5 Best (and the Most Effective) Tactics in App Store Optimization

Katerina Zolotareva is Marketing and Customer Success Manager at TheTool. She loves writing about App Marketing and Mobile Growth and helping app developers promote their apps!

In this article, we’ll discuss the most effective App Store Optimization tactics that help maximize visibility in the app stores, improve conversion rate and drive organic installs to your mobile app.

There are more than 5.3 million apps in Apple App Store and Google Play Store, combined. And in a few months from now, that number will seem small. With the market of mobile apps being extremely competitive, it becomes a real challenge for app developers and marketers to achieve visibility in the stores and get organic downloads.

App Store Optimization is the solution, and it has already become an essential strategy for mobile businesses. ASO is the process of optimizing app store product page (listing) to improve Search rankings, Top Charts rankings and Conversion Rate.

The Effectiveness of ASO Activities

The app marketing professionals from ASO Stack have created the ASO Activities Impact Chart to help developers and marketers prioritize their time and effort spent on the ASO activities.

The chart is designed to help you make sure that your ASO efforts are bringing results.

The logic is simple: start optimizing with the actions located in the top-right quadrant, then move to the second best case for more high-impact actions, or the third best case ー if you don’t possess enough resources to dedicate to your ASO strategy.

Work your way through the most important App Store Optimization actions and enjoy the results.

The most effective ASO instruments:

1. Optimize App Title / App Name

The capability of the App Title (Google Play) or App Name (App Store) to boost rankings is uncomparable to other listing elements, and it’s also easy to do.

Both app stores allow 50 characters in the app title. However, the iOS 11 limit for iOS apps will be only 30 characters, complemented with a Subtitle field of 30 characters that will also affect your ASO efforts.

The best practice is to keep your brand name short and easy to memorize, and put the core keywords of your app into the Title alongside brand name:

• Brand name — Keyword 1, Keyword 2, Keyword 3…

Here are two examples:

You can also take advantage of seasonal searches and include them as keywords:

2. Optimize other textual fields for search

Optimizing for search is the first step in any ASO strategy. Apart from App Name/Title, there are other elements that have a high impact on app store search rankings. For iOS apps, there is a Keywords field, and for Android apps ー Short and Full Description.

Optimizing for search requires thorough Keyword Research. To select keywords for an app, you need to take into account their traffic size (the volume of searches for this query) and competitiveness (how many apps are ranking for this keyword). The best practice is to select mid and long-tail keywords 一 keyword combinations with a good amount of search requests and less competition.

How to find optimal keywords

There are various keyword tools that you can use for ASO Search Optimization, for example, Google Keyword Planner Tool, SEMRush or The Tool’s app keywords tool. In TheTool, for instance, you can find keyword suggestions based on the store recommendations, and analyze your keywords regarding traffic and competition:

Where to place keywords

• App Store: Keywords field (100 characters). Space is limited, so write numbers in digits, don’t use spaces and don’t mention plural forms in case there is already a singular form.
• Google Play Store: Short (80ch) and Full (4.000ch) Description. Don’t include the same keywords you have already used in App Title. For the Full description, focus on the first and last lines of text. And remember that the descriptions on Google Play also help improve Conversion Rate, so keep it clear, organized and catchy.

3. Optimize the graphic assets of your app store listing

Icon, screenshots, and feature graphic have a great impact on Conversion Rate, a measure of what % of users end up downloading your app after visiting its product page.

It’s worth working with a designer to create a visual identity for your app. Keeping the graphic elements aligned with the app’s overall style is of the utmost importance.

Keep in mind, on the Apple App Store the screenshots have more impact, as they appear in search; and on Google Play Store the icon and feature graphic are more important because they’re visible on the store listing ー no scrolling involved.

This is how the app listing will look with optimized graphic assets on the Google Play Store and App Store:

4. Localize your app

Localizing an app is completely different from its blind translation ー you have to respect the cultural differences such as reading right to left, different calendars, and signs.

First of all, you need to make sure the app is available in as many countries as possible. You never know where your users will come from, so making an app available worldwide will give an instant boost to visibility and help drive organic installs.

If you don’t have the necessary resources for a complete localization into different languages, you can start by localizing your app store listing, with the app itself available in English. When you identify the geos of your main sources of installs, you can localize the app itself for these countries.

There are many companies dedicated to app localization, including tools that can help localize the graphic assets, for example, Appshots:

5. Encourage more positive reviews and ratings

A high rating holds power to convince users to download an app. On the other hand, negative average ratings can immediately discourage people from downloading.

Getting a lot of positive reviews and ratings can be quite challenging, especially for apps that are just starting out.

The secret is in finding the right point of time when to ask for a rating from a user and making sure that negative reviews don’t leak into your app store page.

A great moment to ask for a rating/review is after a user completes a certain task a few times, or after they complete a level in the game. But asking for a rating during the first use could lead to a negative review. The reason being, the user has not had an opportunity to explore the app’s value in its entirety.

To avoid negative reviews, create a special support page to handle problems or bugs. Use intelligent prompts, like this:

In summary

App Store Optimization is a complex process that leads to the maximum visibility of your app, improves conversion and drives more organic installs. Every app is different, so there could be different winning strategies ー but here are the most effective ways to skyrocket your ASO search rankings and improve conversion rate:

1. Optimize App Title
2. Perform Keyword Research
3. Optimize Graphic Assets and A/B test
4. Localize
5. Encourage Positive Reviews and Star Ratings