Thank you everyone for your responses to yesterday’s blog post on increasing traffic to your Android app. In response to your questions today we are going to take a closer look at ASO and how you can help choose the right keywords to help your app become an Android app success in a crowded app market.
App Store Optimization is a term that many of you are now aware of and want to do right. The way in which app stores allow your app to be searched for changes from time to time, but if you get the basics right you will most certainly be enhancing your app’s likelihood to be found in an organic search in a crowded app market.
Choosing the right keyword for your app is not an easy task, afterall you want to ensure you’re your app name and description sound good and not robotic. What you must also realise is that the implementation of keywords does not push your app up the search list immediately, it takes time for the system to capture the data, in some instances it could be at least one month before the search engines will update to include your app.
So how do you decide which keywords will work for your app?
1. Try your own search – What I want you to do is to go to your app store and to type in a number of words that you would relate to your app. Have a look at what apps appear with the words that you have inputted.
Take a note of the number of times the words appear in the app, in the name, in the description, behind the images. Another thing to note is the amount of downloads the app has had in relation to the number of uninstalls, this is something that will also affect your app positioning.
2. Research the app store – This method involves going to the app store and to the category which you are looking in include your app. Take a quick glance at the apps that appear in on the front page of these categories. These apps have managed the most difficult task of all, to make it to the front page without anyone having to search for them.
What you should do now is to look at each of these apps individually and see which keywords are highlighted the most, what word or phrase do you see reappearing in the app names, the descriptions. Check the number of downloads each app has and also how many apps each developer has. We have found that leading apps tend to belong to app makers that have a minimum of seven apps in their app business.
3. Use online keyword tools – You no longer need to guess at which word people are searching for, you can use online tools that will help you see what words are popular when searching for an app, not only will you be able to see popular words, but also how competitive the words are, for example; a word that is searched for 10,000 times and has 10,000 apps using it is highly competitive, a word that is searched for just 5,000 times but only has 100 apps using it is far more likely to help you get to the top of the search lists because competition is lower. Two top websites for ASO include: Appcodes.com and AppAnnie.com
Understand your audience
When you choose your keywords you must also take into consideration your particular audience. Language differs depending upon age, gender, locality, social status of your audience members and it is this that should be your final point of consideration when choosing the top keywords for your app. We look forward to hearing your stories about how you got your Android app success