App Store Optimization in 2021 - Keyword Optimization (Part 5/6)

What is up app nation. It is Steve P young founder of Appmasters.com The place you go when you want action packed content related to growing your app downloads, and obviously your revenue and part five. Woo. And you believe it part five of this free ASO training. We're going to talk all about how do you optimize for the keywords in your app, title, subtitle, keyword, field, and so forth. So in our previous video, we showed you all the tools that we use to do keyword research.

And including building a brand and why it's so critical that you have to these days, because it's so competitive, build the brand for your app. Now, in this video, I want to show you how to pull all the data, get the most accurate data, and then use that data to optimize your app store listing. So without further due, Well, let's get to it. So here's the app that we're going to be looking at. This is one of my apps and we're doing a lot of ASO tests, so I'm sure all of this is going to change as we, it keeps going forward, but this is the app that we did and I use all the tools.

So what you want to do is put together a spreadsheet like this. Okay. Now this is my own patented spreadsheet. Okay. You're not gonna find this anywhere else, but here's what we're doing. The key thing is to all the keywords you pooled in part three and four. Of this series, you're going to then put them into an ASO tool. Now the two that I recommend right now operate are being one of them. I love them. They're so super affordable or mobile action now because we're an agency.

We like to use two different tools. If you're on an indie budget or startup budget. I would just pick one. I like out radar because the data is very accurate, but the price isn't as high. So it's great for startups out there. So that's why I personally prefer, but I like mobile action as well. So here I'm using both. Okay. Here's what we're going to do. Now. I have this filtered, so I'm going to show you all of this, and this is our exact ASO.

So as you can see, there's a ton of keywords that we pulled for this app, right? Over 210 keywords. Now what I do after I get this, my team puts this altogether and these would be blank right now, but I would then sort, and you can use sort by app radar. I start by the search traffic. Now for those who aren't familiar. The, the reason why I have Spanish, Mexico, English keywords, and the Spanish Mexico localization is because the us app store actually indexes that localization.

So I want to put English keywords in here, and here's what we're doing. We're sorting by search traffic. So I guess my team didn't pull this particular keyword. I think I added this in a later round, but, um, I'm then looking at the search traffic and sorting by it and then kind of figuring out where I should be now. Here's the key. Part you want 75%. Of your keywords to be high traffic, high competition keywords, and about 25% of those keywords to be lower competition, lower traffic keywords.

If you're just starting out, you may want to shift that percentages a bit to more lower competition keywords, right? But I'm coming around because of all the different tricks and tools that I have in our arsenal to optimize for these keywords, I'm coming around and saying like, look, go after the high traffic high competition keywords, because that's actually going to make a huge difference in your organic downloads.

And if it sticks, man, you're going to get thousands of downloads a day. So I come around to just focusing more of our efforts on the low competition, low traffic, and now on the higher traffic higher competition. Keywords let's get back to the spreadsheet. So what I do after this is obviously sleep sounds the big thing for me. So I'm going to focus on sleep sounds. I'm then looking through, given the data I'm looking through which keywords I should target.

Now you see X's, this is my process. I like to put Xs around this target. What does this target column mean? Well, it just means I want to go after that keyword. Let me go back a little bit and explain all these things as after we pulled the data. So mobile action. Traffic obvious chances. The likelihood you'd be in the top 10 app radar traffic. Obvious difficulty is obviously that's pretty obvious keywords length. I just have that.

I don't use it all the time, but it's just the length of the keyword apps is a number of apps that show up and rank. If you're a new app, you won't have a rank for this. So you can put in any app into any of these tools and kind of get the data. But if you're already out there, you launched, then this is your current ranking for that keyword. Right. But that's what it is. I go in and depending on the chance and difficulty scores, I put X's around the keywords I want to target.

Right. So let's say rain sounds. I do have rain sounds in the app. Relaxed melodies, obviously some machine I want to do that and I just go through, and so what I try to find is just high traffic keywords. Now, the brand stuff that I talked about before, here's why I decided to call my app Moonlight because when I'm searching through this data again, I didn't know. I actually did the ASO before, while my developer was creating the app.

