5 Legitimate Reasons Your Keyword Strategy Isn’t Working In App Store Optimization (ASO)
And the simple solutions to fix them systematically
App Store Optimization (ASO) is in many ways dependent on keywords or search optimization. It maximizes your app’s exposure to mobile users' in-app store search and is responsible for 30 percent of all installs in general. Having a good keyword strategy, as a result, is crucial for ASO success.
However, most strategies I’ve seen in-app store keyword optimization (KWO) tend to quickly head towards a dead-end, hindering the app’s ability to increase traffic and turn it into installs. More importantly, the problem usually isn’t having insufficient keywords. Most marketers do keyword research really well. Instead, the keyword selection process is where things tend to go wrong. Many mistakes are made in this stage that render an entire keyword strategy ineffective by creating the following flaws:
- Low search volume per keyword, which leads directly to poor traffic
- Low relevance to users, who most likely won’t install after seeing the app
- High degree of competition from other apps that rank for the same keywords
- Low effectiveness of keyword combinations, which makes the app rank for much fewer keywords than it could
- Low weight of keywords, based on how they are used in the metadata, which reduces their ranking as well as conversion potential
These are the most common weak spots of a keyword strategy. When left unattended, their damage could be enormous. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to fix or prevent them. Let’s take a deep dive into each topic and see how you can do it.
1. Low volume
The most important attribute of a keyword is its search volume. It stands for the estimated amount of people using a specific keyword in app store search to look for an app that may serve their needs. Ranking for high-volume keywords will get your app exposed to more people, increasing the traffic. This is why having any keyword with low volume is very bad for KWO.
Unlike SEO, where you can easily use Google Keyword Planner to quickly, easily, and accurately find, track and analyze keywords for Google search, ASO isn’t supported by any official tool (e.g. from Apple or Google). Your best bet is third-party tools like AppTweak and Mobile Action. They aren't flawless, but at least they offer relatively reliable data for sufficient keyword analyses. You can use them to properly keep track of the volume (or popularity) of each keyword you’re managing to figure out which ones are promising and which should be disposed of.
What’s often alarming, though, is the frequent disregards of such valuable keyword data by many marketers. Search volume tends to be examined only during the keyword research process, then it's left behind for a very long time, sometimes forever. For some, this is because there is no time to regularly check the volume data. For others, it's because search volume is often thought to be constant — it isn't.
In either case, KWO is done based on outdated data. When external factors like seasonality cause changes in search volume and, in turns, keyword performance, they'll go unnoticed. Eventually, marketers become uninformed and unresponsive to change, and their keyword strategies become ineffective.
Luckily, it often takes very little efforts to solve this problem. All you need to do throughout an entire KWO project is:
- Always refer to an ASO tool’s keyword data before making a move.
- Regularly update the data in your keyword management systems (e.g. Excel sheets) from such a tool.
- Make variations of a keyword strategy and tailor them to seasonal events to quickly adapt to changes
TL;DR — remember: If it has no volume, it isn’t a keyword — even if it looks like one.
2. Low relevance
In ASO as well as any other area of modern, digital marketing, one thing matters in customer acquisition even more than the traffic — the conversion. For an app, mobile users may come, see it and go (that’s why Google calls them “visitors”). Even when your app gets excessive traffic, the only thing it can promise is a lot of visitors, not installs. Those visitors need to be converted into installers to finish the job.
What does it have to do with keywords?
Imagine: Your app ranks at position #1 for a keyword with very high volume, making it exposed to thousands of users in the app store, but only ten of them install it, and nine delete it after a day. What does that leave you? One single customer among thousands. That's a dreadful conversion rate. But how come?
The reason is simple: Your app is irrelevant to the vast majority of users who see it via the keyword. When users use a keyword to search in the app store, they have a specific expectation in mind. If your app doesn't look like it fits their expectation, they won't believe your app has what they're looking for. If it has nothing they're looking for, it isn't relevant to them — and they won't install it. Keyword relevance, therefore, is a vital aspect of app store KWO.
The problem is: defining how relevant a keyword is to your app is a subjective kind of work. Things like “relevance score” aren't real — they're invented to quantify the subjectivity of the matter to keep KWO manageable. However, as ASO is meant to be data-driven, subjectivity won’t suffice.
