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Advanced App Store Optimization Strategies for 2024

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App Masters14:24Open on YouTube
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The bottom line

Indie apps grow in 2024 by targeting niche keywords that big brands ignore, then placing them everywhere the stores and Google can index them. This gets free organic downloads without a paid-marketing budget.

Key takeaways

  • Big brands chase crowded keywords and leave niche keywords open. 0:40
    • Big brands run on funnels and paid ads, and they care little about ASO.
    • Their ASO effort goes to high-traffic, high-competition terms, so indies can take the niche ones.
  • Finding the right niche keywords can turn a dead app into a profitable one. 1:45
    • A motivational app ranked number one for two new keywords and went from no sales to $1,000 to $1,500 a month on a $20 a year product, with no new features.
    • A new sleep sounds app, built after the keywords were chosen, made $933 in its first month.
  • In-app events lift keyword rankings and conversion. 5:40
    • One client moved from rank two to one by putting the target keywords in the event title and descriptions.
    • Conversion rate rose 35% for one app, even though impressions and downloads fell.
  • Localizations let one US listing carry many more keywords. 8:18
    • The US App Store indexes nine extra localizations besides US English, such as Spanish Mexico and Vietnamese, so English keywords go in each title and subtitle.
    • Indies outside the US should start in their home country, where competition is lower.
  • Google web search and search ads are another source of cheap downloads. 11:17
    • A niche keyword app ranked number one on Google and got over 100 downloads a day from Google and Chrome.
    • Google search ads that send people through a website to the App Store can cost less per click than Apple Search Ads cost per tap.

Let the big guys fight amongst themselves and we'll focus on these niche keywords.

Steve Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Niche keywords in practice

Niche keyword wins can be checked, planned before the build, and repeated at larger scale.

  • Mobile Action gives the more accurate search traffic numbers. 1:46
    • The two motivational app keywords score 3724 there and 5 in App Radar.
    • App Radar is still good for difficulty.
    • Steve credits the AI craze for Mobile Action's better traffic scores.
    • The app gets about 2,000 downloads, all organic, with no paid marketing.
  • Choose keywords with traffic first, then build the app. 3:15
    • The sleep sounds app launched on November 5 because its keywords already had traffic.
    • Other keywords nobody watches are still open.
    • December revenue stayed near the first month.
    • Steve thinks it could reach $10,000 a month by Q2.
  • The same method works for a larger app. 4:07
    • A client making about $80,000 a month started in mid September.
    • It now has 11 new number one keywords, 120 in the top 10, 262 in the top 30 and 76 in the top 50.
    • The top one count matters most. Top 100 slipped and Steve doesn't care.
    • A viewer commented that the steps took his app from 0 to 5,000 in 2 months.

5:40 In-app events as an ASO tool

Events work as keyword placements, and they may also make the listing convert better.

  • Write each event around the keywords you want to rank for. 5:53
    • Put the keywords in the event title and in the short description, or both descriptions.
    • Steve has talked about events for about two years and uses them for ASO.
    • Events also bring users back into the app.
  • Conversion rate rose while other numbers fell. 6:21
    • The client data compares November 5 with December 4.
    • Impressions, downloads and product page views all dropped.
    • Other apps saw every number rise along with conversion.
    • Steve says it happened across multiple apps, big and small, and he doesn't normally track this number.

7:12 Events and localizations add free keyword space

Google Play events and the extra US localizations give more places for niche keywords at little cost.

  • Google Play promotional events give extra room in search results. 7:25
    • One client already ranked well for its main keyword and gained a second slot once an event ran.
    • Only apps with over 1 million downloads can use them for now.
    • They show in the games home, the store listing, the events tab and search results.
    • All it takes is some graphics and text.
  • Every extra US localization should carry English niche keywords. 8:36
    • Each title and subtitle holds niche keywords, which adds up to 15 or so across the listing.
    • Arabic, Russian and Vietnamese listings all get English keywords.
    • Apps big in Mexico or Brazil should keep Spanish there.
    • The main three are US English, Spanish Mexico and Vietnamese.
  • Indies outside the US should win at home first. 9:48
    • Some indie developers made $3,000 to $4,000 from places like Germany and Russia before turning to the US.
    • Downloads are worth having even when conversion is low.

