App Store Optimization: The Proven ASO Framework for 2026

Coming up, I'm going to break down how to actually make ASO work for you in 2026. Stay tuned. What is up app nation? It is Steve Pang, founder of appmasters.com, and today I'm going to break down what's actually working when it comes to getting organic downloads from the app stores in 2026. So, without further ado, let's get started. All right, here it is. ASO. And for those who are not familiar to ASO, it is just SEO for the app stores. It's to drive organic downloads for your app. It's one of the best channels that I've used ever since I've been in the app stores since literally almost the birth of the app store. been in the app space since 2010 and it's been a tremendous lever for growth but getting super hard today with vibe coding and the amount of new apps launching every single day every single month it's getting a lot harder and a lot more crowded to really make ASO work for a lot of newer apps now for

established apps a lot easier especially if you have a paid marketing channel but for those newer apps and those indie developers out there, I would say ASO still kind of works and I'm going to break down what you should be focusing in on as of today. All right, let's get started. So, for those who aren't familiar with the factors, here they are. Here are the most important. I've kind of laid it out this way. The most important is going to be the metadata, right? Your keywords, the what's in your title, what's in your subtitle, what's in your keywords field. For iOS, for Google Play, it's title, short description, and description. So that's still extremely important. It's probably most important in my opinion. And download volume. So this is why more established apps with paid user acquisition, paid marketing or social media presence will have that download volume. That actually helps with your

organic rankings. And then obviously user ratings and reviews. Those are important, but I would probably put that in the mostly important as of today. The more ratings you get, the more likely people are to download. So hopefully that helps out your paid ad channels and then that helps out your meta metadata, right? So here are the mostly important rates and these are things that I kind of look at but I don't think they make a huge difference. They're important but like you know it's not what I would solely rely on is what I would say. So the conversion rate I know a lot of people ask me about this impression of downloads. This is shown within app store connect. I don't actually pay attention to that number just because I have no idea what impressions mean.

Right? That's primarily it. But I do look at the product page view to download. So it is important to test out your screenshots to hopefully increase that conversion rate. Your sales, this is a factor. So it's mostly important as well. But I've seen other apps that don't rank as well in ASO, but obviously make more than their counterparts that do rank well in ASO. And then obviously retention engagement and that's extremely important for Google who takes that into account. iOS we're starting to see signals I mean we've been saying this for a few years now that they're starting to pay attention to retention engagement. So I think it's going to be a big priority for iOS moving forward.

All right here are the lease updates and these are things that people talk about. App updates important but not super important. seen apps that like literally hasn't been updated for like years that rank really well for certain keywords. It's annoying. App installs, something to pay attention to, but nothing to like really put a lot of efforts in. And then back links and external traffic. I know this is important on Google Play and even on iOS sometimes, but not hugely important. Backlinks important for more of the website. So, if you're trying to use SEO to drive downloads for your app, which a few of our clients do pretty well on, that's important. But in terms of just ranking well within the app stores themselves, not as important.

Now, this is for those who are just starting ASO. A lot of you advanced people already know this trick, but the US app store on iOS indexes nine different localizations, including Spanish Mexico, which we've used for years at this point. It expanded to Vietnamese, Russian, Portuguese, and all that stuff. So, you can take a screenshot here and Apple has this. If you just Google it, you'll find all the different countries and the corresponding other countries that it supports. I think UK has other countries as well.

And then Canada has Canada English, Canada French. So, a lot of different overlap when it comes to localization. Now, what that means is you can have English titles, English subtitles, English keywords in your Spanish Mexico localization or your Vietnamese localization and that will help your organic rankings and keyword rankings for the US. That's essentially what it means. All right, here's an example of one of our apps. You can see I have this is our US localization. Here's our Spanish Mexico localization. And I'm using English in both. And I'm trying to balance the the keywords that I'm trying to go after. And so that's an example of how you can leverage this other localization tactic. All right. Okay.

Here's the most important part. If you're new to ASO, you got to find the right keyword. And what does that mean? Here are some examples. So this is one of our clients and they're number one for certain keywords. And these are the traffic scores, right? And here's how the app does. Gets about 150 downloads a day. Now, on launch, we were able to find these two keywords, get it to number one very, very quickly. And this was in 2023, okay? So, a few years ago, but we were able to drive 150 downloads organically. If you don't believe me, here it is. This is app store search.

So, download by source type. You can see apps source search. So, a lot of it all through organic and sales right from the jump. Now, this is very rare and it's very hard to do, especially if you're just relying on ASO from day one. So, I'm extremely proud of this, but we were able to generate $1,600 in sales in the first 22 days just finding the right keywords. And these were keywords that a lot of people were ignoring. So, $1,600 in sales in 2 in the first 22 days of launch for absolutely free because we were able to find the right keywords and knowing what we know get that app to be number one for those particular two keywords. And here's another example.

This is an app of ours that we've sold, but the app was doing nothing for the longest time. For years, mind you, for years. Okay, it was launched in like 2022 probably, but for years it was pretty much doing nothing in terms of sales. one keyword change and we change the app title to because we found these two keywords. Change the app title and these two keywords have traffic. Change the app title and we're able to get to number one for those two keywords and finally start making money and we since exited that app. Now, you're probably asking, "All right, Steve, what keyword should I pick? I mean, there's a whole lot of keywords." So, here's the way I would do this. I would try to find relevant keywords, okay, that are catered to your app. Find about six to 10 with the least search score of 30, right? It worked for me. Finding those two keywords with search score of 30 got to 100 downloads a day and started.