So I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to call the app yet. Okay. So I did that way before. Given all this, I was like, wow, this is the first keyword that actually has a good score. So it has really high traffic. Right? We don't know what these traffic numbers mean. Facebook, Instagram, the very popular apps. They have close to a hundred, so we're not entirely sure how many downloads this traffic number is going to equate to.

Right. But obviously the higher, the better. So here's the first keyword that came in that. Had a good ring to it. I like it. I looked in the app stores, there weren't too many apps that were ranking for Moonlight that had really a grip hold on the app store. And so I was like, yo, this is perfect. Right. So that's why I decided to call my app Moonlight because that's my brand now. Right. Moonlight it's. Associated with sleep.

And at the same time, the scores here are showing me that this is a great score, right? Good traffic, lower competition. And when these little highlights for me, I just have a conditional formatting. It just shows me that's green, it's above 70 and it's lower traffic. How I turn lower traffic. And if it's below 40, it's yellow, it's like on the verge. If it's under 30, then it's very low traffic. The reason why I like using two different tools, you don't have to use two.

But the reason why I like it is because if both tools are telling me it's lower competition, I'm going to likely rank for that. And we are number five for Moonlight. I'm trying to get that higher, trying to get into that number one spot. And so I'll share with you how we've been able to do that. Cool. All right. Again, these are ease. This was another term that I thought about in terms of PR potentially for my brand, but you're going to go ahead and depending on I just go Xs, Xs, Xs.

This is things I want to target. So go through this really quick and just put Xs around all this stuff. And so what else you can do is after I've done that, I even do this. So I'm going to filter first and foremost off of X's. What I also like to do is sort by the chance scores now, mobile action. What I found is going to show me more keywords that are lower competition. Whereas that radar doesn't show that many now, which ones have been correct?

Which ones? Haven't, that's still up in the air for me. I haven't done a granular look at the two, but I found his mobile actions a lot more. Relax, maybe in their competition. And so I like just sorting by that for now. All right. So reset. That was a good one. That's why I had reset in here. Cause it obviously makes sense. So I was like, all right. That's that makes sense. Rachel Ray, maybe not that. Refresh. Okay. Interesting.

Let me think through that. So I just sort through that and then kind of figure out, because it was going to be a new app that I wanted to really focus. It's more on the lower competition, keywords in the subtitle while still going after the high competition keywords. Okay. So. I'm starting to then, because I've now sorted all the keywords with the X I'm, then starting to think through, okay, where should this keyword be?

And so this is why you see us subtitle. It's like, because I used it there. So if I use it anywhere, then I'm going to put it in the title sort title. So I'll just show you like where it is. And then if it's X means things, I just didn't get to it. Right. Maybe just didn't fit for what I was trying to do. So. I will sort by traffic again, and you can see I'm like, okay, well sleep sounds definitely it's in the U S title.

I want that in there. I definitely want Moonlight. That's going to be my brand name now, moving forward. That's in the U S title manifestation. I was like, ah, it's not hugely important for what I do, but the traffic scores, the difficulty scores are great. And the traffic score is great that I put it in the Spanish Mexico. And I'm going to figure out like, if this is worth continuing to optimize for. And don't pay attention to the ranks because my team just used a previous app that I had as the ranks.

So don't worry about that too much night owl. Great. So these are the things that you start looking for, right? You want to try to find good high traffic keywords and start optimizing for it. And I like to filter it just so I can see, get a sense of the difficulty if it's green, like, okay. Go here and see if that's okay. If yellow it's like right on the verge. And then you can also do difficulty here by operator. And I do that a little bit more often because mobile action.

I know a lot of keywords are gonna be lower difficulty. So I then say, okay, operator, are you telling me? And then both tools are telling me low competition. Then I'm going to really, really go after that particular keyword, a couple of key things out on point out. Are we referred to the Spanish Mexico? I have English in there. Notice that I have actually different title, app name and different subtitle in both vocalizations.