In order to make it more objective, you need to look for additional, mostly quantitative data to back your definitions of relevant or irrelevant keywords. In most cases, having the following can help:
- Conversion rate (CVR) or Tap-through rate (TTR) on keyword-level on Apple Search Ads: It isn’t ASO because it’s ads and not organic, but it does show data on keyword level. By looking at how well a keyword on Search Ads converts users from visitors into prospects (with a tap or click), or installers (with a conversion), you can estimate how it would perform organically.
- Acquisition reports on keyword level in Google Play Console: The Console offers a Search-related acquisition report that reveals keywords that Google thinks have brought the most visitors to your app's store listing. What's more, you can see the number of installs and CVR attributed to these keywords as well. At least for Android, this is enough to decide how relevant some keywords are based on their actual performance.
- ASO tools' estimated installs per keyword: Tools like AppTweak show approximated numbers of installs that each keyword generates in total and how many go to your app. While this is not an absolute value to take for granted, it at least gives you a signal to evaluate how much you should count on which keywords.
TL;DR — remember: Traffic without conversion is like window-shopping customers — many check your app out but nobody downloads it.
3. High competition
Reaching many people and having a strong conversion power is just part of an effective keyword strategy. Sometimes, even when you do everything right, e.g. choosing the most relevant keywords with the highest volume possible, a keyword strategy may still fail because your competitors are also doing the same thing and their apps manage to rank higher.
How could this happen?
For starters, having keywords in the (indexed) metadata can only guarantee your app will rank for it. It doesn't promise how high the ranking position could be. Search ranking algorithms in the App and Play stores take many factors into account, including your app's acquisition and retention metrics, user ratings and reviews, and stability indicators such as crash rate, among others. Apps with different levels of such performance indicators who target the same keyword to rank for will come out at different ranking positions.
In KWO, it’s often a goal to rank in the top ten, five, three, or even at #1 for desirable keywords in-app store Search. However, it’s usually unreachable if those keywords are “dominated” by many apps with superior performance than yours. The competition is simply too high — if your app ranks for them, the ranking positions won’t be high. Your keyword strategy, for this reason, would be destined to only meet very humble goals.
Of course, in order to determine how competitive it is too competitive, you need data. The following types of analysis should be done to get such data:
- Competitive analysis in background research about the business of your app, not just ASO: These will show your which competitors are posing a threat to your app in general, what competitive advantages it has against them, and how does its market share compares to theirs, among other insights. They aren’t directly relevant to ASO, but they reflect the kind of competition your app faces as a product.
- KPIs tracking, measurement, and reporting: These will keep you informed about the marketing performance of your app, such as installs count, CVR, retention rate, growth trends, and so on. Because they are all indicators of your app’s quality and popularity, app store keyword ranking algorithms tend to use them as an input to determine its positions in the search results.
- Real-time search ranking positions: Many ASO tools let you preview how many and which apps are already ranking for which keywords. From here, you can easily find out all competitors who are “occupying” the top spots for the keywords you're aiming for. If, for instance, there's a keyword you really want your app to rank in top five for, and only two competitors are found in this group who are more competitive, then it's safe to say nothing will stop your app from reaching this goal.
TL;DR — remember: Not all keywords in your app's metadata “belong” to it — it needs to get past the competitors as well to secure ideal ranking positions.
4. Ineffective combinations
Like SEO for the Web, KWO for apps also depends on the combinations formed by the keywords you’re using. This means when selecting which individual keywords you want your app to carry in the metadata, you should also anticipate the phrases or even sentences they may involve or formulate. It contributes to your keyword strategy in two ways:
- It gets your app to rank higher for any phrase its metadata matches. For example, ranking positions for keyword “online music player” will be higher for apps with “online”, “music” and “player” compared to those with just “music” and “player”, and even more so compared to those with only “music”.
- It gets your app to rank for more keywords than it carries in the metadata. For example, if your app contains “cheap” and “tickets” in the metadata, it will likely rank for all “cheap XXX tickets” keywords, from bus and train to underground and plane.
This means having the best mix of individual keywords isn’t enough. You need to have the best combinations that those keywords form and are involved in as well. If what you do in KWO is go from top to bottom, select the best keywords you see without connecting them together, or with additional words, it won’t have an effective reach to the users. At the end of the day, why rank for a few hundred keywords when you could cover thousands?
