App Store Optimization in The Nutshell



This is the only guide you need to read to increase the amount of organic downloads on App Store and Google Play.To get more news about App Promotion, you can visit aso700.com official website.
App Store Optimization (ASO) is the same as SEO but for app stores (Google Play and App Store). It’s important to do it right because it can get your app a lot of organic downloads. I remember that in the past I have published apps without it and get around 1–3 downloads a day organically at the beginning but when I nailed ASO I got 10–20 downloads a day. And at least for me it was a lot of downloads at the beginning.
Anyone familiar with SEO knows that these things change constantly and what worked yesterday might not work today. That is why I try to focus finding what kind of things probably affect and how to then do own research to find the best tricks. It’s full day job but at the beginning it’s fine to spend 5–10 hours doing it right and then leave it like that for a while until you have more resources to focus it again.
The idea is to find right keywords to get your listing front of the potential users. Let’s say you are building a social news app where people can talk about news.
First you need to make a list of possible keywords. Try to come up longer and shorter combinations. Don’t list just obvious like “news” because those are probably reserved but list them too because they might be those gold nuggets that are under appreciated by everyone. Example below (but make your much bigger):
Second you need to find how competitive these are and how many really searches them. For this we need some tools. Most of the tools cost something like $50-$80 a month and if you are cheap person like me, it’s too much.
Almost all of the tools offer some kind of free version that allows you to do basic things. Keyword tracking is never included but in thetool.io it’s offering to track 10 keywords at the time. That’s perfect in this step because you can check 10 keywords, delete them, and check 10 more keywords. I think there was some limit how many times you can do this a day but you can always create multiple accounts.
Create an account to thetool.io and choose any app (if yours is already there pick that) from the App Store or Google Play depending which you want to first do. I don’t think the app matters to the results we are interested but I often pick some competitor’s app just in case it matters something. Scroll down and press that “plus” button to add the keywords. And remember again that you can do 10 at a time.
You get something like this. It takes some time to collect the information so be patient. Now take some spreadsheet software like Google Sheet (again free :D) and write all the keywords to the first column, then the second take diff, and then the third take traffic. Put also some mark that is it App Store of Google Play because the numbers are often different. I recommend to list the other store values after the first.
After getting all this data it’s time to analyze it. The idea is to find keywords with high traffic and low diff. You can create another column where you create some kind of function that tries to calculate one number that could be easily comparable but it’s also fine to just look them manually.
If you don’t believe to get hundreds of downloads with some PR campaign or by getting friends to download at the beginning, I recommend to try find something where difficulty is less than 50. You can experiment how the numbers change by searching something really stupid and something no one probably searches and something really difficult (like news in example above). This way you get some sense of how big or small numbers to expect.