ASO Beginner's Guide

coming up is a Facebook live recording that I did for the hello meets community where we talk all about 8s oh I answer a ton of beginner ASO questions so if you're just starting now then this is the episode for you stay tuned what is up app nation it is the young founder of app masters doc oh and before we go to the recorded Facebook live video I want to tell you about an exciting new program that we're just about to launch you can start pre-ordering and ordering today if you want to get access to the special pre-order pricing but it's app masters Academy we've put together everything that we do for our clients into one humongous library of video courses this includes courses from some of our friends about how to localize apps about how to cross-promote which ad units perform the best for monetization and all the courses that we put together and clean our ASO Apple feature courses that's coming up soon and the beta free

strategy that we talked about in our other videos but it's a great great course that we're super excited to launch with it's $25 a month and it's pre-launch pricing right now so if you want to get access to it and lock in that $25 a month pricing then go check it out it is app masters Academy comm app masters Academy comm and we're gonna be launching in just a week September 8th 2017 so all that we're just tidying up a few things just so you guys can have access to it and then for the Apple future course I'm gonna do that live with all the members there so I'm going to walk you through our strategy share the strategy and then ask to answer any questions that we have from the community so if you're ready to grow your app downloads this is the complete course on influencer marketing on ASO on paid of free strategies on any growth happy growth hacking campaigns that you can think of to grow your app downloads

we already get started go check out at masters Academy calm and now to the Facebook live recording cool so great question let me let me just start off with a little bit of overview of Who I am why I was invited to do this so I am Steve P young I'm the founder of at masters Co been in the app space since 2011 and I was doing on the side I used to do growth hacking and only marketing for start-up in San Francisco and I was doing apps on I was like oh this is great and in 2013 I decided well I still had to start up I was like I want to take this seriously I want to be an entrepreneur I used to sold cassette tapes back when I was younger and so I thought the best way to do it was to learn from my heroes and I've always wanted to start a podcast and as someone who listened to a lot of podcasts I was like oh I know I have this app space I'll just interview some of my heroes on a podcast for the

apps and have said continue to grow did that in 2013 on the nights and weekends and then they started building up an audience who then started coming to me for app marketing help now I was just learning at the time so I've interviewed the co-founder should sit co-founder Shazam Crossy Road Tweetbot clear like all the big app developers out there and I was doing that and built up an audience and start coming to me for a mark at mark I'm working help and after seven months after starting the podcast I ended up leaving my startup job to pursue this full-time so since then we've been known in the space for apps optimization which is what kind of cover out getting clients featured by Apple we've had thirteen and one just last last week and then influencer marketing and different growth hacks so for those who are so that's been like four years now we've got a podcast and a YouTube channel that you guys can all check out

but everything's on at masters Co but let's get into some of the questions so if you're brand new to Apps our optimization essentially what it means is SEO for the App Store right so just like you would think about Google and your title your page title and the content on it on that page think of absolute optimum is the same thing so your app name is sort of like the title for your Google if you're trying to optimize for that and then you've got your keywords on Apple and then on Google Play you got your short description your description so you're just trying to optimize for what you think are gonna be the most valuable in terms of traffic keywords in your app game and in your keyword fields I'll make sure I don't miss any questions here too so let me get into some of the basic steps so the the basics are you want to for App Store optimization don't just think about keywords alright it's

important it is important but you got to have a good at because you can rank there are different hacks out there to rank well for certain keywords but if your app doesn't hold up then it's not gonna sustain that high ranking okay so have that balance but when you have that balance already ready to go then I would say your app name is gonna be the highest weight that you have for trying to fix the camera because I'm a stickler for this crap but your app name is gonna have the highest weight so you want your most valuable keywords in your app name and then now with iOS 11 coming up in just probably a couple of weeks theme the subtitles could be important too and obviously the keywords on iOS so that's how you do it okay there's a lot of questions alright so let me start with the I got the question about how do you get your app on top I'm gonna rephrase that because there are so many different variables

