Keywords in in-app — Just do it!
App Store Optimization (ASO) is not a miracle, it takes time, effort and beyond simply translation. Trust me, I have been preaching this for so many years. It seems like a never ending journey, a bit like Frodo, walking through Middle Earth, but me with a poster that says: “ASO is not translation…please, believe me, here are some coins”.
But sometimes a bit of translation can help. And that is how this whole hack started to take form. I went to App Promotion Summit 2017 and The Tool presented a keynote where they spoke about using keywords in in-app title and description in iOS, and showed a case study. It made total sense to me, but it did stay in the back of my head, with all of the other things that were going on at that point.
#1 TEST
We had been doing some interesting effort in iOS ASO and we were gaining some grounds when it came to keywords but still nothing that would tilt the balance. Sometime in the beginning of March this year, I talked to the product PM and we decided to try. Just let’s see what would happen, only US focused and only 2 of the filters we had. We used the keywords ‘filter’ and ‘filters’.
Surprise, surprise, it worked! We won 18 spots in one day, and a bit more in the second day, this was maintained for at least a couple more weeks, for the US.
We decided to go on and start testing for a different country, so we tried Brazil. We won some positions, but nothing as big as the US, but we did manage to rank for the first time ever for the keyword ‘filters’.
#2 TEST
So we decided to really go for it, so we added ‘filter’ and ‘filters’ to all of the in-app filters and the results was just as interesting, we jumped from 40 to 25, 15 positions gain.
It’s important to point out that we were not running anything different in the US, other than these tests at these specific timeframes, nor did we have any different spikes in search.
We also did the test for Australia, GB, Canada, and the spikes were similar in this second test. US was the biggest one though.
CONCLUSION AND NEXT STEPS
The main conclusion from this test was: go for it, test your keywords in in-app if you have in-app purchases, it works!
We did try to do it using translation only, for other countries, it did not work. We are reviewing for exact search to see if we can find a better result in countries where we do have managers dealing with ASO.