However, tracking and managing keyword combinations isn’t a simple task. Most of the time, you’ll need to build an in-house solution to capture, group, and sort keywords linked to numerous high-value combinations. This will take time and effort — the resources you won’t always have. To find a more timely solution, your best bet is to use an ASO keyword tracking tool. More specifically, two types of feature exist to help you in this regard:
- App and Play store auto-suggestions simulator: Some tools offer a simple feature that shows auto-suggested or auto-completed keyword combinations based on your input as if they came directly from the App Store and Play Store. This could already hint countless keyword ideas for your app — all you need to do afterward is check the volume, relevance, etc., before deciding how to use them.
- Keyword combinations generator: There are tools out there that help you quickly generate all possible combinations of your input keywords. These include single and multiple-word phrases that don’t necessarily all make sense semantically. However, you can always filter them based on data like search volume to decide which ones to keep.
TL;DR — remember: KWO is about quantity as much as quality — it should make your app rank for as many keyword combinations as possible, and those combinations must also have high value, based on volume and relevance, among other factors.
5. Low weight
In the final stage of the keyword selection process, you’ll need to decide how to write each keyword in the metadata. Depending on the way it’s used in each exact asset, its impact and significance (or weight) in search ranking will differ. More specifically, you need to track three types of keyword weight:
- Location in the metadata: This refers to where, as in the particular metadata asset, a keyword should go to. For iOS, your app will most likely rank highest possible for keywords in its Title, then the Subtitle, then the Keywords Field. For Android, the same applies for the Title, Short Description and Long Description, in that exact order. This means if you send your most important keyword to the Keywords Field or the Long Description of your app, you’d limit its ranking potential.
- Keyword match type (iOS): In the Apple App Store, your app’s ranking for a phrase (long-tail keyword) improves if it contains an exact match of that phrase in the metadata. For example, it’d rank higher for “meal plans” if it contains “meal plans” instead of just “meal” and “ plans”. If you aim to make your app rank in the top ten for a very important phrase and you split its constituents across different metadata assets, you may never hit it.
- Keyword occurrences (Android): While exact matches aren’t a thing in the Play Store, its search ranking algorithm relies on a different factor to weigh keywords: Occurences (AKA density). On top of where to write a keyword in the metadata, you should also consider how many times you should do it. Repeating the same keyword three to five times usually signals a strong connection between that keyword and your app — its ranking positions will soon start improving. One mistake, however, that many marketers make is repeating keywords too heavily. This can make the metadata look clunky, unnatural and messy because it’s littered with keywords and often meaningless. This is called “keyword-stuffing”— a forbidden move that Google condemns and should be avoided.
As you can see, the multitude of factors affecting keyword weight makes it easy to make mistakes in many forms. The best way to avoid them is:
- Sort all keywords by order of priority: If you sort all of your keywords in order of priority, you can easily decide which one goes where, e.g. the top three get to land in the Title, the next three to the Subtitle, and so on. This way, it's very hard to make mistakes related to keyword locations in the metadata.
- Bookmark important exact-match combinations (iOS): If important phrases or keyword combinations are properly marked and tracked, you won't forget about them when changes in KWO need to be made, e.g. when keywords are moved across metadata assets.
- Count number of appearances of each keyword (Android): The only way to see if a keyword is not repeated insufficiently or excessively is to count how many times it appears in your metadata. You don't have to do this manually — ASO tools offer ways to automate it.
TL;DR — remember: Deciding what keywords to use isn't enough, you need to decide how to use them in your app's metadata as well.
Keyword optimization in ASO is still an emerging topic. It isn't emerging because it's new — it's over a decade old already — but because the involved work is still complicated, under-informed, and vulnerable to many mistakes. These mistakes can't be thoroughly fixed and prevented with keyword hacks. They're short-term, tactical solutions to deal with immediate problems, which could always return in the long run. Instead, you need to solve them by establishing concrete, systematic processes, and routines.
Above were the top five most damaging flaws that app store KWO could have, as well as the simple solutions that you can systematically integrate into your strategy. Handling them should be enough for an effective keyword strategy — but the only way to know for sure is to see them in action. Have fun testing, measuring and optimizing your keywords.
