Are you fooled by the five myths about ASO in 2014?

Apps are a very big business. According to the Wall Street Journal, app sales currently reach $25 billion. This does not include the vast benefits generated by other industries that form part of the app economy. VisionMobile predicts that the global app economy will reach $143 billion by 2016. With a growth rate reaching or even exceeding 30%, the APP industry has become the hottest field at present.

As it grows, the market for app development and consumption is on the rise.

With billions of smartphones around the world, people buy apps and consume in apps.

That’s why App Store Optimization (ASO) is so hot among marketers and SEO experts. Sadly, there are still many myths going on and many secrets to be uncovered. We are dealing with a serious topic and we cannot mess it up.

How important is App Store Optimization?

First of all, ASO is really important.

Why? Not only because apps are a big industry, but also because users are looking for these apps. Apptentive reports that 63% of Apple users browse the App Store to find new apps.

Customers find new apps in many different ways – through the media, websites, friends, etc. But without a doubt, customers are looking for apps. Nielsen’s data echoes Apptentive’s.

According to the head of search and discovery at Google Play, Ankin Jain, 12% of active users search for new apps every day, and 50% of active users search for apps at least once a week. Over the course of a month, Google Play processes 6 million unique search keywords.

For ASO, we need a deeper understanding to get rid of the following fallacies.

Fallacy #1: Change your app title to accommodate advanced search

Truth: Pick a title and stick with it

Without a doubt, the title is one of the most important elements of App Store Optimization. The head of Google Play search said in the Inside Mobile Apps report that the title is the most important unit of app metadata.

In response, some ASO people began to transform titles to better suit advanced searches. They create all kinds of titles every day, changing keywords, adding keywords and renaming their products. However, doing so actually has no effect on rankings. It may even hurt its ranking to some extent. In a previous article on ASO, Robi Ganguly states:

“Changing your title and keywords can be detrimental. As your app ranks higher and gets more reviews, word about your app will spread by word of mouth, and changing the title will make it harder for word of mouth to spread.”

Once you’ve chosen a title, that’s it, and you’d better make it a good one. Here are four tips.

1. Keep it short — 25 characters or less

Short titles are easier to read on small screens, while longer titles will be cut off. As one of the most important search data in the App Store, you don’t want it to be cut off.

The following app, Productivity Wizard, has only its name visible on the screen. They’d be better off not using such long names because users won’t be able to see the full name on the app browsing screen and will be less likely to download the app.

2. Make it new

Why be innovative? Searchers are either categorized or navigational. Users will hear or see your app and then perform a navigation search to access it. If the title is original, it is more likely to be remembered and successfully searched for.

Guided searches are like “Angry Birds” and “Evernote”, rather than categorized queries like “bird games” or “note-taking apps”.

3. Make it unique

Unique is similar to novel, but with a difference. The novelty is what stands out to the users. You don’t want your app to get lost in the morass of copycat apps like Flappy Pig, Flappy Wings, Flappy Fall, Flappy Hero, Flappy Monster, Flappy Nyan, etc., ad nauseam. Copycat apps rarely become as successful as the apps they copy.

Searching for "flappy" will result in 2193 app product results. A lack of unique titles means you’ll be lost in the app morass.

4. Use a keyword, but don’t keyword stuff it

Keyword stuffing is almost as sinful in ASO as it is in SEO. Apple said that "the use of repeated or irrelevant keywords in app titles, descriptions or promotional descriptions will create an unpleasant experience for users and will result in the suspension or removal of the app."

Remember, you only have 25 characters, so a concise title with a short keyword is all you have.

Myth 2: Keywords don’t matter

Truth: Keywords are important

Some people believe that SEO (search engine optimization) relies on keywords, while ASO relies on ranking operations. Because ASO and SEO are completely different, many optimizers do not consider the importance of keywords when creating titles and descriptions.

But the truth is that keywords are very important. Keywords are important in your title and description. Of course, I’m not saying you should stuff them, but it’s best to include your keywords in the title and app description.

MobileDevHQ’s research on title keywords is as follows:

App titles that included the keyword ranked 10.3% higher than those that didn’t, which doesn’t sound like a lot. But it’s easy to include keywords in your title, so why not do it?

Go back to the data surveyed at the beginning of the article and remember how many users are searching for APP.

The App Store and Android App Store have their own app ranking algorithms, which inherit the traditional search algorithm - keywords. Don't ignore keywords.

