Cracking the Code: App Store Optimization for Apps Struggling with Downloads

the developer out there who might have just launched their app or is getting no download what should our ASO strategy be a lot of people ask me what is App Store optimization and I say it's a way to tell Apple and Google what your app does because they have no idea that's not manipulating the algorithms but how do you do that for apps with the zero of that new downloads a thousand new downloads a million new downloads all of them need to tell the algorithm what the apps don't because at the end of the day you want to appear in search results if you think about it Apple and Google spend so much money so much effort to driving people into the App Store Apple used to have this figure of 80 something percent on their site of traffic of downloads coming from search so you use ASO to tell the app stores what your app does and then they rank you in search results downloads don't actually lead to

better ASO to better ranks because it's all about where and how you use keywords because again we're telling the algorithm what it should know about your app or game and then we're also using ratings as the currency more ratings is more better for the algorithm let's talk about no downloads the idea behind no downloads is is kind of simple so if you need keywords to be included in search results that you can do without any downloads you don't need any sort of ratings any sort of downloads to be just considered to be ranked the only problem is without downloads you're not going to get ratings and without ratings you're not going to get up high in the search results so what you'll do if you can't do that you got to reverse that you gotta aim low that's really where you begin and you got to build up that momentum so if you think about it ratings or if we talk about it ratings are the currency so if you did your

keyword research correctly and you did your keyword optimization correctly meaning you found the keywords where you can compete that are relevant and are as popular as you can actually get and then you use them properly and the name and the subtitle and the keyword list and the short description you optimize your long description on Google Play and use tools and you did it with actual data then you should be well positioned and now all you really need to do is you need to start small and grow from there one of the biggest mistakes that I see is that developers just Aim so high for the most popular keyword competing with Instagram for example you're just never gonna win that way starting low is not there's no number for what is low it really depends on your competition on the keywords you're going after how do you approach this on uh on your end I like to start with at least 30 search score traffic and we can kind of break

it down with the keyword inspector that you have here meditation you know what I try to do with this with meditation and look I'm on I should if you subscribe to it you'll see the popularity score but you'll see that like 60 it's like super high and so I like to go a little bit deeper and then or like lower in the funnel and think about like deep breathing or Pace breathing because number low component of it's a lot less crowd in that space because the big guys are all going after the keyword anyway yeah exactly so this is keyword inspector and app figures and that's actually one of my favorite tools because it gives you everything you need to know in a really easy way to see it and very very quickly too so if you look at meditation you can see the keyword that you can see the the um the popularity score it also shows you the actual results and it shows you there are new ratings and you're now

going to see new ratings anywhere else not on the app store or really anywhere else because the most important thing for Apple in this example is to show you the overall ratings a million ratings is great but the ASL for ASL purposes the algorithm actually looks at the last 30-ish days so you're not going to see that on the App Store they have no incentive to show you that but you need to see that and that's where you see in keyword inspector so I use it all the time for my keyword teardowns and really for everything else when you said low still like was there anything else we should be focused on we have no downloads is it just should we try to run some apple search ads or should we do anything else Beyond like going after these low competitions we have it in our title and subtitle but what else should we be scenario there's more that you can do on the organic side but yes to App Store Optima to Apple search ads and I

saw that in the chat as well so let's talk about what it means to find keyword opportunities and the way I see them at least are keywords that are the algorithm decided to to rank some apps that don't have the keywords in their name because they probably there aren't that many apps that Target that keyword but the search volume or the popularity score is high-ish and Steve you said 30 I really like 30 I think it's a good number if you can't find the 30 and the keywords that you're targeting aim a little lower that's still okay but if you find the 35 or 36 or 37 and that's not a linear scale so a 37 is more than two better than a 35 so you want to aim just as high as possible where the apps are not targeting the keyword in their name you can Target it using your name and you will actually do considerably considerably better so even if you have two ratings maybe not two maybe 20 but the top results have a thousand you

still have the potential of ranking in the top five for a keyword if you are actually using it better than the competition that's a small trick not many people talk about it and I think a lot of people don't think about how important it is to use the name for keywords which is mind-boggling in 2023. I just wanted to give an example like deep breathing as the example I don't think it has that much traffic okay but I'm just using it as an example so you're saying like deep breathing as an example you can see the top five results are not using deep breathing so this gives us an opportunity if this was a small keyword we want to go after to go after that keyword and use it in our app title the idea is you find a keyword that someone else decided is not important enough for them but it's still getting a ton of searches BBC actually they were on my live show a few maybe a year ago or so and they were telling me

how they found the keyword that their competitors were using that they weren't using but not because they couldn't not because it was too popular anything like that it's because they just didn't think about it like a Twist on a thing that their app does I think it was a game and they said as soon as they used it they saw an immediate increase in ranks and only because they didn't think about using it but then they saw it in the tool they saw it in the competitor keywords report another tool that we have in that figures for apps for optimization it's one of those things where you can't always think about all of the keywords because people have just infinite creativity and infinite intuition when it comes to how to search on the App Store so that's why this works so well there aren't that many keyword opportunities so it's possible that for your Niche if you're doing something very specific you won't find

