ASO Optimization Experience: Tips for app keyword optimization

When developing the first product, you may not even know what ASO is, because there are so many other things you need to do. Most novice developers even go to the game to enter the AppStore to know that there is a "keyword" this thing to study. Just because these developers spend less time on keywords, it directly leads them to lose a lot of potential downloads. Data shows that 63% of downloads originate from the App store's search behavior, so developers must make sure that the keyword is up and down.

First, establish a key font

However, before you build your key font, you must be familiar with some of the basic terms of ASO:

1. Relevance (relevance): the relevance of a particular keyword to your app and the target user, and irrelevant keywords are difficult to generate effective conversions.

2. Difficulty (difficulty): the level of competitive motivation for a particular keyword, the higher the value, the more difficult it is to enter the top ranking.

3. Flow (traffic): The level of popularity of a particular keyword, the higher the number of searches in search, the higher the value.

Identify keywords that have relevance

Remember to use keywords that are highly relevant to your app and users. Some keywords seem to have a ranking advantage, but it doesn't make sense for your product. For example, you are developing a math game, but you define the keyword as "swimming", although swimming has a very good flow and intermediate difficulty, but it is completely unrelated to your product.

At this time if there is a player want to find some swimming games or swimming learning book, the top 10 of the search did appear in your math game products, but they will download it? Almost no one would, would they? Because only keywords with relevance can produce effective conversion rates.

Analyze competitors ' keywords

We can determine which keywords are relevant by analyzing the competitor's situation.

First, you need to know who your potential users and competitors are. You can find your competitors in the AppStore leaderboard, but here's a little trick, you don't have to browse through different popular apps, just use the app figures top apps tool, and it's incredibly handy to show you top ranked apps for up to three categories. In addition, you can find Appnique's list of "recommended competitors" and the "Track competitors" tool at Sensor tower.

OK, now that you've found your competitor, using the sensor tower's KEYWOD spy allows you to spot your competitor's keywords, which, in addition to letting you discover your competitors ' keywords, can also let you see how your product's keywords overlap.

At this stage, your main goal is to create a broad, potentially relevant, key font, and different ASO tools may provide you with different keywords, and your job is to manually filter out the keywords that are ultimately available.

Other ways to Judge keywords

1. Software name

Many applications in their own name will actually contain some important keywords, so the name is a good entry point, in general, you should add some high-traffic, difficult keywords in your application.

2. Software description

Looking closely at the competitor's application description, some applications are likely to include potential keywords in the description, but it is worth noting that the AppStore algorithm may not be included in the ranking considerations for the text in the application description.

3. Software evaluation

There are also potential keywords in high-score evaluations of competitor products, starting with the five-star evaluation, because the five-star evaluation is the most intuitive player needs.

4. Google Trends

If you want to know the number of searches for a keyword, Google Trends is a good choice. Still with the math game as an example, we use "math game" as the basic keyword, while querying "mathematical movement" and "math training" to compare. The search for "math movement" is almost 0, suggesting that this is probably a cold keyword, and that Google Trends will provide you with some keyword suggestions.

Second, the APP store related keywords

Apple is currently experimenting with a new app Store feature, and when you start querying, the keywords can be displayed directly to the user.

Get keyword Data

Now that you've got a keyword font, you'll have to get specific app store data, and many ASO tools will show you the keyword traffic and the keyword difficulty. This step is critical, and it's important that you get the traffic and the difficulty of each keyword, because before you go into the second step, you need to empty all of the 0 traffic keywords in the key font (or put them in a pending area, because some keywords are likely to get traffic again in the coming period, Who can think Flappy Bird suddenly can red up? ）。 Based on your game type and the information you collected using the ASO tool, the average number of iphone and ipad scores was scored to get a total difficulty/traffic figure.

Choose your keywords wisely

AppStore the length of the keyword list is limited to 100 characters, and within this limited length, we need to decide which keywords to use. And the ultimate goal of all this is to choose the right keywords from the key font, which will bring a valid download volume to the right keywords. First, we need to remember:

High correlation + appropriate difficulty + general traffic = Increase in download volume

The right difficulty: we need some keywords that don't rank too hard, because our products are basically appstore on the top, we're not Angry birds.

Some traffic: we need a certain amount of search keywords, otherwise we will waste 100 characters of space, no traffic will not bring download.

At this stage we usually have two choices, either choose the keyword with high traffic, or choose the keyword with difficulty. Which do you want to choose? Perhaps your answer may be to choose keywords with high traffic.

The difficulty of choosing a keyword

Assuming this is your first application, it is recommended that you consider scoring your keywords from now on, ranking them in all your traffic-based keywords, and grading them for their difficulty. The following algorithms will have an impact on your software rankings:

1. Total downloads (current version and previous version)

2. Download momentum (download acceleration)

3. Comment Volume (positive and negative comments and historical commentary)

4. Player activity (frequency of application being turned on)

5. Discard rate (the rate at which the application was deleted)

6. Click Download rate (the number of downloads from the search download)

In general, the top ten traffic-intensive keywords in our app require a lot of testing and evaluation, so don't expect to select the keywords you want at once, ASO optimization takes time and requires constant monitoring and adjustment, which is a continuous development process.

In addition, AppStore will often change their algorithms, so we need to have the ability to react and modify quickly. Choosing a high-correlation, low-difficulty keyword and at least some search-volume keywords is your best choice. Every time you update your keyword list, you'll get more results, so you'll have to give up after the first commit and keep sifting through the process.

Difficulty level

If your software is already online, you can now split the list of keyword lists, ideally, you should always be concerned about the impact of keywords on downloads. This information is valuable because it will help you to guide the subsequent decision-making process well. It's also important to know your keyword rankings for the level of difficulty you've identified, and we've arranged the following difficulty levels. The difficulty level can help you quickly narrow down the list of potential keywords.

1. Target keywords: (difficulty less than 2, and ranked less than 10), this is your first choice, this keyword gives you the opportunity to appear in the top ten of the search;

2. Alternative keywords: (difficulty in 2-4, and ranked between 10-30) This is your alternative, if you are not sure enough of the target difficulty keyword, then you can fill your list with these keywords;

3. Exclude keywords: (difficulty greater than 4, ranking greater than 30): This is the keyword you need to exclude. These keywords have little chance to bring you download volume.

Ideally, you should have enough target keywords to choose from, and if there are not enough alternative keywords, it is recommended to reread the first article. The game shelves are the real start, from the moment you are on the shelves, you should always keep track of your keyword rankings, focus on comments, rankings, downloads and other elements to determine exactly what keywords you need.

Traffic is king

So far most of the time we are talking about difficulty and relevance, in fact, the flow is certainly very important, no traffic there is no everything, just said in the case of a certain amount of traffic we will pay more attention to the difficulty and relevance, for example, you have only one keyword can be filled out, but you also have three potential keywords can make a choice, If they are both highly correlated and the same difficulty, then naturally choose high-flow keywords

Third, step by step tips

Space is invaluable, and Apple restricts the user to 100 characters. So we have to maximize the role of the keyword in a limited space. You can add keywords to your software's name, but keep in mind that if you want to make your own product a brand, avoid turning your software name into a garbage heap Oh!

Note the length of the keyword, as much as possible to ensure that each keyword is less than 10 characters. Keep up-to-date because every time you update, you'll have the opportunity to delete underperforming keywords and add new keywords.

ASO Optimization Experience: Tips for app keyword optimization