Myth #3: It’s all about app ratings

The truth: Ratings are important, but not everything

There is no disputing the fact that app ratings matter. Judging from push notifications requesting user ratings to almost begging for rating prompts in apps, you’d think ratings are the most important feature in ASO.

Rating, as one of the most important descriptions in an app’s feature list, has the effect of influencing the likelihood of users ignoring or downloading the app.

The truth is, while app ratings are important, they don’t have as much impact on app rankings as most people think.

To uncover the truth behind the impact of ratings, Inside Mobile Apps conducted a study. They first examined a random sample of simple search terms (1-25 results), medium search terms (25-100 results), and complex search terms (101+ results) to see how each app ranked based on its ratings.

Here is their rating/ranking comparison for iOS:

The ratings of apps after the eighth place in the search results dropped sharply. But what’s interesting is that the impact on the scores of the top eight doesn’t seem to be that big, the fluctuations are all up and down. In the simple search terms, the researchers found that the average rating of the tenth-ranked app was as low as 1.09, which is, frankly, terrible.

Below is an analysis of Google Play’s ranking of apps. Unlike iOS, apps at the bottom of the rankings didn’t see a big drop in ratings, and the researchers suspect that “Google Play’s search algorithms for app discovery and visibility appear to be taking a more sophisticated approach, allowing higher-quality apps to appear at the top.”

There is more evidence to dispel the myth that ratings are everything, as even some highly competitive apps at the top of the charts don’t have very high ratings. Look at the relationship between the iOS list ranking and the rating in the figure below. No app wants to be rated one or two stars, but they can still rank at the top of the list.

Of course, ratings are good, and high ratings are better. For users, those apps with four or five stars give a good impression. However, in terms of rankings, it plays a lower role than we might think.

Myth 4: If it’s in a store, people will find it

Truth: Apps need a lot of downloads to gain recognition

Some ASO professionals believe that as long as an app is on Google Play or the App Store, it will be discovered, downloaded, and will earn the desired revenue. Please see the statistics below.

There are a ton of apps out there, and to compete successfully, you need more differentiation than just some clever keywords in your title and description.

Your app needs to be downloaded.

Contrary to what I said above about app ratings being overestimated, the impact of downloads is often underestimated.

It's a tough deal. Because you need more downloads to get larger downloads. Let the data speak for itself.

The more apps you download, the higher you rank, that's it.

Download conversion rate depends largely on your marketing attitude. According to the SEW report, the download conversion rates of top-ranked apps vary widely, depending on their path to popularity.

To increase app downloads more broadly, it’s usually best to use traditional marketing routes — social media, content marketing, PPC, email lists, etc. Once you slowly gain downloads from marketing, you can potentially move up the app ranking, which then leads to more downloads, higher ranking, more downloads, until you reach a critical mass.

Don't go the route of scammers who add junk downloads simply to boost their rankings. Their approach is to use programming to automatically download apps. For example, automatic or explosive mass downloads like a virus. Furthermore, some of them were reportedly even able to circumvent anti-spam algorithms and boost downloads by sending emails to a huge pool of potential users.

Myth 5: Description is not very important

Truth: Description is very important

I’ve heard of some ASO examples where they didn’t achieve the best results because their app descriptions were so bad.

It is said that ASOs fail to achieve excellent results because they fail in description.

There was once a report claiming that you can be trained to become an ASO expert , which included this sentence:

Description doesn't make a difference.

They further explained:

From a purely ASO perspective, the app description field does not affect the search ranking on the App Store. On the other hand, Google Play’s ranking algorithm takes into account the content of your app description.

From what I’ve learned and researched, app description is very important for both Google Play and App Store. Even though the quality and keywords of the description have no impact on the ranking algorithm, it cannot be disputed that it can potentially influence users to download the app. In turn, downloads resulting from the description have a significant impact on rankings.

Search Engine Watch reported that the second most important factor affecting rankings in the App Store is “app description”. They note that “descriptions help you rank better in the App Store.” The top ranking is “a natural combination of focused keywords in the title and description data.”

AppTweak has a similar explanation for this:

Keywords have a huge impact on ASO. In fact, whether it is the title or keywords of iOS apps or the title or description of Google Play apps, keywords have an important impact on the App Store algorithm, so they need to be chosen wisely to give the app maximum visibility and the greatest chance of being discovered.

in conclusion

Some of the successful apps on the App Store rely on simply avoiding misunderstandings, and the ASO fallacy is obviously one of them. You may not create the next Flappy Bird or the next billion-dollar Instagram, but with enough hard work and savvy, your app will be discovered and downloaded by more people, ultimately setting you on the path to success.