App Store Optimization in 2021 - Keyword Research (Part 3/6)

What is up nation? It is Steve P young founder of Appmasters.co, the place you go when you want action packed content related to helping you grow your app downloads, and more importantly, you'll revenue, the money, money, dollar bills ya'll. And in part three of our ASO course, we're going to talk about one of the most important pieces of the ASO puzzle. And that is. Keyword research. One of the biggest mistakes I see app developers make is using keywords in prominent sections.

And the previous videos we told you. All those prominent sections, but using keywords that have absolutely no traffic. And by following this video and this exact process, you'll be able to find hidden gems, keywords that have high traffic, low competition that are going to be important for helping you drive those organic downloads, helping you build a brand and obviously outranking your competitor. So let's get to it.

All right. Step number one, start with three to five keyword. Now we're going to expand on that. Think about your app, and then think about the three to five keywords that most people might be searching or might be using. When there's trying to find an app like yours. Now, I'm going to use my app, this app right now that I just launched and we're going to be doing a case study on our YouTube live streams. Pretty soon.

So I will make sure that we can link that into the show notes once it's live and you can check it out there if you're watching this later on. But if you're just watching this as this video goes live, make sure you tune into our YouTube live streams that happen every Friday at 9:00 AM Pacific, but we're going to really dive deep into how much money we're making and so forth. But here we're going to use this app, right?

So for me, obviously, I want to go after sleep sound. Because this is an app that allows you to fall asleep and you can remix different sounds, all the critical things. And these are very popular types of apps that you've probably already seen the app stores, but you can hear crickets city sounds, you know, instrumental. So we put a lot of work and effort into putting a lot of different sounds in here. And what I want to do is just start with those.

So for me, it's sleep sound. It's pink noise, it's white noise, it's relaxed melodies. These are the type of keywords that I'll want to rank for. And the main one, obviously, because it's in my app, title sleep sounds. Next thing that we're going to do is use a tool that I absolutely love it is called. App follow here's the website@followed.io. And here's what we're going to do. You're going to sign up for absolutely free.

And I've got a free account too, and we're going to go into live keyword ranking and with the five, three to five keywords, you're going to just put them in. Okay. So I'm going to put sleep sounds and I want to see what type of keywords that come up in here. They come up with 10 suggestions. So these are all the auto-fill keywords. So if I were in the app right now, putting sleep sounds. And I didn't hit enter. These would be Apple's autofill suggestions.

And that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for Apple to expand on it because when you take the autofill suggestions, just like Google on Google play and Google and SEO, Google's telling you an Apple is telling us that these are the keywords that are very popular searches that contain the word sleep sounds. Okay, so I'm going to copy this. I'm gonna click this and I'm going to open up my text editor. I use BB edit, but here's what we're going to do.

This is my exact process when I do any type of ASL project. Okay. I'm going to pace these keywords in here, right? Some you don't need, so I'm going to actually delete some of these things. Sleep sounds, tracker. Ah, I don't really need that free. Okay. For kids rise, this is probably a app called rise and leave that in there. And this sounds by sleep pillow. Okay. Again, probably just want sleep. Right? We sleep. Sounds Apple.

Great. Now the other thing I can do is just put sleep and see what happened. Sense of what happens here, sleep tracker. So these could be potential sleep better. Right? That could be a keyword that I want to rank for that in there sounds sleep. IQ may be sleeper maybe. Okay. So I'm going to do that, right. And let's say the other keywords that I have are going to be relaxed melodies, for example. It is a competitor of ours.

So that might be a keyword or maybe I want to go after pink noise. So I'll put in pink noise in here. So you just want to start putting in these different keywords. Okay. And sometimes they expand, they sometimes they don't. Cool. And we're going to put it all in textile. I usually try to come up with a hundred keywords, but for the sake of this video and not having to be an hour long, which might take this whole process, I'm going to keep it relatively short, but you want to start with those three to five keywords.

Okay. Number three. Is look for the app that stands out for your main keyword. Now for me, I'm gonna go back to my example. I'll put sleep sound. So I've started building a longer list. Usually there's a lot longer, but I'll start with those three to five and I'm going to look at these search results. So what comes out first? Sleep sounds calm. Dang, calm. Didn't know your ranking. So well, maybe I should go after a different keyword.

