Understanding App Store Keywords is the key to understanding and mastering App Store Optimization or ASO, which is the process of maximizing the visibility of your app in the App Store and getting more downloads and installs than your competitors.
ASO needs five vital components to succeed.
Understand Your Target Market
Just like with any marketing strategy for a business, knowing your target market is a very crucial part of planning your strategy.
Identify which user group would want to use your app and create your marketing plan based on what will appeal most to that group of consumers.
Create a profile of your target audience by taking into consideration the socioeconomic level, gender, education, culture, area of residence, age, etc. as these will play a role in your audience’s decision on whether to install your app or not.
Be aware of how users will actually use your app and what their reasons are for using the app. Know your users’ interests, as some are straightforward while others may not be what you think they are. These different interests ultimately explain why your users would look for and install your app.
When you already have identified your market and their profile and interests, you’ll be able to sense what their preferences are and can build a strategy based on those users.
Check whether your app description, app icon, name, screenshots, keywords and preview videos for apps (also known as your app metadata) were designed to answer the needs and preference of your target users.
Keep in mind that a successful ASO strategy begins with the right app store keywords.
Optimize Your App Store Keywords and Creatives
Make sure that you are searchable and easily discoverable by using keyword optimization to get a higher ranking in the search results of app stores.
It is good to note that creatives and keywords work well with each other. Familiarize yourself with the key terms that is commonly used for your own app because creatives that show in the results page will catch the attention of your target audience and increase your conversion rates and/or the rate of the tap through.
If your rate for tap through or your rate of conversion is high for a keyword search, your ranking for that specific keyword is also high, which means you have higher discoverability.
Make sure that you are testing your creatives because part of a winning strategy in ASO is optimizing CVR or conversion rates and discoverability.
Keep abreast of the latest news for app store keywords, mobile app development and how app developers are rising and grinding!
Reinforcing Positive Hypothesis Testing
A hypothesis is an exact statement that you can prove or disprove. Use hypotheses to start your marketing strategy investigation.
To create a powerful app store keywords ASO strategy, make sure that you build it on “what messaging and creatives should I combine so that users would download my app” hypotheses.
Start by thinking broadly and doing research. Find existing data and use those to refine your ideas, which can impact your users then create your ideas’ categories and test those.
Use these test points:
- Check out which ads succeeded for competitors and why those ads might for you
- Check out your own successful ads and figure out the reasons why these worked and others failed
- Create an inspiring sentiment and how you can convey your app’s functionality in just 3 to 6 seconds
- Find ways to address the lack of social proof or credibility
- Know which app feature is most used by your audience
- Learn from your app’s users’ feedback and reviews. What factor in your app attracts your market and what pushes them away? Improve on the things they like and fix the things they don’t like.
- Use the Tool Box (ASO) to audit your competitors by screening the creatives they used in the app stores. Be inspired by those to create new ideas and concepts
Develop A Strong Overall Message With Matching Creatives
Optimizing your creatives will improve your CVR. Your creatives (Icon, screen shots, preview videos of the app) in the app store have the most impact, but it has to be done right. Consider these things:
Crowdsource: Ask other people how your messaging and creatives come across to them so you can gain an insight of how it will appeal to your audience.
Small mobile screens: The information should be appropriate to the size of the space. Too few or too much would have a negative impact.
Visitors’ attention span: Most visitors have limited attention span. They won’t be looking at all the screenshots or watching the full video before deciding.
In fact, your average visitor in the app store will have already made a decision whether to drop or download in just 3 to 6 seconds after being on the page and 60% of those visitors decide without even checking the page.
This means that you get your best shot of appealing to that audience in just that first one frame. Make sure that your messaging and creatives gets the point across with that first impression.
Build a Data-Centric Conversion Cycle
Translating data into guiding insights is a very important component of your ASO strategy. An analysis stage to be healthy would have these steps:
- Explore engagement in the app store by assessing the performance of your page asset. This is to identify strengths as well as weaknesses and understand what are those things your users respond to
- Check for winning variations that can be pushed to the app live store
- Quantify the CVR lift located in the app live store
Make new hypotheses with your conclusions from your analyses (post-test). The ASO Life Circle shows that each stage passes information to the next stage. This is why an ASO strategy should have a strong foundation.
Keep in mind that your users, market and competitors will continue to change and evolve, so create a strategy that you can make into a cycle to keep up with them.
Data showed that before the release of an app, leading apps are testing their app creative assets not less than 2 to 4 times, and they update their app store creatives at least 1 to 2 times every month.
For your app store keywords and ASO strategy to succeed, you have to develop a clear, strong, long-term plan that continuously monitors and optimizes your app’s performance at the App Store.