10:47 Boost installs and Google search

Boost campaigns are risky, while Google search is a less crowded source of downloads.

  • Keyword install campaigns still lift rankings, but carry risk. 10:47
    • Some bigger companies use them.
    • The speaker neither promotes nor advises them.
  • Niche keywords can rank on Google and in the App Store at once. 11:17
    • One niche keyword gets 5,400 searches a month, and the app is first on desktop and mobile.
    • A friend, Rudy, got over 200 downloads a day as number one for a keyword.
    • How Google picks the winner is still unclear.
  • A Google search campaign can send paid traffic to the App Store through a website. 12:45
    • Martin of a podcast app bids on podcast app. It is not a Google UAC campaign.
    • The landing page might be bypassed. More details are promised.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters, ASO and app growth consultant. Advanced ASO tactics for 2024: target niche keywords big brands ignore, use keyword-rich in-app events, fill every US localization with English keywords, and capture Google web search traffic. Steve's motivational app went from no sales to over $1,000 a month from organic downloads alone just by changing keywords and title.

Lessons that draw on this:

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript398 lines
0:00

coming up I'm going to share the advanced ASO strategies that you should be utilizing in 2024 stay tuned what is up app Nation happy New Year and welcome to 2024 and if you're new to this channel while you are in the right place if you're trying to learn these strategies that will help you grow your app downloads and your revenues I've been in this space since 2011 doing this full-time since 2014 and I want to share with you all the different strategies that we are utilizing for the tiniest of apps and the biggest of apps so without further Ado let's get started number one you want to focus on Niche keywords look the App Store is not the app store when I started in 2011 it is very crowded and so you're going to have to find if you're not one of the big players with the Big Brand you're going to have to find these Niche keywords that these bigger Brands may not even paying attention to now going to pause

1:01

here for a little bit I've worked with a lot of big Brands and what I've noticed from them is they think about the app Business a little bit differently than what Indies might be thinking about it the big Brands tend to have a funnel in place they raise some money so they need to do some marketing which means they need to run some Facebook ads they need to run a bunch of ads they're not even paying attention to ASO they could care less about ASO they're just thinking about let's spend some money to get some downloads get that data and then lower the cost peray install All That Jazz and also some of these bigger brands are going to go after the most competitive high traffic High competition keywords so let the big guys fight amongst themselves and will'll focus on these Niche keywords so let's get into it I want to give you some examples our motivational app right here the keyword volumes that we ranking number one now I

1:52

wanted to highlight this because mobile action saying the search traffic is 3724 for these two particular keywords whereas app radar is saying it's number five I know that mobile action especially with the AI craze has way better traffic scores than any other tools in my opinion right now at radar still very good from a difficulty perspective but mobile action is more accurate from a search traffic perspective same with that follow as well and so as you can see I discover these new two keywords and we are number one for these keywords this app was doing nothing for the longest time so if you got an app out there and you're like struggling to make it work really pay attention to keyword research and try to find the best keywords out there and sometimes these new keywords just like for my app will pop up and just like that we went from getting no sales whatsoever for this particular app boom

2:42

we hit over a th000 in September in October and we've done better since but this is an older screenshot but we're averaging about $1,000 to $1,500 just with Organic downloads for a $20 a year product okay didn't add new features just change the keywords the app title and all that that stuff and that led to the boom all right as you can see we're getting about 2,000 downloads roughly and all organically I'm not spending any paid marketing so this is the type of business I like to run I don't have to worry about this we're getting constant downloads for free and we're making money all right so let me give you some new data with a new sleep sounds app now for me what I'm doing is finding these Niche keywords and then building app versus thinking about the app idea and then finding the keywords okay so I knew these keywords had traffic so I launched a new sleep sounds app in November that very first month we launched in November

