: Use the subtitle to rank for additional keywords, ensuring not to use duplicate keywords.
Keywords Field
Apple provides a field called ‘keywords’ on your app configuration page. This is the third and final place where you have a chance to add more important keywords relevant to your app. These keywords are not seen by any users, and is instead a comma separated list of terms relevant to your app.
There’s a lot of information out there about how to best use this field, but I found a lot of the data to be either old, inconsistent, or not working. I’ll share what I learned and what worked for me.
In my opinion, do not stuff this field or add phrases to it.
As you can see from the graph above, my ranking dipped considerably in the last couple of months. This was (I suspect) due to two things: changing my app title to ‘Meta Meme Maker & Creator’, and putting ‘meme maker’ as the first keyword/phrase in my keywords list.
Changing my title to ‘Meta Meme Maker & Creator’ definitely dropped my ranking, but I can only venture a guess as to why. I was trying to rank higher for meme maker, so I thought having this in my title would help. But I think the title looks jumbled, and probably had a confusing effect for people browsing in the App Store. My guess is that Apple penalized this title, perhaps through an editorial review.
Secondly, for the keyword ‘meme maker’. There’s a lot of prevailing wisdom that says not to use spaces in the keyword list. I now believe that to be true. Using a keyword with spaces hurt my rankings. I was trying to get an exact match for ‘meme maker’, but it had the opposite effect.
The keyword list should be comma separated words, single words without spaces. I also read that you should use the plural form of the words. So instead of saying meme, put memes. ‘Comics’ instead of ‘comic’. You get the idea. And again, try not to repeat keywords in the list that you already have in your subtitle or title. Some repetition may occur which is fine, but don’t stuff it.
Finally, you can use keywords to rank for other apps. You could put ‘instagram’ in your keywords list, and potentially rank when users search instagram. This is a lot tougher, and works better for low volume searches. I have ‘9gag’ in my keywords, and have started ranking for certain 9gag search terms. They are mostly low volume, but it does offer additional ranking strategy.
Lesson #4: Use keywords properly. Don’t use spaces, try not to repeat keywords already used in the title, but make sure to add synonyms of other keywords (i.e. maker — creator, editor, generator).
Tools and Experts
There are many ASO tools and experts out there just waiting for your cold hard cash. Let’s start with the experts.
Sometime back I paid someone to check out my app, and provide a good App Store description and a set of keywords. This is the list of keywords I paid for: creator,maker,generator,create,generate,gif,hilarious,funny,funnymeme,picture,editor,pic,best,top
Some of those keywords are actually pretty good, and I still use them, others I do not use anymore. But here’s the thing. The expert NEVER provided titles or subtitles to try, and never even suggested that as a way to improve ranking.
Later, I talked to a firm who could ‘guarantee’ #1 placement, and I would not have to pay until I hit the #1 spot for my keyword. After digging in with these folks, I found two things. One, they will simply do a lot of iteration on your title/subtitle/keywords, stuff you could do for free. Two, when they say #1, they don’t necessarily mean the U.S. market. They probably mean a smaller country, and a small category within that country.
Lesson #5: Experts might provide some decent advice, but you could probably figure the same stuff out through trial and error. It’s good to talk to someone, but don’t expect a miracle.
Tools
There are some solid ASO tools out there but I mainly use the free version of AppAnnie (I have no affiliation with them.) I also used AppTweak (also no affiliation) in the past.
There’s a lot of interesting information these services can capture, but I didn’t need it all. For a while AppAnnie wouldn’t even respond to my requests for a professional account. Eventually someone did get back to me and tell me the license is for one year and has a ‘corporate’ rate or something. I read that as ‘expensive’.
AppTweak provides many tools, the most helpful tool for me was to compare my app against other apps in the same category. I was able to see what keywords my competitors were using, and compare mine against theirs. I paid for one month of AppTweak ($60) and learned what I needed. I may renew the AppTweak subscription when I want to dive deeper on keywords again and further explore the tools.
Lesson #6: ASO tools are quite helpful, but you can probably get by just using the free stuff that’s out there.
Turn Around Time
This is one I experimented with a lot. How long does it take for my changes to take affect and update my ranking? The answer: about a day. That’s really important to always keep in mind. Once you alter your title or keywords, you should see an effect within a day or two. Don’t wait a week or two, hoping that the tide will turn. If you alter your keywords and your ranks drop significantly, change them back.
Sometimes ranks will fluctuate a bit, but I’ve found that the change in rank happens very quickly after I alter my keywords. In this way I guess Apple is merciful, as it enables much quicker ability to test keywords.
Lesson #7: Ranking should change very quickly after altering your keywords.
Keep Track Yourself
One minor but very important point. Keep track of changes you make to the title, subtitle and keywords on your own. Apple does not provide a way to view keywords you’ve used historically. Once you start focusing on ASO, you will want to keep close track of this information. Maintain a spreadsheet of the date your new title, subtitle and keywords went into effect.
Lesson #8: Keep track of all the changes you make in a spreadsheet or text file.
Other Influences on Rank
Beyond keywords, there are a few other things that influence your rank.
Age of the App
You built the latest and greatest app with the best features that your users want. You’re better than the competition in every way. But somehow some app that hasn’t been updated in 1 year, and only has 70 reviews, is still ranking above you. How!? Why?!
Yeah much hair will be pulled out over this one. This is Apple just trying to keep the ‘tried and true’ incumbents in place, and throttle new, ‘experimental’ stuff. You need to stay the course to overtake these long lived incumbents.
Downloads and Purchases
The rate of users downloading your app and making purchases in your app will affect your ranking. I believe that both cumulative downloads, and incoming traffic for the day will affect your rank. I’ve noticed that when I double or triple my ad spend for a day, it will increase my rank substantially. Then when I get back to normal ad budget, my rank drops again. I can only assume this is because I am driving way more traffic to the app, resulting in more downloads and purchases.
Ratings and Reviews
This is a tricky one, as I have not had a consistent experience with this. I’ve seen some brand new apps with no reviews rank really high, and then I’ve seen some older apps with thousands of reviews also rank high. My own app has 536 reviews (as of this writing) and is ranked 10 for ‘meme maker’.
I think the important thing here is to focus on executing keywords flawlessly. I don’t believe Apple will heavily penalize apps for not having ratings or reviews, but other things will come into play like incumbent apps or apps with high download rates.
Meta Meme’s Progress
Here is Meta Meme’s progress over the last couple of months:
v2.86
I thought I was being clever by making my app name ‘MetaMeme’ to free up characters, and stuff the entire ‘Meme Maker’ phrase in my title. This didn’t help, and I ended up having dupes in my title which wasn’t helpful.
v2.87
I went back to a normal title, but changed the subtitle and keywords. Whoa this made things worse.
v2.89
Altered some more keywords and dropped even more in rank. Noooo.
v2.93
The WORST combination of all. I thought having ‘Meme Maker’ in the title, and as the first keyword would boost me straight to the top! Nope, this dropped me lower than I could have expected. I dropped to 38, and eventually made my way to 43. Much sadness.
v2.96
I decided to clean up my act. Make a legible, proper title that made sense to users, but still had strong keywords. Use a good subtitle that presented additional valuable keywords. And finally, clean up that keywords list! Get dupes out, get phrases out, and use relevant single words separated by commas.
Conclusion
Meta Meme has had many ups and downs in App Store rankings, and low rankings really will hurt your download rates. Make sure to invest properly in ASO and setting up the right keywords.
If you have any questions or tips about ASO you’d like to share, please drop them in the comments or hit me up on Twitter.
And if you are interested in making memes, please check out my app, Meta Meme, in the App Store.