there and then submit asks what keyword tools do you use for keyword research on App Store and Google Play alright so that's a great question and I did this case study submit on three different tools that I checked out so I've tried a bunch of them but I have my favorite so far just so save you time our sensor tower and mobile action now I would prefer to use mobile action because I've seen the best results from there if you had to pick one but I try to use both that's my advanced strategies okay so are not asked so I hope that helps so mobile Action Center tower for the tools that I would use and look at a penny as well and I don't know if I have enough time to go through all of this but a penny what if I'm looking at competitors I use that Benny because app and you will tell me if you look at the keywords on the left hand side they'll tell me which keywords they're ranking well for so unlike the other ASO

tools where you have to input keywords a penny actually reveals keywords that a competitor is ranking well for so it's a great way to do some keyword research are not vast we've got about a 16 1,600 downloads for a buggy app now we want to relaunch it into a new one while there's a lot of questions coming in oh no somebody so sucky but I hope you're monitoring all the questions so the if you're gonna relaunch it that's what I recommend depends you've got the 1600 downloads already and if it's like downloads are one thing but how many users do you have if you don't have that many users it might be better to relaunch it as a brand new hat because then you can try to get an Apple feature or you can do brand new a is so on it everything else the that's the pros right you can try to pitch Apple because it tends to be better easier to pitch as a new app the cons would be let's say you've at you've had good reviews so out

of the 1600 you've got like 100 views whatever but you don't want to lose that all right and so a part of ASO is also the the length of time the app azzam in the App Store and so if you have that length of time you want to save that you want to deploy that then it might be worth it if it's an on game I would probably keep it as the version right now if it is a game I'd probably relaunch it as a brand new out because it's easier for a game to get featured by Apple as a new game rather than an updated game how long should the description beam look on the Apple side it is probably not indexed so far with iOS 11 it might be indexed the other thing that let me see if I can scroll through the comments I can't okay good okay so I'm gonna try to hold this off how long should the description be for an Android app so your you have 4,000 characters Sepang I would play around with all 4,000 as much as possible I

have put a bunch of keywords you know there's differing reports that density is more important than actual like length of keywords so think around like when I do Google Play optimization I tend to focus on a select few keywords or is on iOS you know I go after a lot of keywords on Google Play I just sort of concentrate on the most impactful keywords so on iOS I might be going after let's say like 50 keywords and phrases but on Google Play I might shrink that to about 10 to 15 and just have a good density of that and I would also say that what we've seen because we've helped clients get there already number three but we help them with few tweaks to get to number one for a keyword on google play what I've seen is short description long description and the first few characters of the description are really important so I tend to repeat whatever keyword I'm targeting in the app name the short

description and the first sentences of the long description cool can you share some braking strategies as well like shed some light in okay let me read this as if where people are listening this so submit submit a school can you share some ranking strategies as well like shed some light on the App Store algorithms what are the main ranking signals so submit there's a couple of different variables right your app name the keywords that you're using your attention the reviews that you have and the length of time that you've been on the App Store now I would probably say that the biggest most in terms of the algorithm the heaviest weight is gonna be on the app name itself we've been able to you know on average we increase talents for clients for anywhere from 50 to like 400% depending on what the bar that we're working with so if you're averaging about five to ten we would probably like double or triple or 4x

those downloads if you're ready averaging 50 to 100 probably I would say 50 to 20 to 50% increases the download so the biggest way to do it is have the keywords that you're really targeting in the app name and then if you're gonna hack the system repeat it in the subtitle with iOS 11 and then buy some reviews I know a lot of people are I'm assuming based on the names from India and so I know you guys know how to buy reviews but if you if your keywords have certain reviews in it that should help with your rankings oh the last thing is there's a Spanish Mexico trick so if you're focused on the US store I'm more focused on the ASO perspective from english-speaking countries they're the US app store indexes the Spanish Mexico localization so if you put English keywords in that localization happening different app name different subtitle and different keywords in that localization different from your US

localization then you can pretty much double the amount of keywords targeting so usually put competitors or lower traffic keywords that have low difficulty in the Spanish Mexico localization in English okay hello sir you have only 500 downloads and have 63 rating but someone have three rating they are on top so what to do get hold $500 you know like I don't know any more details Suppan so I'm sorry like I'd have to see the app a little bit more it could be your keywords it's kind of harder to determine exactly if you're gonna get it that gonna get that specific it's easier for me to see the actual keyword or the actual app all right people are very active sumit so I'm building an app in Instagram Auto followers like nish I want to know how to do competition research research some apps in the niche have 5 million downloads and they were launched just three months ago I think that's like so I would say look it's

