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If you’ve launched a mobile app, there’s a good chance it will need a push that will get it in front of interested users. App Store Optimization (ASO) can provide you that boost by helping improve your organic visibility, conversions and paid outreach. If your business’ app needs help growing, here are three ways App Store Optimization can help.
1. Keyword Optimization
An important goal for any business with a mobile app is to increase its overall visibility. The best way to do this is by focusing on appearing in organic keyword searches on the app stores.
Apple has stated that the majority of app discovery occurs through search, which has been consistently reported and demonstrated year to year. Developers that want their app to appear in searches can start by optimizing their App Store listing’s metadata to improve its organic footprint and overall visibility.
Keyword Targeting
When optimizing your store listing, you’ll want to use a structure that allows relevant users to search for and discover your app. Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store algorithms will scan a listing’s metadata for keywords, then index the app for them in search results. As your app gains clicks from searches for those keywords, its rankings for them will improve.
With proper keyword targeting and optimization, your app can potentially rank for hundreds or even thousands of keywords. Each keyword your app is successfully merchandised on helps expand your organic footprint to reach even more users.
It’s easy to see this in action as part of the App Store Optimization process. After Carvana optimized its metadata, it began appearing in searches for high-volume keywords it was previously unranked for. Among these keywords were relevant and highly-searched terms, like “car shopping” and “car buying.”
This keyword optimization will help get your app in front of users. From there, getting them to download it is a different story. This is where creative optimization comes into play.
2. Creative Optimization
Your creative assets – the icon, screenshots and video for your app – play a key role in your overall conversion rate. Optimizing these assets alongside your keywords can help boost your chances of gaining installs.
Appeal to Users
Your creative assets take up a significant portion of real estate in the store listing and are included alongside the app name in search results. Since all traffic will lead to the search listing or app page, the creatives need to appeal to users from all sources and get them to convert. You can create a page to do my quiz for me For more attractiveness.
Creative sets can improve conversions by showing users what the app has to offer. Using engaging visuals, screenshot copy that emphasizes key features and highlighting the value propositions can help encourage users to install the app. Including top performing search keywords in the screenshot copy can also be helpful, as it allows a user to more quickly visually connect what they searched for with your app.
If your creative sets get users to click on the app from search results, it can help improve your ranking for those search terms. Conversion optimization, therefore, can help improve your metadata’s organic footprint while also increasing your overall conversion rate.
A/B Testing
How do you know what will work for your creative sets? Utilizing A/B tests can help identify what aspects perform best.
By testing different variants of your creative assets, you can determine which aspects convert users the best. This helps you pinpoint different traits that users like the most, such as background colors, screenshot copy, feature order or composition.
After running tests, you can take the aspects that perform best and fully incorporate them into the creative set. Each update should build upon the successes of previous ones to further improve performance.
We can see how iterative testing can help an app increase conversions by looking at PlantSnap, an augmented-reality plant identification app which grew to be #1 in its category. Through testing incremental changes in design elements and testing, then incorporating them into future builds, the developers increased their conversion rate significantly with each update.
3. Paid Marketing
You can supplement the growth from organic App Store Optimization efforts by investing in paid user acquisition. This can be especially helpful for mobile app businesses just starting to build a presence in the app stores.
Paid ad campaigns such as Apple Search Ads and Google Ads can place your app at the top of search results, thereby helping direct users to your store listing. Traffic from these in-store sources is tracked by the store algorithms to help determine keyword rankings, thus helping paid outreach feed into organic growth and generate traffic.
Additionally, paid user acquisition can help the app stores’ algorithms merchandise your app store listing at a faster pace. This can help build rankings for keywords quickly and get a head start on the competition. When there are potentially hundreds or thousands of apps to compete with for each keyword, this can make a crucial difference.
The increased speed of indexation can also help save you time in gathering data. The faster you gain quality traffic, the sooner you’ll be able to gain important insights from it.
Overall
App Store Optimization is a process of continued research, execution, analysis and iteration- key elements of growing any successful business. Businesses with mobile apps can utilize ASO to help their apps grow and continue to reach new users with a proper application of keyword optimization, conversion optimization and paid marketing. If you’re not investing in App Store Optimization, you’ll only fall behind the businesses that do.
