Without optimized keywords, potential customers will struggle to find your app when searching the App Store. We have seen downloads increase by 40-100 percent when using the App Store Optimization (ASO) techniques described in this article. 

Now that we're doing this process once again with Disco Fingers, we thought we'd share our step by step approach with you.

Download statistics from one of our kids book apps before and after we optimised it's keywords. No new features were added. The screenshot is taken from AppFigures.

First, so let’s go through the basic keyword rules on the Apple App Store:

• You have 100 available keyword characters

• Title, keywords, company name are categorised by the App Store search engine 

• Your In App Purchase names also counts, but to a very limited degree

• The app description does not count

• You can only change keywords when updating the app

Step 1: Swap out bad keywords

The main principle of App Store Optimization is to make sure that your app ranks in the top 10 search result for all of its keywords, ideally as high as top 6.

If your app ranks below top 10 for a specific keyword (we call this a low ranking keyword), it probably won’t provide enough downloads to justify it’s usage of precious keyword characters. So you’ll have swap it out with a high ranking keyword, where your app ranks above top 10.

It would be great to rank amongst the top 6 results for "music". but there are 19,521 other apps trying to do the same. So it only makes sense to target the keyword if "music" is a part of an important keyword phrase.

The only reasons to keep low ranking keywords, is if they are extremely trafficked or if they are a part of an important double word search. If you are building a music making app, like Disco Fingers, and it's ranked high for «music maker», it’s probably wise to keep both keywords even though you'll probably rank low for them separately (see image above).

So go though your app’s keywords and identify the keywords where you rank below top 10. After you have done this, the next step is to find better keywords to swap them out with. 

Step 2: Find 40-50 keyword alternatives

First, write all potential and relevant keywords you can think of down in a spreadsheet. Every single one. Don’t forget double word search phrases.  

A good way to get ideas for potential keywords is to find your competitors, and do the following:

1. Spy on their keywords, using SensorTowers Keyword Spy tool

2. Search through their (and your own!) users reviews using App Annies  Reviews Tool

Your spreadsheet should look something like the image below, which uses our Disco Fingers app as an example.

You should keep on going until you have a lost of 40-50 keywords / keyword-phrases to choose from, as most of them will probably be discarded in the next step.

Step 3: Distinguish the good from the bad

Now, you'll have to identify the candidates worth trying out. To do that you’ll need to answer the three questions below:

• Competition. How many apps are listed for this keyword?

• Traffic. How many people search for this keyword?

• Relevance. How relevant is the traffic from this keyword?

In general, you want identify the ones with low competition, but high traffic and high relevance. 

SensorTower will give you both the competition (amount of hits) and a traffic estimation, (based on a rating from 1 to 10). Use these numbers in your spreadsheet.

The relevance is up to you to decide, based upon common sense. I always give my keywords a relevance of either “Low", "Medium" or "High”. This will make your spreadsheet look something like this:

By analysing spreadsheet you can identify the keywords that are worth trying out, where the competition is low as possible, and the traffic as high as possible.

Don’t forget that the keywords must be highly relevant (extremely important). If they are just slightly relevant, it will give you few and low quality downloads.

In the example above, you can see that “melody maker” and “make beats” are the only good keywords for a newcomer like Disco Fingers, as they don’t have hundreds of competitors, but they got some degree of traffic, and high relevance.

As for "pentatonic", the first two factors are good, but it's not highly relevant to our app, so we won't include it as a keyword.

If we had an app with lots of downloads and good ratings, we could probably target more popular keywords like “compose”. But that's only possible if Apple has rewarded your app with higher keyword ranks, so that it's competitive enough.

After you have used this process to identify your keywords, go through the checklist below so make sure you don't do any final mistakes.

A quick checklist: 

• Use all the characters available (100), separate them with comma (not a space, as this steals)

• Do not repeat any keywords you have in the title in your keywords. Place a few of the most important keywords in the title, but don’t make your title spammy

• Long words will probably not give much traffic

• If you are shameless, put keywords in your company name.

• Check SensorTower to see if your keywords have any traffic at all

´- Use singular (“kid”) and not plural (“kids”), as the search engine is smart enough to rank you for both if you use the former.

International app? Localize!

Finally, if your app's international and you want maximum output, you’ll also need to localize the keywords, at least for the most important countries. We’ll give you a bullet proof way to do this in our next blog post, as this subject deserves it's own article.

Plus, we'll give you contact info to the affordable but great translators we use, so that you don't have to spend time finding - and quality checking - your own translators. 

To be notified when we publish that article, input your mail below.

Subscribe

Sign up with your email address to receive notifications of new articles.

Email Address Sign Up

We respect your privacy.

Thank you!

Any comments to this article? Feel free to post a comment!

Thanks,

Per Harald Borgen

The Disco Fingers Team