Cause I want to target the English speaking us market. Right? So I'm using that Spanish, Mexico, not putting Spanish in there. I'm using English. I lost the brand in the Spanish Mexico. Because I don't, I want to really focus on sounds to sleep, right? That's the key word I want to really go aggressively after. So I lost my Brandy. I didn't care about the market as much. And I was like, okay, I'm going to go straight forward.

Now, if you care about your branding, you can leave it in there. Hasn't made a huge impact in terms of keyword rankings, in my opinion anymore, it's just up to personal preference. The other thing that I like to try to do too, is the us keywords that might be using that really want to optimize for, I ended up repeating them in the Spanish, Mexico subtitle. I have run a test that if I double up it actually helps me. I haven't done run a test where if I'm using it in Spanish, Mexico subtitle, but I remove it from the U S keyword field.

Does it hurt me? I will run that test and report back to you, but that's just something to be aware about. And then the keyword tool or the Spanish Mexico keyword field. It's completely new. Right? You don't have to repeat anything. If the singular is there, you don't have to have the plural. Most times you can test that. I have tested it with different keywords and doesn't make a huge difference. You also do not encounter refer this back in another video, but you do not want to put spaces in between the keywords.

So if you have cricket, put it in there and you put it space, a few things I'm also testing is the order of the keywords. Does it impact your rankings? Like. Am I going to get a higher rank for cricket versus fan because cricket is up front and center. I don't know to be true or not yet running some tests and things that you'd want to test, but those are the things I want to highlight to you. Right. Really try to have the higher traffic keywords in the beginning.

No matter what the competition is. In your title. All right. In your subtitle, you're going to AB test. Now I've already optimized it as you guys can see, this was the first round. I've now changed things around, based on the data that I have. Post-launch okay. And I'm going to keep switching them around. So I would recommend that you update this at least once a month. And if you don't have a new build of ready, just submit the same code with that's what we did.

And then go from there, Riley. It doesn't really matter. So at least once a month, do this, try out new keywords, use all the tools that referenced in video three. To find out, even you keywords to be like, what else can I explore? Because after a while this gets like, okay, I've already put it here. Right? Like I've already put it in the U S title, which is the main spot. And I can't grow keyword rankings. Well, maybe try a different keyword.

It is about that. And the last thing I want to point out is continue to optimize your product, your retention, your conversion rate, because as you continue to tweak that product, the better your numbers become from a retention and monetization standpoint, the better your keyword rankings are going to be, especially on the Google play side, because Google understands all this stuff. They're from this they're big data guys, right?

Whereas iOS, you're starting to see inklings of it, but not super aggressive yet. But at the same time, it is important. Right? So. I wouldn't say it's hugely important yet on the iOS side, but it will become important later on as they get more and more data and they get more sophisticated that your revenues, your retention's all going to tie in to your keyword rankings. All right, guys, that's it. Let me know what you thought in the comments below how you like to do keyword research, how you like to optimize for your particular keywords.

And if you're using this spreadsheet, well, let me know about that as well. I don't have access to this. There is no public. File of this spreadsheet, but if you are within the app masters Academy, you do have access to my handy-dandy template, but it's something that you can build on your own. It's not a hugely sophisticated guys. All right. In our last video part six of six, we're almost done with this free training.

We're going to talk about all the ways that you can increase your downloads without. Touching your keywords. So super important, something that you want to continually be AB testing, look out for part six. That's coming up soon and we've seen some tremendous results, like double the downloads, not even touching the keywords, just optimizing for these few areas that I'll share with you. In part six of this free ASO training.

I am Steve P young on all your social media platforms. So follow me there. If you want to get the insights on Twitter on Facebook. On Instagram, Steve P young or follow at masters on Facebook as well. And go check out our website and our free training. By going to app masters.com. You can get our free training that walks you through how to build a profitable app business, or until next time, make sure you hit that subscribe button.

So you don't miss that critical video six and I'll see you on the next video. Thanks for listening to the app masters podcast for show notes and amazing app marketing content. Check out app masters.com.