hard to tell because some of these guys are throwing a lot of marketing dollars on these apps and so if you see something take off like well what do they do I would say they're throwing a lot of money at the at the app and so unless you have a big budget I would say the white best way to do market research is to obviously download the app look through their reviews some are probably fake and then look through a penny to see which keywords they're targeting but the way or a penny will tell you which keywords they're actually ranking well for but know that if any app just jumps from nowhere like the sorrow haha one that came out of nowhere usually they're throwing a lot of money at it so anyway and you're asking probably like how much money I would say anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand a day a day to get into the top charts all right Suppan ass I have seen many apps they use same copy content and they

are not the top I don't know what what's the question so on so we asked that for me all right that's a good question sigh so so I asked how can i retarget my App Store listing visitor who came to my app page but did not install the app and this is a for Android I'm no clue to be honest and I don't think that you can do that maybe look at AdWords to see if there's a way to do that like hey pass impressions so I'm not sure unlike a you know like retargeting for your website I'm sure that's where your question comes from I'm sure people are thinking about how to do it but right now they they haven't done it but that's a great one man I like that okay any other questions how are we on time so let me try to Suppan let me ask you said many app I saw that many apps they use same copy content and they're not the top don't know what that means are you saying because they have the same app name list is what I'm gonna assume I'm

gonna answer it this way they have the same app name they have the same keywords may be similar icons and they're not the top right what would like I said there's very there's a lot of variables into absalom position when it comes to rankings so it could be that they're not retaining users could be that they have no reviews whatsoever so it's not just like copying hey I'm gonna copy flappy bird I'm gonna create a very similar app and call it flappy bird too right if there's no reviews there's nothing going on just because you have that keyword into your app name doesn't mean you're gonna rank well for it there's all these other variables so once you've optimized it the app name the subtitle and all and you sort of play with that I'll focus on reviews I'll focus on other things and downloads too because that's a part of the algorithm how do I Drive more downloads okay here's some more stuff

all right shared your video Latino well thank you for sharing the video I appreciate it Facebook said thank them they are using the same description in their app after that they are on top okay I don't know if there's a question in there but look on Android description is gonna come way it's a bigger it's a bigger piece of the puzzle then on iOS the description on iOS it's not a huge part yet thanks for sharing the video guys I really do appreciate that how Google decide ranked in the App Store Google is doing a lot because they're so smart and they come from the search world they're doing a lot in terms of figuring out retention uninstall raids so there are algorithms of way more I would say sophisticated than iOS so it is app name short description long description and then reviews and then downloads and also retention so make sure it retains really well I don't know a soupçon so I think your

question you asked they are using the same app name same description after that they are on top and they are and they have no ratings look I think it's too specific so maybe it's just a copycat trying to figure that out I think it's a little too specific for your type of app I don't think it would work well I don't think it's a long-term strategy and I think it's being that it's too specific it might not make sense for everybody else that's here as well okay this great one a lot of Android questions so I asked if I frequently update my app screenshots would it help in increasing app ring yeah because what you would you can do side wonder what I would do for you is do a be testing on google play with your screenshots and then figure out which one converts better so for a client of ours I actually said hey your icon needs to be updated it looks a little bit outdated and we changed we create a brand new

icon for him we changed it and we a be tested on Google and we saw a 25% I was somewhere around 25 or 50 and forgot what he he's I just did that I posted 25 I think he said 50 but a 50% increase in downloads by just changing the icon so those little things come into play and then once you figure out what works you know let it go for a while and maybe try to optimize your app name to you know I would take it step by step so I would say app name short description long description hack those see if there's a change maybe there's a little bit of change then focus on the actual optimization so the conversion so icon screenshots and then is there a change yes good now go back into the app name short description all that and keywords so I just did take you step by step because if you change too many things at once you don't know what's what's driving the growth really good questions I cannae think you said you mean I want

