Marketers love three letter acronyms – PPC, SEO, CRM – I could go on. However, one acronym that is growing in significance and is fast becoming a household name (at least in most marketers’ homes) is ASO – App Store optimisation.
ASO involves optimising your App Store description and settings to achieve the best possible rankings within the App Store. Many ASO techniques are comparable to SEO, with keyword discovery an essential tool. The case for good ASO is clear: as of June 2014, there were approximately 1.2 million apps in the App Store and around 30,000 apps are launched every month. To ensure your app doesn’t die a death in App Store obscurity, it’s crucial to take ASO seriously.
Surprisingly, many large companies don’t consider ASO an important part of marketing. A recent survey by mobile agency Yodel revealed that 67% of all app downloads were attributed to user keyword searches within the App Store, yet a significant number of apps lacked even the most basic optimisation. Add to this research by analytics provider Mobiledehq.com, which reported that 66% of downloads were of apps in the top five position of a specific search and only 6% of apps were downloaded if they ranked more than twentieth, and it becomes clear that there is a lot of room for app developers to boost downloads by undertaking ASO.
The search algorithm that dictates the position of an app in the App Store is shrouded in secrecy, similar to Google’s internet search algorithm. Nobody knows the exact formula, but we know for certain that the app title and keyword field can play a significant part in how an app is ranked for target keywords. The App Store keyword field has space for up to 100 characters. The best approach is to include as many relevant keywords to your app as possible, separated by commas with no spaces. For example, if you had a wedding app, you could enter keywords such as bride, groom, engagement, planning etc. However, the Yodel study found that UK retailers are only using 23% of their total keyword capacity allowance. Staggeringly, almost a quarter of the keywords used were not relevant to the app and bizarrely, a further one in ten contained a typo. A UK furniture store, which will remain nameless, even managed to misspell the word ‘room’ in the app keyword field.
Clearly, most companies do not realise the advantage their app could get over their competitors if they used the entire keyword allowance properly. A simple fix is to take the same keywords that are used in PPC and SEO campaigns and apply them to the app.
Currently, even the most competitive keywords are underused in the App Store. For example, the word ‘mortgage’ is one of the most competitive Google search keywords. The top five results returned in Google for ‘mortgage’ includes three major high street banks. In the App Store, the same search only results in one high street bank app in the top five results and four other apps that you have probably never heard of.
The beauty of the App Store at the moment is that you don’t have to be a big established brand with unlimited marketing budgets to achieve success. What you need is a great app that has excellent ASO. By maximising an app’s position on App Store searches, the app will be downloaded more often and, if the app is good, satisfied users will leave positive reviews, further boosting search results. It is a virtuous circle that is as simple as it is important.
By Ajay Chowdhury, CEO of Seatwave.
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