App Store Optimization

Today, every single developer focused on mobile applications and games also needs to learn how to promote them on their own due to increasing competition and pricing of the professional marketing services, and as you may know, in this industry the one who shouts louder wins. This means that you need to focus on marketing as soon as possible and make sure that the application or game reaches its target audience. After all, it won't promote itself and won't grow a pair of wings to fly into the user's device. Therefore, one has to take major leaps to reach their audience.

That's why we would like to talk about App Store Optimization – a set of practices designed to make the app easier to find, thus promoting it in a very subtle, but working manner. It's affordable and usually requires some time and effort to research the necessary data and use it properly.

How does it actually work?

If you're familiar with SEO, then you can safely skip this part and move on to the actual methods, since ASO is basically “SEO for mobile applications and games”. If you aren't familiar with it, however, then it can be explained like this:

App search optimization is the set of methods used to make the app easier to find through search engines and appeal to the target audience in a couple of ways, including, but not limited to assets used on the app, localization and data. It's a promotion of applications and games without advertising, and it's very affordable to do on your own if you know where you need help and where you will be fine by putting some effort into it.

Read on to learn more about several methods used in ASO.

Keyword Optimization

Keyword Optimization (KWO) is used to make the application or game easier to find using the search engines. By researching the relevant keywords, picking the most popular ones and using them in the app description and tags field you can increase the popularity and download numbers, thus improving the performance of your app or game on the market. While this may not work out the way you're expecting, but that's alright – once you get a good grip on it, you will get better, and if it doesn't work out, then do additional research and pick new keywords. Consider updating them once in a while anyway, since

If this works out well, there should be a noticeable increase in ranking in search results and also a nice boost of downloads and visits of your app page. If that's not enough, however, then consider trying asset optimization.

Asset Optimization

Asset Optimization (AO) is a good way to convince the user to install the app. While Keyword Optimization works to drive the user towards the app store page of your application or game, Asset Optimization works to convince them by offering nice assets, such as:

• App icon;
• Screenshots;
• Video preview (YouTube).

You can hire a designer to get a better icon and improve the overall look of the app, while you can pick better screenshots yourself to tell a nice story about the experience the user is going to have while using your application or playing your game. Video preview can be done on your own, or you can find a studio that can offer these services for an affordable price.

Overall, you should notice a nice increase in the conversion rates after doing this.

Localization

Consider supporting the following languages as soon as you can get the application or game translated to them:

• English
• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Chinese
• Japanese
• Korean
• Russian
• Portuguese

Use freelance translation services to pull this off for an affordable price with good quality. This way you can significantly expand your target audience and bring more people to try your app. Sometimes this can also multiply your download numbers, which is a great effect no matter how big or small they are.