3:34

5th time range we were able to get roughly about $1,000 933 to be exact all right in December we're doing pretty decently around that same Mark now I'm obviously trying to grow this now I think it has a potential to hit 10,000 and hopefully I'll hit that in Q2 of next year we've worked on New keywords I've tried different things and now I'm like okay going after these other keywords and so forth but there is a whole set of keywords that nobody's paying paying attention to that I'm paying attention to with this particular app okay so if you think it's just for those small numbers you're like oh Steve that's $1,000 what about for bigger clients I'm going to show you this real quick all right so this is one of our clients they're making about $80,000 a month and since we've been working together they we started in roughly the middle of September since we've been working together their keyword traffic has just

4:23

gone up as you can see top one we have 11 new keywords 120 in the top 10 262 in the top 30 76 in the top 50 and then who I don't really know what this means I was like top 100 does this mean that we got more over here and that's why we lost the top 100 I have no idea but we lost some in top 100 which I don't really care about really the big number right here top one is the big one that I have to pay attention to okay and that's the same strategy we use for them so I want to give you some data here's how roughly about the same amount of downloads they getting from App Store search only this is App Store search downloads they're getting way more through other searches but but you can see since we've been working there September we've been able to grow their organic App Store search downloads and I've used this strategy if you don't believe me somebody in the YouTube comments put this in here he said I

5:10

literally tried this step-by-step strategy and I'll link up this video into the info up here but you can see we showed you exactly how to find these Niche keywords what type of search traffic score you should go after and so forth and that's enough and he did this I literally tried this step by step and it worked for my app we went from 0 to 5,000 2 months thanks Steve for sharing your experience okay that was a YouTube public comment right underneath that video that I'll link up so focus on these Niche keywords especially if you're an indie developer out there all right number two inapp events they are super important these days now I've been talking about them for about two years now but here's some new data to share with you now I've been using inapp events for ASO purposes so I tend to have keywords right here that I'm trying to focus in on when I'm putting these inapp events together so it's more for ASO

6:05

purposes and they do help we saw one client get from two to one with just having that inapp event with the right titling so number one make sure the keywords you're going after are in the title of that inapp event and the short description or both descriptions frankly right now pay attention to the dates November 5th here's what we saw for this client on those say dates you can see November 5th and then I pulled from December 4th you can see the conversion rate for this app went up by 35% despite the fact that we were getting less Impressions less downloads less product page views now don't pay attention to these all these numbers because I shared this on LinkedIn and they're like hey what about why did everything else go down we've seen this with other apps where everything went up and the conversion rate went up too all right this is just happens to be the screenshot I have but I trust me when I

6:55

tell you this that for multiple apps big and small small when we've had an inapp event we've actually seen this conversion rate go up and normally I do not pay attention to this number but I was like huh interesting this is a great way to bring users back into your app show them new content it's almost like oh there's something cool happening here and that's why I'm loving inapp events and so for a lot of our apps and a lot of our client apps we're putting together an app event calendar for the remainder of 2024 Google Play has the same thing currently it's only available for apps that have over 1 million downloads but here's what we've seen with Google Play promotional content that's what they're called okay here's where they're displayed you can see in the games home so you can get featured the store listing page right here the events tab right here in this events Tab and then if you search for the search

7:48

results obviously super important right so we did this for one of our clients and we were able to get some leverage from an ASO perspective they're already ranking pretty well for this primary keyword we had an inapp event and start showing up down here so it's just another way to maximize your impression share so to speak and it's lwh hanging fruit like all you really need are some graphics and some text that's it that's really just it so it's a no-brainer it's low touch high impact type of campaign number three us localizations I know this is a little bit dated but I wanted to make sure we had this in 2024 the US App Store indexes nine different localizations that's 10 in total right 1 two 3 four five six seven eight nine okay good all right so that's 10 including the US English you have these 10 different localizations now obviously we've been utilizing the Spanish Mexico for a long time but what I really want