That's a great way to get start driving downloads and more revenues. You optimize them in the US title, subtitle, and then Spanish Mexico title and subtitle. I picked six to 10 because you can fit roughly about six to 10 keywords in both these localizations, both the title and subtitle of these two localizations. Now, these are optional, not necessary at this point, but you can do a lifetime offer for free. I know a lot there's been some push back, but trust me, it still works for just 2 days, and you can promote it on our other company that we own called Indie App Santa, or you can even do it on Reddit through different subreddits. All right, again, these are optional, not really necessary. Why I like these optional plans is after an ASO update, I like to give these new keywords a bit of a push. And so when I make a lifetime free offer for my app and I promote it on Indie App or Reddit, that usually

drives thousands of downloads. Again, remember the factors, download volume, download velocity. So, I'm trying to give these keywords a bit of a push by bursting downloads within a short amount of time. All right, so that's why I like to have them in there. Here are things that you should not go after as well. All right, so here are the dos and don'ts of picking the right keywords. Do not go after your competitor keywords.

They generally do not work. Okay, if they're branded search, they're probably going to click on the first search result, which is going to be the brand. So if I was Nike, for example, and there's Reebok right behind me, well look, I search for Nike. I'm more likely to download Nike. Nike is already the number one ranked keyword. Not likely I'm going to scroll down any further than the first search result. Okay. You can go after these competitor terms on Apple ads. That's a great way to do it, but I wouldn't do it for ASO. Go after relevant higher traffic keywords if you can find them. And that that's the hard part these days. And go after these keywords in the title and subtitle. And if you're just starting out and you don't have a paid marketing channel, I would try to go after longer tail keywords. All right. Now, if all else fails, you did this strategy and it did not work, what I would suggest to you is

go after search traffic of five keywords. Okay. Look, any ASO tool out there will have search scores. Apple doesn't tell you exactly what the search scores mean. That's why I had to do a lot of analysis to tell you, hey, 30 search score, here's what I've been able to achieve by ranking number one for these 30 search score keywords. These days, because ASO is so hard, what I would do is use ASO mobile. These are one of our sponsors and partners, and this is one of our apps that we have.

And try to rank for keywords. This is what I mean. The search score right here of five or 20 if you can do that. And so you can see, you know, I'm ranking number one for this keyword. I'm about number four for paraphrase, which has 20 search traffic. I know it says five here, but actually 20. And then paraphrase tool, I'm number six, and that has 23. So this is what I mean when I say search score of five. Just try to go after those cuz those are going to be a lot less competitive. And now you're playing the quantity game. You need a lot of these keywords ranking well. And I'll give you an example. So let me back up real quick. I'm going to link the video to this particular video so you can see how I use it. But there is a you add your app or you can add your competitor's app and then you go to app keywords and this is how you can do keyword research really quickly. All right. And then I try to pull the search

traffic scores for these keywords and try to figure out what's the complexity level. If it's low, the higher likelihood I'll be in the top five, hopefully three, and hopefully one. Okay, so ASOM Mobile, I'll link that up and you can see a full product breakdown of that particular tool. But here's one of our clients that we worked with and I've kind of removed all the info for this client. This was a category that I was like, you know what, there's just really no search traffic scores for them. But if you're working with us, here's a spreadsheet we kind of put together. We pull the data from two different sources and what we found was this client. Now I've only showing the keywords that they're number one for.

They have 92 keywords that they're number one for. And look at the search traffic. It's all five. And when we looked at the data, the App Store Connect data, the client was making roughly about $2 to $3,000 a month. Now, if you're just relying on ASO, that's a good number to hit. If you want to scale it, you're going to need paid ads. We've have clients that are making about six figures, half a million dollars. You know, some of them that are purely driven by organic search, but the good thing about those clients is their brand also has organic search. So, they're not just relying on generic terms, they're also relying on their branded terms, right? But this is one where I started thinking through late last year in 2025 that, hey, I think this is the next best strategy. So, this is a quantity game.

As you can see, you need a lot of five search traffic keywords, but even for our app, Paraphrase, you know, there's a just a select few keywords that we rank really well for, and that's making about $3,000 a month all organically as well, pretty much organically. We have a little bit of Apple search ad spend. Okay, that's it. So, just to recap with ASO, I think it's getting really, really hard these days. You're going to have to do a lot of keyword research and you're going to have to be patient. What I would do is utilize ASO as a part of your overall marketing channel, not just the entire pie. So, it needs to be a slice of the pie, not your entire pie.

And if you've already unlocked a paid marketing channel like Meta, like Tik Tok, or you figured out the organic social media to drive growth, then I would say ASO is a great candidate for you [music] cuz given our knowledge, we can help you expand and gain more organic downloads. If you're purely relying on it, I would say try to run some ads. And I like to start off with Apple ads, especially if I'm under $10,000 of MR. I want to start off with Apple ads. It's a lot cheaper. All I need are keywords and I can just start with that. So, that's what I would do personally. But, if you're interested in learning more or working with us to help you with your ASO, with more importantly your payroll and monetization, go check out appmasters.com and make sure you hit subscribe on this video cuz all we do is talk about apps and how to increase downloads and revenues. Oh, I forgot one last thing. All right. If you want our

full ESO course that includes some of the crazy tactics that we can't share publicly cuz it'll stop working terms of increasing your ratings and review, you know, some of our cool little tricks that I can't talk publicly about. But go check out atfounders.co and that gives you access to our entire course library that includes the monetization tricks and ASO. We've got hundreds of videos and hundreds of app founders within that community. So, go check out appfounders.co.

All right. Now, I'll see you on the next video. [music]