All right. So what I want to look for is look, columns got a million plus reviews. All right. So I'm like, ah, let's get a lot. That's going to be a lot. And it's going to be hard for me to outrank that, especially as a new app. Okay. So I'm looking for one that stands out in terms of the number of reviews. Maybe they don't have as many as everybody else on this list on this top tip. Okay, so this is rain premium. This is an in-app purchase.

Now this is also a good habit to name your in-app purchases with the keywords that you want. Because now this rain sounds, this is one of their in-app purchases that are showing up. Okay. Alexa, melodies. So, again, these are, this is decent 8,000 compared to two hundred thousand one hundred thousand sixteen thousand sixty eight thousand. So we might have found it, guys. This sleep not bad sleep right here is interesting.

Cause it only has 879. So these are some candidates right here. I don't know how to say that or just this sleep sounds and meditation. All right. So I'm going to pick both. We can try both, but here's what we're going to do with this one that stands out. We're going to actually, you can just actually click on this. Okay. I'm going to click on it. And what I follow is doing is showing you all the different keywords from Apple search ads, this and the cool thing about it is now you're really starting to build.

Right. So I will actually copy this so you can hit, whoops, go on popularity. I'm gonna hit copy. And then here's what I'd normally do. I put this in Excel spreadsheet. All right. Here's my spreadsheet. I'm gonna put keyword because the way and score, I'm going to pace and then I'm going to go data and I'm going to filter cool. Do this a little bit. And I'm just going to fill it. Now, here's what I like to do. I will blow this up a little bit for you guys, but I want to go through some of these and just find the ones I like.

So sleep tracker is probably not a good fit for me, cause I don't track your sleep. So I'm put calm or I want to look at that white noise meditation. We don't really do meditation, but sleep sounds Bose, ASMR sound machine, but bed Wars. Interesting. Uh, so I'm going to copy these again, these become keywords that potentially want to target. So in another video, we're going to run the data on these, and I'm going to show you how I determine where certain keywords go in the titles of talent, so forth.

But right now we just really want to build a long list without really caring about the data. Quite yet here because of that follow, we can see the search traffic score. Now, when you think about, when you see this score, you're probably thinking to yourself, what does this really mean in terms of keyword volume or how does one, how does a score equate to downloads? We just don't know. Right? We know Facebook, Instagram, the very most popular apps get close to a 99, a hundred score.

And calm, pretty popular, right? It has a 70 and that's all we know and what I try to say it. And I'll kind of cover this in a later video. What's the minimum to go for, but for now, just know that we want to find the higher, the better. So we'll just pick a few. Okay. So I really go down this list and I find the ones that are the ones that make most sense for me. So like here sleepy is, I'm like, Oh, I'm getting bedtime.

This is good. Where this was a keyword, never thought of soothing sleep sounds and didn't come up when we were doing the autofill. So I'm definitely adding that to my list. Help one. It doesn't make sense, right? Fall asleep fast. Huh? That's interesting. I want that free sleep stories. Okay. That makes sense. Because you know, we put that app in there. We don't have sleep stories. I'm gonna delete that. So again, fall asleep.

Cool. Free sleep music. We definitely have that, you know, then this allows us to really start generating a lot of different keywords. Okay. And I just keep copying and pasting and you might see that there are some duplicates and I'll show you how to get rid of them, but you'd want to start doing that. Right. And why I picked this one that stood out is because they're standing out for a reason. And so I'm trying to find the keywords that they know of, that we might not be thinking about that calm and the popular apps appear are definitely not thinking about right.

If I pick this, they're going to show the most popular keywords that we probably already know if I pay call or if I even pick relaxed melody. But I want to pick the one that stands out just a little bit, because then I could get a real good sense, because I'm gonna assume they're doing their ASO really well. They've done some tactics really well because they only have less than a thousand reviews and they're showing up in the top 20.

So I'm assume that, and I want to find these keywords and usually you're going to have to scroll to the very bottom of this list. So let me go back to that spread. Spreadsheet, we're going to have to keep scrolling. So help me sleep. That's interesting. Right? So all around the scores are around the things where I'm like, ah, this is not that much, right. I usually want to be above 20 and definitely above 10, because anything under 10, it just does not have enough traffic to sustain long-term growth and downloads.