them but I've been able to find keyword opportunities almost in every type of app that I've I've looked at or helped or worked with over the last few years and I write about it all on keyword teardown so it's definitely possible where do you like to go so you I know you said your keyword inspector is one of your favorite tool I'm a lock now is there any way where you try to like your favorite tool on app figures to find these keyword opportunities so let me show you uh what do we got let's uh let's go back to meditation okay the keyword meditation in keyword inspector and then that highlights it in the list so you can see which apps are using which words it's actually really cool to see the competitiveness is really high I like it like don't even go for it yeah exactly I mean it's meditation Apple made an app for almost this I made an app journaling which I think is very close to what this is going to be so

yeah right so now on the right hand side you'll see a view in and then if you or compare in just above the table on the right hand side oh compared to yep and then go into keyword into competitor keywords right here compare compare keywords What's Happening Here is now we're taking the top five results from keyword inspector that we just saw and we're throwing it into a lookup that will give us all the keywords from all of those apps together and what we can do here there we go is here I like to find keyword Gap so imagine if I'm one of the apps in this list and if I'm not I can add my app very quickly that what we just did was a shortcut right how can I find all the keywords that my competitors are ranking in that I'm not ranking in and so if it's possible that maybe a competitor came up with a much they just did a lot of research and found a clever and novel way to find their app I can now take it and you can

do that you can sort then you can filter their filters up top so you can filter for let's say popularity of 30 plus and then from here you can go back the keyword inspector check out the actual other results see if you can maybe sneak in see if they're optimizing what the keyword in their name and if all of that is is really sexy go for it and that's how you win with a with a brand new app or an app that hasn't had enough traction it's it's a lot of work but when I say a lot of work I mean like an hour I don't need like six weeks just gotta know how to use the tools a little bit and once you use them that's it you're in business what you would do from here is you'd actually track all the keywords that you like that's what I do that's my process and that would put them into the keyword performance report and then you can see all the trends especially if your app is ranked for them and then after that you can

optimize for it meaning put it in the name hopefully the name or if you need to the subtitle and the keyword list push out that update and then those Trends will update and hopefully you're doing a good job and just through the roof and you'll get an email when that stuff happens I like it I know past guest of mine rooted Anya was talking about how she went after panic attack and she works really well for panic attack and she said look it was that same strategy we talked about hey going after a smaller keyword but that's less difficult only 136 apps show up for it but it's very targeted what I found Ariel too is you know obviously meditation mindfulness all around the panic attack but if somebody's having a pan attack they're very likely to subscribe anyways so the deeper down the funnel that you go from a keyword perspective we started with meditation but panic attack is in here the lower

you go the smaller the keyword the more the higher the intent as well and I think it's a great starting point for beginning developers yeah absolutely do you think that just keyword optimization alone is enough these days yes I know and maybe so the the yes is I think if you take the time and you actually do it and you're you have realistic expectations you don't expect overnight to be a success and you give it you know a few weeks a few months then you will do okay but it also isn't and that's where it's critical to understand who your audience is what do they want how many other competitors do you have in that space are they well known are they not are they nameless and it's just a matter of whoever shows up in search results or are there very existing very known popular brands and all those make it a little bit more difficult because if you're competing with a game for example there are a lot of games that

are brandless so the first one that comes up in search results are Solitaire for example you'll pick the first one they all kind of look the same they have the same colors for the icon there's not really a lot of variety and the variety that they do have within the game you're not going to see until after you download it so the decision to download is not really based on any of the real features when it's something like Solitaire it's just it's too basic so for those you really just need to show up first in search results they're also extremely well optimized because of that so that's going to make it a little bit more difficult to find those keyword opportunities and that's where you would want to go and you would want to build that ratings performance because ratings are the currency to App Store optimization especially on the app store Google Play is a lot more sophisticated but on the app store that's all you need

to do in order to rank up and I show that in my newsletter almost every week this is great dude is this the SMA downloads for okay for the entire app I love how you can have everything in one spot you know a lot of times we're going back and forth different things like oh in certain tools won't show you all this data but you're like yo here's our estimated downloads here's the ad networks so at least you can see that this app the second solitaire app is getting about 53 000 downloads but not to according to app figures no paid ads going on and then you can see the new ratings and all this other stuff too at least seven years ago I love that and this is I've been working with this so so long just doing gaps for optimization for so long that's exactly what I want to see so that's why it's there yeah but there's a column there the DPR and the DPR is a it's a brand new column that we added not too long ago super useful so I

started talking about ratings and when it comes to ratings you can't really you shouldn't buy ratings obviously that should never be a thing because you'll get penalized for it potentially you're all honest I know that so we'll talk about how do you raise how do you grow ratings on your own and that is a direct transfer from downloads to ratings it's all about when you ask and how you ask and that is a whole new type of a whole thing we can do a whole live stream on it realistically as long as you do that that transfer that ratio between downloads and ratings that's kind of like your power what is your multiplier and if you know your multiplier you can track it over time and if you're optimizing ratings you can see that you're doing better but putting that aside if you're comparing yourself to competitors you can tell what one download will mean for you versus one download will mean for them so if we're

going into that second stage of should we do Apple search ads that's the question everyone is asking me and the answer is if you can afford it sure why not the idea there is everything is getting more expensive and I did a live stream on this explaining how to do it without breaking the bank but by default when you just create your first Apple search ads campaign you're going to break the bank Apple gives you all the settings that will just drain your bank account and all the defaults are just bad they will give you the least amount of downloads and the most amount of money spent why do they do that I don't know so we're not going to talk about that but realistically they do give you all the options all the all the knobs and uh and things you can tweak in order to fix that so if you do that and you do that well and you spend time optimizing for getting those ratings that will give you an improvement when it comes to apps for

optimization