to talk with you not I won't so I hope that's lon not all right all right is there any website for ASO Suppan yeah there's a bunch of so a panty is one this is like I said this is where they'll show you the competitors or you put in your competitor or even put your own app and they will if you go in the keywords tab they'll show you all the keywords you're ranking ranking well form and then mobile action and sensor tower are the other ones and then I have a bunch of ASO content if you want to check that out on at masters CO and go under like popular posts there's one about I think seven advanced ASO strategies can you please share some of the best tips and tricks yeah so the Spanish Mexico trick that I just told you about the other trick that I would give you guys is to with iOS 11 coming up the app name is getting shorter to 30 characters so make sure that you know you're abiding with those and then repeat repeat whatever

you keyword you want to you want to target into the subtitle I've seen pretty good results with that on the Android side because I know you guys a lot on Android I would say app name it's going 50 now so come really do that and what I would say is also repeat like I said before repeat whatever keyword you're targeting in the app name short description and the first couple of sentence of the long description which I think oh the other thing I would say is uh the tools I've recommended Mobile Action Center tower I would actually use both if you have the budget if you only had to pick one I'm seeing different results so if it's just Android you had to use one what I've seen is that the the traffic scores on sensor tower are probably more correct and more accurate than mobile action but the difficulty score is a mobile action are probably more correct I did this case study there's a video on YouTube where for a

client of ours we increased his rankings into the top five for like six or seven keywords in according to mobile actually they actually had decent volume search volume but we didn't see an increase in downloads at all and so when I looked at the search scores on sensor tower I saw that they're actually pretty low but mobile actions did you know difficulties low which they were right because we're ranking the top five or six for these keywords but no increase in downloads so that's why I'm kind of like if you can pay for both I would pay for both all right all right let's see the pond I think we need to just talk one-on-one because you have a lot of how do I get on top type of questions and really depends on the app okay this is I mean sigh ass on goop on play app page we can see three to four reviews which are on top how Google ranks top reviews if I want to put four or five reviews on top how can I do that

no idea sigh okay cool well I hope I'm coming through for you sesh Seba she said we have been waiting for some kickass tips from you which we wouldn't find in the books and blogs thinks in advance awesome okay like she as hey Steve which all growth hacking strategies can we adopt to increase app downloads on a budget so succeed uh I have a blog post about this my favorite and I actually wrote about this on entrepreneur calm but it's about my favorite growth hacking strategies on a budget so my favorite one this unfortunately doesn't work on Android yet is called a paid a free strategy which works for both paid and free apps okay so it's essentially if you have a paid app you make it free for a couple of days and I would just say one day make it free for one day you have to get pressed for it on a price and BGR that drives a tremendous amounts of downloads and then on the next day you make it

paid again and I'm about to share this case study where a client we did this we drove over 33,000 downloads for his paid out it's a twelve dollar I became an additional one thousand dollars revenue and all we did was the day was free it drove all those downloads and because it spiked in the rankings were able to get and one thousand dollars from that as well okay from that campaign for a free app you can make one of your in-app purchases for free so it could be virtual characters if you have the technical capability or in a in-app purchase like not consumable so like a remove adds additional levels things like that you make it free do you definitely have to get press app advice BGR which stands for boy genius report calm those are two big sites that cover it got some hearts on a like I'm liking these hearts show me some more hearts give me some more hearts I like the hearts keep them coming

hearts are good alright backlinks also work on Android Play on Play Store yeah so fun they do work I just don't see them working as effectively as if you just changed the app name around so it might work in terms of like the tie breaker right but not so much if that's like your main strategy just building up app backlinks can we use same keyword I love these hearts alright I love the smiley faces - I saw a few of those those are good oh look at this let me just I saw what how can we use the same keyword in the long description absolutely absolutely that's why I would do like I said you know what I've been playing around with and you just something you guys want to test is the bolding certain keywords that I these starts distracting bolding certain keywords I'm targeting so you know it's a trick that works well on SEO so I was like hey would it work I don't have enough data yet so I'm still toying