Right. But I'm gonna start building this list and then let's go back real quick and then we can pull, you can do the same thing. So you could do the same thing here. And you can follow this same exact process. So they start landing interesting. Now you're starting to see different keywords, sleep, better, insomnia, cookies, anxiety, sleep booster. So you're starting to see different keywords that are showing up. Because we put a different app.

So again, I started building this list, right. And I met, I might pick three to five different competitors and put that into the search ads recommendation right here. Or just, just click on the app that shows up in the surgery. Now we should have a long list of 100 plus keywords that we can then pull the data on to see what the competition looks. And if we should really target that keyword in right. All right. Let's get into the last step and that is to use any, so I have relaxed melodies already put up right here, but you go into app any, again, it's all free.

I'm logged in. I pulled up the app, relax melodies. I can pull up the other ones too. But what I'm going to do is go to ASO keywords and unlike all the other ESO tools out there at Benny's the only one that gives you keyword data on the keywords that the app ranks really well for. So as you can see this app ranks really well for relaxed melodies, obviously calm because it's happening, calm, sleep sounds. Number two noise machine.

So now I can copy and paste all this into my handy dandy spreadsheet. Now the copying and pasting is going to be a little bit tricky, but you can just copy and paste this whole row and then put it into your keyword text file. And so that's what I would do. Now. You can then go into our other competitors. So this was the other one, right. As you can see, you know what we've done in the past, and this is old, like 2011 trick, but maybe it's still working because my, yeah, look, this app wants to 2019, it's 20, 21 now.

But what they did was their, their developer name is very similar to the keyword that they want to target. And so that actually helps you rank them. When your developer name has that. And so as you can see sleep, that might be one of the reasons why they're ranking really well for sound. I like what they did. They used to put sleep and then put sounds where it afterwards. It's nice. All right, let's go back to this. So we'll go into the keywords here on app Annie, and then we have these keywords that they rank so we can copy and pasting.

You can sort by rank if you wanted, just do that for you real quick. So apps to help you sleep. The number one, there you go. Didn't think of that keyword, right? This becomes a particular keyword, commonly music. Did it help me? Don't know what that, why sleeping music. So again, these become keywords that we can then use, put it into our spreadsheet right here. Now I'm using BB edit on Mac. If there were keywords that are duplicated because I have my assistant, someone on my team run the data and we're going to show you how to do that later on, but I'm going to process duplicates.

Right. And what I try to do is just delete duplicate lines. Definitely do that. And duplicate, so a new document, you don't have to put kind of like do it, but anyways, I'll just take that out. So it got rid of all the duplicates. So I'll send this text file over to my team who will then get the data for me on all these keywords. Now, generally I only have 31 just for the sake of this video, but generally you, I usually have up to a hundred, 200 keywords for any one ASO report that I'm going to be putting together.

So you want to have a really big list of keywords. But for now, I just did it just for the sake of time. All right guys, that's it super simple process. I like using the Apple search ads tool because it really helps me find the keywords that I'm not thinking about. The auto-fill just does so much, but the Apple search ads recommendation. I love it because in a way, Apple is saying that, Hey, I know your metadata. Here's some keywords that you might possibly want to target, or I know your metadata.

I'm going to expose some of those keywords as well. So, if you're looking to do competitive analysis on ASO, do that Apple search ads recommendation and put your competitors apps in there. Cause then you can see what keywords they might be using because Apple is just going to really spit that back out to you when you're running search ads, right in the next video, I'm going to talk about the importance of building a brand and share you my favorite tool to find the keywords that are very similar.

To the main keyword that you want to target in your ASO, but also help you build up brand. So make sure you hit subscribe, make sure you like this button. Make sure you don't miss that next video about building a brand. And lastly, make sure you tune in every Friday, 9:00 AM Pacific that's 12:00 PM Eastern time to tune in for our YouTube live streams, where we'll share with you. What's working today. Usually have a guests on and also an audience.

Favorite is wool. I am, I guess we'll take a look at your app and give you feedback on how to grow downloads and how to increase revenue. So if you want to get on that waiting list. Go to this website at appmasters.com/audit. All right guys, until next time, I'll see you on the next video. Bye. Thanks for listening to the app masters podcast for show notes and amazing app marketing content. Check out appmasters.com