Advanced App Store Optimization (ASO) Strategies to Double Your Downloads

- Coming up, I'm gonna share some Advanced ASO Strategies that we use to help our clients double and even 5X Downloads. Trust me when I tell you this is gonna be some ninja stuff. Stay tuned. (ninja shouts) (machine whizzes) What is up appnation? It is Steve P. Young, the one, the only founder of AppMasters.co. And today I want to share some Advanced ASO Strategies with you. These are the same exact strategies that we use to increase downloads for our clients, double, I mean on the low end we've seen 20% increases and on the high end we've seen 5X, what is that, 600%, 500%, increases in downloads using just purely ASO.

I'm gonna share some of these strategies. I'm actually gonna go in depth on just three of the main strategies, but if you want all of the Advanced ASO Strategies, I've got a webinar coming up this Wednesday. So if you're interested in learning more about this, go to appmasters.co/asowebinar, alright, /asowebinar. Great, alright, now one of the things I want to talk to you about is ASO. When people started thinking about ASO doesn't work anymore, there's some people in the webisphere saying, "ASO is dead, it doesn't work, "it doesn't allow you to increase downloads at all."

Well, I said heck, I'm gonna double down on ASO and really learn the ins and outs of ASO and make sure I start adapting and adopting new strategies. Because as people started running away from ASO, I started digging in even deeper. We've definitely seen a lot of great results for our ASO clients. So if you're interested, we can talk on how we can help you with ASO Strategies. But here, I'm gonna share three of my favorite tips.

And if you want more, if you want them all, join me on the webinar appmasters.co/asowebinar. Alright, let's go to the first one. Number one, I've said this before and I'll say it again, Use Two ASO Platforms. Now, obviously, some people who are on a budget, actually there's no excuse. (laughs) Frankly, there's no excuse why you shouldn't be using two ASO platforms. Now the ones that I've been using a lot are Sensor Tower and Mobile Action.

Now to the competitors of those two, please do not reach out to me and say, "Come on, why do you keep promoting these two?" These are the ones that I've been using a lot, okay? So I'm just gonna continue talking about them as I use them. Maybe I'll start using some of yours, the competitors, maybe not, but right now these two are working for me so definitely use two. I'll share with you why I believe that you've gotta use two.

So here's some real stats from our clients, okay, and data. Now this is a little bit older in terms of the traffic scores because this is data before Apple released their Search Ads and both tools have started, frankly a lot, almost all the tools have started incorporating Apple Search Ads, so the traffic scores may be a little bit off. But the difficulty probably remains the same and that's what the point I want to make here is.

So here's Sensor Tower Data, Mobile Action Data. And as you can see, sometimes Sensor Tower says app is very competitive, meaning you can't rank really high for it, right. Here's this one Keyword that has a 4.9 on Sensor Tower in terms of difficulty but a 93% chance that you're gonna rank high on Mobile Action, which means it's low difficulty on Mobile Action. And for that particular Keyword, we target it for our clients and we're ranking number three for that particular Keyword.

So again, you never know. And when both platforms say a Keyword is really low on competition, you can see that we rank really high for that particular Keyword. Okay, here's another one where Sensor Tower says really pretty relatively low competition, 2.8. I would say anything under a three, I would consider low competition. So 2.8 competition and then a 67% chance of a rank in the top for this particular Keyword on Mobile Action.

So Mobile Action's saying, "Nah, it's pretty competitive." Right, it's pretty competitive. And so, if you look at the Keyword ranking for this, we are number five for that particular Keyword. So Sensor Tower was right on this. Now I'm gonna show you one last example. To those who probably are just listening to this, this last one is a 1.7 on Sensor Tower and a 50% chance that we're gonna rank high for it on Mobile Action.

So low competition Sensor Tower, high competition on Mobile Action. And we're ranking number 79 for it. Okay, so as you can see, what I'm really looking for on these two different platforms is the competition. I want to target Keywords that have pretty decent traffic scores, so anything above a three, or even above a two I might target, and has low competition. And if both platforms say that it's low competition, if there's a very high chance that you're gonna rank really well for that particular Keyword, and that's what we've seen.

So when we talk about this and if you look at some of this, if you're watching this, I have some Spanish-Mexico App Name and Keywords. And as you can see, when a Keyword says very very low competition and 100% chance that we're gonna rank high for it, so both platforms are telling really really really really this is a juicy Keyword, I'll put it into a different localization, which brings me to point number two. So, this strategy is a way for you to Double your Keywords with Localization.

Now, this isn't localization as in translating for a particular app store. No, this is about the App Store utilizing different localizations, different languages for one country. Okay, let me say that again. This is about the App Store, the Apple App Store, utilizing different localizations for one country. For example, the US App Store indexes the Spanish-Mexico localization, which means you could put English keywords into the Spanish-Mexico localization, English app name, English keywords and still rank for that particular keyword.

And here's proof. So, back to my old slide. You can see the last two rows have Spanish-Mexico App Name, Spanish-Mexico Keyword. Didn't want to tell you exactly what those keywords are because these are my clients and (laughs) we want to hide some of the keywords that we're ranking really well for and have decent amount of traffic. So as you can see, it's decent amount of traffic, very low competition on Sensor Tower.