around with it but I've been building keywords in the description that I want to focus on Google Play please send the link here are you talking about the strategies I'm not sure all right did da you play a part in increasing a prank you know it's yes I would say sigh yes da you just means daily active users I would say yes because it's retention right retention to becoming a key part it's always been a key part on Google Play but not so much Apple and I think Apple starting to take in to account of this as well hi Steve on a website I can target different customer segments by creating different landing pages how do i target them on the App Store so yeah there's no I think you're talking about a be testing Neha so on Google Play you can do that right you can a be test there's no way to say like I only want to show these people this thing and these people this thing so all people named Steve gets one app page all

people named mark get another page there's no way that you can do that the the best way is to a/b test so the only thing you can do is a bit has different icons and hope for the best but there's no way you can target I mean the only way you can do that is probably just running Facebook ads and targeting different customers and showing them different messaging based off of that so I would say probably yeah Facebook yeah it's probably the best cuz I was thinking through Google Adwords and I don't think you can do that with Google AdWords either so I ask will increase in uninstall' lead to reduce out-breaking yes yes the blog link it's just at masters Co slash popular - posts or blog I mean you guys can look it up if you're on the computer go to a masters CO and then I think at the very bottom it says popular blog posts just click on that and let's just see all my popular blog post so soupçon ask what

keyword tools do you use for a keyword research on App Store and Play Store I've already mentioned a bunch soupçon pay attention it's a pani mobile Action Center tower on Google Play description the only place I can stuff keywords for Google Play optimization yes Ian on Google Play you can only stuff keywords you can do that in the app name now they made it fifty characters short description long description put them on the left just like SEO put your most valuable most targeted keywords on the left hand side so start with that thanks for sharing thanks for sharing weapon all the hearts we'll app indexing help me increase my a prank sigh I mean these are all like micro type of questions and the way I feel about this is it's too micro right like yeah probably but like just focus on building a good app putting the right keywords in the app name that's what I've seen the most benefiting people

asking all this stuff about iOS thought I'm like I've been able to see increase in downloads with a crappy icon crappy screenshots and crappy everything else just by optimizing the app name and the keywords within it and finding the right keywords the key to apps are optimization in my belief is finding keywords that have decent competition I mean I'm sorry decent traffic below competition and that's why I recommend using both mobile action incentive tower because what I found is but if both tools are telling me low competition I tend to rank really high for that if one says it and the other doesn't then it's a mismatch of sometimes it doesn't always work but if both tools are telling me yes this keyword has low competition I can rank really high for that keyword deep peak asks how effective is a/b testing testing really effective I we increased downloads by 50% for a client just by changing around

his app icon so really effective when you can do it well alright thanks for staying up so late guys I want to get hearts when I ask for it that doesn't feel that great okay all right well black hat ASL works sigh Hospital black hat ASO work so black idea so I share this strategy too is when you sort of game the system and put reviews so what I saw my black hat ASO strategy was buy reviews with keywords that you're targeting that helps your app rankings so it does work it's just it's not a long-term strategy but it is a strategy that a lot of people deploy because if you think about it if you see an app and you're like holy crap they launched 2 days ago and they have like 100 reviews it's probably blackhat ASO and they're probably buying reviews so a lot of people a lot of companies are doing it it's just I don't know if it's a long-term strategy I know a lot of big bigger game companies the other way too black hat is so is

what I call a search boost some people call a search spike I don't know but essentially what it is is driving downloads with a keyword search so this user search for your targeted keyword and then download your app and that game's a system now again what we've seen is we help the client go from 108 to 1 and then I think he'll and in top three or four but essentially you gotta have a really good app right like he already had ton of reviews or really well optimized app and we're able to make it stick because I've seen certain keywords that go all the way up and then all the way back down and it's been so my clients it's like well sorry you didn't stick what got you there for one day and we've been doing this for another client where we're going after really really competitive keywords and we're being able to get him up there and it takes time to but he's already got a good app he's already got a good reviews

he's already well optimized so tend to work that way and I did this for one of my apps and we're able to rank really high for low competition high traffic keywords so can you name some companies who are doing blackhat a so I don't want be associated with that but I I we do some of that side and then the other ones are called I think they're called hey let me pull it up on my website okay yeah so 8s Oh top one the number one calm and that allows you to do those keyword things in there and then the other one where I started buying reviews be careful when you buy reviews is best review app calm they're great like spammy names I think this review app calm is where I've tried to buy a few reviews on there they don't always think the thing about buying reviews is apples obviously catching on and same with Google and what happens is you see them live on the App Store and a couple of days Google and Apple take them down so be

