Discussing ASO strategy and choosing the right keywords
| Choosing the right keywords for your app is an important step towards achieving success. Unfortunately, there are no tools available today that can free you from this daunting and tedious investigative work. With more than 1.5 million mobile apps on the market and new products popping up every day, app developers must pay special attention to app store optimization ( ASO ), especially keyword optimization. In this series of blog posts, we’ll explain how to pick the right keywords for your app and provide an easy-to-follow guide. In the first part of this series, we will describe how to find relevant keywords for your app. The second part will outline the basic keyword selection process, and the third part will show you a complex process for selecting a more optimized keyword list. We will provide you with real-life examples based on our own projects. Optimizing your keywords can have a hugely positive impact on your downloads. Our current data shows that our download figures have grown significantly with recent updates. But remember that executing ASO also takes time. Don't cram at the last minute When you're developing your first game, you may not know much about ASO because you have other things to do (like releasing the game, or fixing all the bugs). Most developers only stumble upon ASO late in the development cycle. We didn’t do our own “keyword research” until the last minute, right before submitting our app. In the days/weeks before our game is released, we have a lot of other things to think about (fixing bugs, publishing loading screens, setting up social media pages, writing app descriptions, contacting press, etc.). Keyword optimization has always been on our to-do list, but we keep putting it off. The little time we spent on finding the right keywords could have cost us a lot of potential downloads. According to Nielsen data, 63% of app downloads come from app store searches. So make sure you do enough research on your keywords. 3 Easy Steps to Picking Keywords 1. Create a Keyword Library Before you start creating a library of potential keywords for your app, you must be familiar with some basic terminology from different ASO sites. * Relevance: This refers to how relevant a particular keyword is to your app and target users. Irrelevant keywords will not generate conversions. * Difficulty (Ranking): How competitive is a particular keyword? This higher value means it is extremely difficult to rank among the top. *Traffic (Popularity): How popular a particular keyword is, i.e. how many searches it has. 1.1 Determine relevant keywords. Only use keywords that are highly relevant to your app and users. Never use keywords that appear to have a ranking advantage but have nothing to do with your target users. Let’s say you develop a math game and define the keyword as “swimming”, which has relatively good characteristics, fairly good mid-level traffic, and low difficulty. traffic & difficulty (from gamasutra) Based on the above characteristics, you might think this keyword is an easy target, even though it is completely irrelevant to your application. Now imagine you are a user searching for an app that teaches swimming techniques. At this point, a math app appears in the first ten search results. Will you download this app? Probably not. If users take the time to conduct a search query, they are searching precisely and are highly unlikely to download an irrelevant app (a barrier to conversion). Only relevant keywords can generate conversions. So how do you find keywords for your app? 1.1.1 Analyze competitors' keywords We usually determine relevant keywords by analyzing the situation of the top competitor. If you’ve mastered ASO, you should have a pretty good idea of who your potential users and competitors are (if you don’t know where your market is yet, you’ll need to spend some time figuring it out first). To understand potentially relevant keywords, you can start by collecting keywords from your main competitors. To find your main competitors, you can browse the top charts in the relevant app store category (our relevant categories are Education, Games/Education, or Kids). Instead of manually browsing the popular apps in different categories one by one, you can use App Figures' Top Apps tool, which can display the top ranked apps in up to three categories at the same time in an extremely convenient way. Top Apps (from gamasutra) In addition, search for some general but highly relevant fields (such as "math" or "math games"). App Annie has a great keyword ranking tool that can help you quickly identify some of your competitors. Appnique (from gamasutra) You should also check out Appnique’s “Recommended Competitors” list and Sensor Tower’s “Track Competitors” tool. Sensor Tower (from gamasutra) Now that you’ve found some of your top ranking competitors, it’s time to find their keywords. Sensor Tower’s Keywod Spy is a powerful tool for discovering competitor keywords. This tool not only allows you to see your competitors' keywords, but also allows you to see how your own keywords overlap with them. Keyword Spy (from gamasutra) Note: The keyword list provided by Sensor Tower is not necessarily the same as the keywords that your competitors actually submit to the app stores. Currently it is not possible to directly query competitor keywords. Sensor Tower may use a series of keywords from the app store search API and then guess the keywords of the app based on the ranking results. Another useful tool for finding competitor keywords is Straply, which lets you see your competitor’s products and their keywords. Straply (from gamasutra) Your main goal at this stage is to create a broad library of potentially relevant keywords. You may find that not all keywords provided by different ASO tools are relevant to your app, so you will have to manually select the final candidates. The easiest way to do this is to just paste them into a Google Drive sheet and share it with your team. 1.1.2 Other methods for determining relevant keywords App store name Many apps contain some of the most important keywords in their names, so the name is an important entry point. In general, it’s a good idea to add high-volume, high-difficulty keywords to your app name. App Store Descriptions Browse app descriptions of top competitors. Some apps may include potentially relevant keywords in their description (especially in the list of features). But be aware that Apple’s App Store algorithm will most likely not factor the text in your app description into your rankings. App Store Reviews Search for keywords in top reviews for your app and competitor products. Start with 5-star reviews first, as they are more likely to contain some positive keywords. This process is very time-consuming, so we recommend only doing this if you are determined to identify enough keywords. There are also many tools on the market that can automate this process, such as Sensor Tower's Review Analysis tool (currently only available in enterprise version). Google Trends Google Trends (from gamasutra) If you want to know the volume of searches related to a basic query, you can use the Google Trends graph. Let’s use the field “Math Games” as our base trend and compare it to the query volume for “Math Sports” and “Math Training”. There are almost no searches interested in "mathematical sports", which suggests that this keyword may not be very successful. In addition, Google Trends can also provide you with some keyword suggestions. Google AdWords Keyword Planner This is a reliable source for conducting basic keyword research. Keyword Planner will provide you with useful information about search volume and related keywords. Apple App Store Related Keywords Apple is currently experimenting with a new App Store feature. When you enter a search query, Apple will display related keywords (currently only available to certain users, but hopefully it will be available to everyone soon). Dictionary It may sound a bit old-fashioned, but if you really want to find different variations for a specific keyword, it’s worth looking it up in a dictionary. If you're lucky, you might get some good advice. 1.2 Get Keyword Data Now that you have compiled a library of relevant keywords, you must get app store specific data. Many different ASO tools present keyword traffic and keyword difficulty values. This step is critical because, for example, high-volume keywords from Google Keyword Panner may have very different characteristics in an app store environment (e.g., different search behavior on web vs. mobile, different ranking/competition on websites vs. apps, etc.). In the next step, it is critical that you obtain the traffic and difficulty characteristics of each keyword. Before moving on to the next step, you can delete any keywords with zero traffic (or move them to a pending list, as they may start to get traffic again at some point in the future). Depending on your game type (iPhone, iPad or Universal) and the information available in your ASO tool, average your iPhone and iPad scores to get an aggregate difficulty/traffic number. Summary In this article, we have shown you how to determine relevant keywords (remember, only relevant keywords can generate conversion rates!). Unfortunately, there is no single tool that can do it all for you, but there are a number of tools that can be helpful during your investigation. The key to finding great keywords is to deeply understand your market. The better you understand your potential customers and competitors, the better your keyword library will be. Executing an ASO strategy takes time, so don’t expect it to happen overnight. |
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