8:45

to point out here is what we're doing from our side is we're going back to number one we're finding these n keywords all these Niche keywords are in the title in these nine different localizations they're in the title they're in the subtitle so we'll have 9 10 11 15 different Niche keywords and we'll put them all in the right places so here's an example for one of our apps you can see the English title and subtitle and then the Spanish Mexico title and subtitle so in all these nine other localizations even though it's Arabic Russian Spanish Mexico and Vietnamese you want to put English keywords to help your Us app store rankings now obviously if you guys are big in Brazil or you're big in Mexico you might want to keep Spanish in there but you can then start to utilize Vietnamese for example or French or Korean as another example as well what we're doing right now is really utilizing the big three for us is

9:42

obviously us English Spanish Mexico and Vietnamese those are the ones that we're really utilizing now I'm on this note with localizations what I also say is don't just focus on englishspeaking countries we've worked with a few different apps especially the Indie ones out there for those who are not in the US like really pay attention to your home country we worked with a couple of different Indie developers who've done $3 $4,000 outside of the US so like Germany in Russia they'll do a lot of sales and revenues and downloads from those countries and then they'll start paying attention to the US so that's okay too don't just focus like on launch be like oh it has to be us it has to be English only no you know your Market you know your language the space is probably less competitive in your Home Country so focus on that Home Country first and then start thinking about the other countries as well even if you just get

10:35

downloads right even if you start getting downloads from those and maybe not sales because the conversions might be low I've talked about this and I talked about this in my sub Club interview and people got a kick out of it so I'm going to keep mentioning it but number four keyword installs or boost now run at your own risk I'm not promoting them I'm not telling you you should do it I'm just telling you a lot of people I've worked with some bigger companies do do these keyword install campaigns to help boost their keyword rankings and yes they are still effective today but run at your own risk I'm neither telling you to do it or promoting it or advising you to do any of these campaigns I'm just telling you they exist and that other people are doing it lastly and something I'm very very fascinated about and very much focused on is Google web search I'll give you two examples the organic side

11:24

now back to your Niche Keers right I have a client that really called their app niche keyword app right in the app stores you can see the number one for Google on desktop search now when I search for Niche keyword app they're number one on Google they're number one on Apple there's 5,400 searches a month for this particular keyword not too bad now I don't know what number you should be looking for but I think 5,000 good enough number okay really 1,000 is good enough for me but heck five the more the mara right so you can see that but on mobile search which most of the searches are happening on on our phones obviously he's also number one right here I've blocked out all the apps because I don't want to reveal this Niche keyword and when I look at his App Store connect data you can see he's getting roughly about a 100 downloads a day just from Google this is app refer and this is Google so you see Google and Google

12:15

Chrome combine those two they're roughly about over a 100 downloads a day just from those two channels so don't sleep on it long as there's traffic people searching for blank app Niche keyword app or just frankly Niche keyword you might get better results on Google and we saw another friend Rudy who had over 200 downloads cuz he was number one for a keyword getting 200 downloads a day from just Google all right so harder to hack I'm trying to figure out the algorithm behind that but I just wanted to point that out this is one that you can control sem and PPC marketing now one of my past guests Martin from podcast app he shared this strategy so I don't mind sharing this right here as well he said look I was like Martin what's working for you guys he's like ASO SEO and SE M and I was like H tell me a little bit more about SCM he said well we're bidding on some keywords so when people search for podcast app he's

13:07

Bing on this term but unlike a Google UAC campaign they're then taking them to a website and that website takes them to the App Store so it's not a Google UAC campaign it's actually a Google search campaign where you can bid it's like an apple search ads campaign but on Google right and we've seen decent success ESS on this for some of our clients and I want to learn a little bit more there might be ways to just bypass this entire landing page so stay tuned for that I don't have enough details but what we have seen is sometimes the cost per click on Google is a lot cheaper than the cost per tap on Apple search ads so it does give you another Avenue or downloads that might actually be cheaper for app than Apple search ads all right I really like this campaign I'll have more details I'll probably create a course out of this once I've have enough of a grass on this particular campaign all right guys if I miss anything leave

14:03

a comment below let me know what you're doing what you're focus on from an ASO perspective in 2024 and if you're an indie out there and you found some success well reach out to me we' love to have you on the YouTube channel as well all right happy New Year hopefully I'll see you in person in 2024 that's it I'll see you on the next video