very very careful the way I like to do this is I like to run this pay to free campaign that I answered earlier where I Drive a tremendous amount of downloads organically good users and then I buy reviews so from an Apple Google perspective it looks very much like nothing funny is going on all right guys anything else before we wrap up and I take off and start working on some other things cool well I do if any questions come up I'll answer them but I do appreciate you coming on so late and if you guys got any questions or want to follow up with me you know go to app masters CO and my email address is just Steve at masters Cove as well thank you - hello meets for inviting me on this was a pleasure I really enjoyed it I hope you guys enjoyed it as well that's up me is telling me like yeah come on in I'll wait for you I'll wait for you just one I did get something from side did Google penalize these apps who use

coupon codes in images I don't think so I mean I've seen a ton of people use it on iOS I don't I don't think it's a big deal I want to worry about it are you in Hibbing have an answer might weep I don't know what you put it in put it again okay would like to row heath ass we'd like to understand the worthiness of app topia and a penny I think a penny is really expensive so I don't know if people on a budget can never really afford it I think they're really meant for enterprise companies epitope yeah I did interview the founder it is something that I'm personally exploring myself into purchasing some of the like the downloads and the revenue numbers just to see what other apps are doing and so I think app topia I would probably start with that they tend to have really good data and just and they have an indie plant that's more beneficial to startup folks and Indies like ourselves all right come on hit me

ian is sad his answer what do you think about hash growth Rose I don't know what hash growth is actually let's put it in there whoo I like skewers yeah there's so many uh pizzas it looks like another a so tool I've tried a bunch like obviously because of the bog and the podcast people send me hanging check out my ASO tool it's just so much work and so many different tools that I try to stick with what's already working once my stuff don't work anymore I check it out so I try to do my best to check out other tools but at the same time like unless I hear frequently I'm out to tell you example like I've heard about mobile action for a long time I didn't start using them until some of my friends said have you checked out mobile actions pretty cool and like three or four people started saying that I was like oh maybe I should start using it and so I started using both because I was just using sensor tower at the time

it's more like a brain trying to make a dent huh a lot of people Rosie says check it out trying to make a dent in the a so market a lot of people are trying to make a day right and they so more get soup on can I send you a friend request sure why not long as you send me a lot of Hearts long as I get a lot of Hearts than my photos that's cool especially my kids okay how do i target competitor keywords in google play in the description section is the only one I can use in so one we've been able to do it well so I'll say that first and to look at the competition because if it's a competitor term like tinder for example and it's really competitive don't matter it won't matter if you put it ten times right like you're probably never gonna ring for it so find the difficulty of that keyword if it's low difficulty then targeted and I would try to put it in the description I was just like now I've done this for other

clients and we've ranked number two or three for these keywords that's because I saw that there was an opening meaning there's low competition for the keyword and high traffic and so I just put I bury it towards the end of the description and I put a bunch of things in there so do that and maybe you can bury in the short description to like hey you know if you love tinder you'll love Ian's app Ian's dating app oh man if I if my app is trendy in the app category will my app install increase most likely sigh yeah I know real Heath I know you mean hash growth cool everyone sends Steve requests and send him hearts he loves hearts alright guys thank you so much for joining thanks for staying up a little bit later if you're in India you're in the States let's do it man it's just starting to date appreciate it hello meets again thank you so much for inviting me on if you guys want to follow up with me and

give me more hearts it is at masters SEO and my email is at masters dot Co as well not to come it's the dot CEO sigh I am sorry man I gotta go thank you guys so much really do appreciate you so much okay all right so last question my a prank is 17th and Matson Navigation category please share me some tips that hug him so I we shared a ton of tips go check out the blog post growth hack that thing there's other ways to do it we were able to get number 27 for like there's ways other ways to do it so let's follow up offline on this I'm gonna take off thank you guys so much I'll see you next time thank you again - hello meets alright do this let's play with some filters bye guys appreciate you