The app market continues to grow at an explosive rate, making discovery more challenging for app marketers.
Currently there are more than 1.6 million apps in Google Play and another 1.5 million apps in Apple’s App Store. Roughly half of all apps are found through search within the app stores, according to some studies. The competition is immensely high, and app marketers need to be savvy in App Store SEO.
App Store SEO, commonly referred to as App Store Optimization (ASO) isn’t as complex as web SEO. Keyword selection plays the most significant role: according to Moz, keyword optimization can increase your app downloads by a whopping 300 percent.
ASO, and keyword selection, can have a huge impact on your app’s performance within the app stores. It's critical to find and use the right set of keywords.
Here are some tips to find the right keywords for your app.
Where can you find the right keywords for your mobile app?
Honestly, there are lots of options, much as in traditional keyword research. The best place to start is the Google Keyword Planner Tool.
Besides, there are other similar kind of suggestion tools that can help you find a few good keyword candidates. These tools will provide you some good keyword ideas to begin with, although you need to narrow it down based on the App Store specific data.
Another good option is to look for other ‘downloaded’ keywords, meaning look for the keywords other apps in your particular niche are using. In simple words, you need to do some serious keyword spying. Most ASO tools provide reports for your competitor's keywords. Use this insight to get an idea about the kind of keyword or search terms people are using but stay away from hacking as it will only harm your App Store Optimization process. If used properly, keyword spying will help you get targeted ideas while saving a lot of your research time. Hashtag search can also help you discover some great keyword ideas.
While Apple limits the iOS apps’ keywords field to 100 characters, there is no such limitations for Android apps. In fact, there is no keyword field Google Play Store like Apple. This means you need to put your keywords in the “long-description” field, which allows as much as 4000 characters, allowing you to insert keywords as much as 5 times within the description.
But why am I telling you all these things? Simply because I want you to aim for one element many app marketers overlook – long tail keywords. Most mobile app marketing companies target one-word keywords only to find that their apps are hardly ranking well for its keywords. A much better option is to aim for multi-word keywords or long tail keywords.
Marketers often argue that long tail keywords aren’t searched as frequently as target one-word keywords. And they are right about it as well. But what they fail to realize that being less searched terms, long tail keywords also have lower competition. This increases your chances of ranking higher on the app store for those keywords.
Once your initial keyword ideas are ready, it’s time to evaluate them. Just like SEO, there are three elements or metrics to consider when it comes to app keyword optimization. These are – Relevance, Difficulty and Traffic.
It goes without saying that your keywords must be highly relevant to your mobile application, especially because the search algorithm of app stores isn’t intelligent enough (yet) to understand synonyms and context.
Contrary to what many follow, never prioritize your app keywords based on the ‘traffic over difficulty’ theory. Instead, look for the relatively difficult, long-tail keywords for which your app is likely to rank in the top 10. Consider the ‘Difficulty Score’ for each of your keywords on a scale from 0 to 10 and calculate the average score for those keywords. 10 stands for the most difficult keywords.
Your keyword rank largely depends on the number of times your mobile app has been downloaded. But how many downloads do you need to get ranked? Nobody knows the exact number. This is where the average Difficulty Score comes in. This number will work as your guideline, giving you a quantifiable number to use whenever you are targeting new keywords. The Difficulty Score of your new keywords must be equal to or less than that average.
The third and the last key element of your app keyword optimization is traffic. When you are stuck with two or more keywords that have almost similar relevance and Difficulty Scores, opt for those with the highest traffic. But never target for higher traffic keywords in the beginning as the competition will be high as well and your chances of ranking for those keywords is almost negligible unless of course your mobile app gets millions of downloads in a month.
Start building your download base with low difficulty keywords i.e. keywords with 1.5 or 2 Difficulty Scores. Gradually move to the higher Difficulty and Traffic Scores as you keep on building your organic downloads.
A lot of apps today are available in several languages, targeting the international market. If you too have a similar business idea, it is highly recommended to localize your keyword optimization. Your keywords must cover your targeted languages to increase its discoverability when people are search for your apps in their native language.
Start with translating the description and keywords of your app and then gradually translate the app title and screenshots too. Both Apple and Google have guidelines for app developers who want to localize their app store keywords.
While SEO and ASO are quite similar in nature when it comes to keyword selection process, there is one big difference between them which is actually a good news for marketers. SEO takes time to show significant results; but with ASO you can reap the benefits of keyword optimization almost immediately, provided you target the right keywords. The tips mentioned here will help you to brainstorm for the right keywords so that you can select the best ideas to boost your app’s performance on the app stores. Happy hunting!