Having a mobile app can be one of the best way to reach your mobile audience.
If creating and developing an app isn't hard enough for you, marketing is another story. Google Play Store and Apple's App Store are two of the most well-known mobile app market. With so many in the competition (millions), do you really get what you deserve? Are you getting enough downloads?
Creating an app and the process of uploading it and optimizing it for users are all important tasks.
Similar to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites, without some good strategies, you won't be able to rank high organically in app stores. Just like SEO, App Store Optimization (ASO) is the process of improving visibility, but only for apps on app stores.
Before learning how to improve the visibility of your mobile app, you must first understand how apps in app stores are ranked.
Apps Store Ranking
App stores are similar to search engines. Using algorithms, apps stores use certain ranking factors to rank the many mobile apps they have. The most notable criteria include the following:
- Number of downloads: Represents the popularity of your app. The more the better.
- Rating and review: A factor to determine quality and importance. More positive reviews influence app stores to give higher preference.
- Installs: How long your app is kept installed by users. The longer the better.
- Uninstalls: The ratio of people uninstalling your app after being installed. The more people are uninstalling your app, the worse your ranking will be.
- Social influence: App stores include signals from social media to determine how popular your app is.
Optimizing Apps For Better Visibility
You need to take care of the following in order to optimize your app in app stores.
- Title: Your app needs a name. The name you give to your app can either be good or bad to your marketing effort. So make it appealing. It's also suggested that keywords in the app title can give more impact on rankings.
- Keywords: Just like optimization for websites, your app should also target specific keywords to maximize organic downloads. Finding the appropriate keywords usually involves targeting long-tail keywords, similar to SEO for websites.
- Description: Your app needs to have a description. Target keywords using your app's description, and make it short but strong.
- Screenshots: Screenshots of the app and its design are the glimpse of things that users can expect when installing your app. Use high-quality images and provide few screenshots to make your app more appealing. You can also use video to showcase your app. And because visuals are your assets, your logo (icon) should also be professionally made and appealing.
- Targeted: Different app appeals to a different type of people. For better marketing, targeted mobile apps tend to perform better than generalized app.
- Socialize: Having better social connection and presence will make your app more visible to more people. Including on search engines, app stores and potential users.
- Responsiveness: Because there are a lot of different devices with wide range of screen sizes, if your app could be used on any kinds of devices like mobile, tablet etc., the more compatible it will be.
- Inbound links: Like SEO for websites, more links that point to your app page will improve its ranking.
- Size: The larger your app, the less number of devices that can use it properly. High-end devices shouldn't be an issue, but since low-end devices are still popular, the heavier your app the higher the chance people will uninstall it.
- Localization: Translating your app into different languages can greatly increase downloads and expose an app to a larger pool of audience.
- Ask and respond to feedback: Ask users to leave a feedback and promote your app to get a 5-star rating on app stores. You may want to create a call-to-action button in your app to ease the process. Any feedback should be considered to improve your app. Responding to reviews is also an advantage.
Conclusion
App Store Optimization (ASO) is the process of improving the visibility of your mobile on app stores, be it on Apple's App Store for iOS, Google Play for Android, Windows Store for Windows Phone or BlackBerry World for BlackBerry.
It works similarly to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is for websites, but for apps. It includes the process of optimization in order to tank higher on chart ranking or search results. But unlike SEO, ASO is younger and evolving. While some methods for optimizations are known, but the exact ranking algorithms can differ from one app store to another.
ASO is important to marketers because a higher ranking will certainly drive more download for your app.