It's 0.5 and 0.3 for these particular keywords and then 100% chance that we're gonna rank high for these particular keywords on Mobile Action. Now the one with the higher traffic score and probably more relevant that I could put into the App Name, I put into the App Name and we're ranking number one for that particular keyword. And for the other keyword with a little bit less traffic, same amount of competition, we're ranking number four.

And these are keywords that do not show up in the US App Name or Keyword field. They only show up in the Spanish-Mexico App Name and Keyword but they are in English, not in Spanish. So literally utilizing both localizations, you're able to double the amount of keywords that you're targeting for the US App Store. Now I'll put a link into the Show Notes but Sensor Tower put a great guide out there that shows you all the different localizations of all the different countries, okay.

But US, just so you know, which most people are focused on, indexes the Spanish-Mexico and the UK actually indexes the Australian localization. Next up, number three. Now this is a strategy I've been talking a ton about about App Store Reviews. Now this very important. Why? Because when people search for your app, or discover your app through a search, they're comparing your app with the other apps. And one of those deciding factors is the number of reviews and the average star rating your app has, okay.

So one of the things that you can do, if you want to be completely white hat about it, is ping your users. So send a push notification to your most loyal engaged users and then ask them to leave a review anytime you have an app update, okay. Because the more reviews you have, the better it's gonna be. And anytime you update your app, when people are looking on the App Store, it shows No Reviews because it only shows, the default view is the reviews you have for your current version.

Really sucks for Apple, you have to click All Reviews for all versions to see all the App Store Reviews. But when you update an app, you pretty much start again by zero until you can really build up the reviews again. That's white hat strategy. Black hat ASO strategy that I discovered, and don't let anybody else take credit for this, it's mine, alright, is using App Stores to actually game the system. And what I started noticing was, some of the bigger companies that I work with, they were telling me that they would buy reviews.

I was like, "Hm, that's interesting." So I started asking around, "Hey, where can I buy some reviews, "where can I buy some reviews?" And my friend started telling me. I was like, cool. So I started buying some reviews. Then I started thinking, hey, what if I asked these people to leave certain keywords in those reviews? Because I know one of the deciding factors is the keywords that are obviously in your App Name, your Keyword field, and your Description, but also in your Reviews.

I knew that was within the algorithm. So what if I could game the algorithm here? So I started asking people that I was paying to leave reviews to leave reviews with certain keywords in there. And what did I notice? An increase, almost an instantaneous increase, of ranks for those keywords I was targeting. And here's proof that I did for one of my friends. We instantly went from 16 to four just by targeting these particular keywords in our reviews.

Didn't change the App Name, didn't change the Keyword field, didn't charge a darn thing. All we did was buy reviews with specific keywords in them and we instantly increased ranks. Now if you want this course that I put together for this, go to appmasters.co/blackhataso. All one word, no dashes, okay. Appmasters.co/blackhataso. Okay, the last strategy that I will share with you is Localization. Now, (laughs) unlike the second step two, this is literally translating your app for the different languages across the world.

It's silly to think that, while most people speak English, it's silly and naive to think that people are gonna search for your app using English when they're somewhere else and they don't speak English. So really localize your app and I've seen tremendous growth from just some of my friends who've localized their app. And one of the things you can do, and this is a tip that I got from Jason Van Buiten, who is the creator of Review Command, he's gonna be a future guest of the podcast, but he said to use Amazon MTurk.

Now there's a lot of localization services out there, but here's a really scrappy way, if you're on a budget, to localize your app, okay. So you use Amazon MTurk and you target the different languages you want to target. So you can look at app fany and see, or maybe some of your competitors are doing well in, or where maybe you are already doing well in if you've already launched, and then localize for that particular region.

For this example, I'm gonna use French, okay. So I want to localize my app for French. So what I'm gonna do is go to Amazon MTurk, and then I'm looking for French speakers, put a link to my app and also describe what my app does, okay. And then on MTurk, you're gonna have people check out the app, maybe download it. And then ask them, what are 10 words, or five or 10 words, that you would use to search for my app and say it in your particular language, alright.

Now you've got a huge list of keywords and you probably want to get 10 to 15 people to do this. And now you should get anywhere from 50 to 100 words or phrases that you could use and just pick the most common ones that people always say and then put them into your App Name. Or put them into your ASO tools, see how much traffic they have, see how much competition they have, and then start putting them into your App Name and Keywords.

And Jason has said that he's increased downloads, I think it was double the amount of downloads he's gotten from that region just by doing this one strategy. Now this is a lot cheaper and more affordable than hiring some other, you know, hiring translators or even hiring others. And what the beauty of this that I like is rather than just hiring one translator, you're hiring pretty much 10 and you're paying them pretty cheaply and you're able to see what they would use and pick the most common phrases that they would search for for your particular app.

Alright, that's it, those are the four. I've got a lot more that I want to share with you but I'll save it for the webinar. If you want to join me for the webinar, it's happening this Wednesday. Go to the link appmasters.co/asowebinar, no dashes, no capitalizations, appmasters.co/asowebinar. And I'll see you on the next video.