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Is App Store Optimization (ASO) Dead?

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App Masters12:11Open on YouTube
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The bottom line

ASO is not dead, but keyword optimization alone no longer brings instant growth, so it is now one part of a wider mix. Smaller publishers need to add creative optimization, ratings, backlinks, ads, monetization and retention to grow downloads.

Key takeaways

  • Keyword optimization no longer delivers instant growth, especially for small publishers. 0:16
    • Before late 2019, updating some keywords could produce growth right away. Now many other factors affect keyword rankings.
  • Keyword optimization is still the foundation, and high traffic keywords in the title still pay off. 2:25
    • A client went from about 80 to 300 downloads a day after moving from rank 80 to rank 5 on a generic high traffic keyword.
    • The US App Store indexes the Spanish Mexico localization, so a different title there can double the keywords you target.
  • Creative optimization is now a major growth lever. 6:52
    • Changing only the app icon led to a 50% increase in downloads.
    • Screenshots that say what the app does and add social proof led to a 91% increase. A specific number like 91% builds more trust than a round 2x.
  • Ratings and Google Play backlinks lift visibility and conversion. 4:47
    • The default iOS review prompt, shown after asking users if they love the app, doubled ratings for some clients. One app gained in a month more five-star ratings than in the previous nine years.
    • Paid blog backlinks moved an app from about rank 10 to rank 2 on a very competitive Google Play keyword.
  • ASO now works as a mix of factors, with keywords as an equal part. 10:30
    • The other factors are creative optimization, search ads and Google Ads, App Store reviews, monetization and retention.

You can't just do keyword research, keyword optimization and poof, you're up and running. It's gonna be a part of the puzzle now.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Organic ASO is getting harder

What worked in ASO a year ago no longer works the same way, so tactics need constant retesting.

  • Small publishers feel the change most. 0:16
    • Steve P. Young says outright that he isn't sure what works anymore, so he is testing it as he goes.
    • His warning: it is getting harder and harder to grow organic traffic with ASO.
    • The plan is to keep updating what works and what doesn't as things change.

2:25 High traffic keywords in the title

One generic high traffic keyword in the title can outdrive every smaller keyword combined.

  • A brand term drove most downloads before the change. 3:03
    • The client ranked number one for a brand term with about 4.0 traffic.
    • Steve estimates that single term brought 60 to 80 downloads a day.
    • Nice low-competition keywords at ranks two and four helped, but the generic keyword was the big driver.
    • At rank two, this keyword would bring thousands of downloads a day.
  • Ranking tricks for hard keywords are fading. 4:29
    • Choose high traffic keywords for the title no matter how much competition they have.
    • The trick still works, but not as well as in this case study.
    • The Spanish Mexico localization should use English keywords and a different title than the US one.

4:47 Getting more App Store ratings

The in-app review prompt makes rating easy, and asking happy users first makes it work better.

  • Use the default iOS prompt, not a custom message that sends users to the store. 5:02
    • Users rate without leaving the app.
    • Buying ratings is possible, but Steve says to be careful.
  • A pre-prompt steers users toward five stars. 5:28
    • Zinio first asks whether users love the app and would rate it five stars. Only those who say yes see the system prompt.
    • Users who say no are let go politely.
    • The system prompt can show only about three times a year, so Steve says not to waste it.

6:06 Ratings, icons and screenshots

Users who love the app get sent to rate, and the icon and screenshots decide who downloads.

  • Asking users if they love the app filters who is sent to rate. 6:30
    • Only users who say yes are asked for five stars.
    • The app had just over 7,500 five-star ratings in nine years.
    • Users who don't love the app are never led to a five-star rating.
  • The icon matters most on Google Play. 7:30
    • The icon test changed nothing else, not even the keywords.
    • The icon sits prominently in Google Play search results.
    • The A/B pick was shown first, with a pause for guessing.
  • Screenshots should say clearly what the app does and why to trust it. 7:39
    • Be clear, don't try to be clever.
    • With no social proof of your own, borrow it with a quote, like one from Einstein.
    • Use odd, specific numbers, since they feel more trustworthy.

8:59 Backlinks and what to do now

Backlinks work like web SEO, and keyword work is now only the base for the other levers.

  • Backlinks tell Google Play which keyword fits your app. 8:59
    • You link the target keyword to your Google Play listing.
    • This takes outreach to blog publishers.
    • You pay them to link back to your store link.
  • Keyword work is the base, and growth comes from the other levers. 10:01
    • Keep the foundation, but expect no instant results from it.
    • Anyone counting on instant growth from keywords will probably not see it.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters, app marketing agency and podcast host. ASO has moved from keyword tweaks that gave instant growth to a mix of high traffic title keywords, creative testing, ratings, backlinks and paid search. Case studies show a 5x download jump from one title keyword, a 91% lift from screenshots alone and a 50% lift from an icon change.

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript158 lines
0:00

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 business and today I want to talk about is ASO dead and what can you focus on in 2020 as you try to grow downloads organically look it spoiler alert it's getting harder and harder especially for the smaller publishers to utilize ASO and grow that organic traffic a lot of outside variables before keyword optimization would be phenomenal you can update some keywords put some keywords here in there and then boom you're off and running you see instant growth but unfortunately these days there's a lot of other factors that go in to keyword rankings that makes it harder for smaller app publishers to really utilize keyword optimization and get that growth so this is a presentation that I did for the mobile growth summit that just happened in February 2020 and I wanted

0:58

to show it to you guys for YouTube hey so ASO in 2020 what is working today so I don't know for me like so much is changing that frankly I'm like man all right I don't know and so we're gonna explore this together and what I really want to do and this is my way of doing this with YouTube is kind of figure out and highlight some of the things are working today and then as things change continue to update this content on YouTube obviously to tell you what's not working and what is working today alright for those who aren't familiar I do have a podcast check it out and it is the number one podcast I would say we've been doing this for eight years now 700 plus episodes with some of the most famous people at publishers out there Chris Barton who founded Shazam, David I shall create a color switch a bunch of different founders here Matthew Hall created Crossy Road, William Todd who was a VP for Rovio, Keith tier who did who co-founded TechCrunch so really

1:58

remarkable people I want to showcase them this is how I've built my whole bread and learn from these thought leaders to then hopefully share back with you what everything that I've learned alright some of our big clients out there Red Bull, Next door, McAfee, whooga, fun plus and there Gamze got a bunch more that I haven't updated this but a lot of big-name clients are working with us as well okay so if you haven't checked it out go to appmasters.com/ iTunes and you're obviously watching this on YouTube alright let's get into some of the tips here number one focus on high traffic keywords in the app title if you've been following my channel you know this tip but I want to make sure you utilize this tip as well here's a tip that I feel like a lot of beginner asos miss that the US app store indexes the Spanish Mexico localization so if you put English keywords in your Spanish Mexico localization you can double the amount of keywords that you're targeting so

2:54

definitely have a different app title than us and your Spanish Mexico okay because that allows you to rank for different keywords really well I want to share this case study for a client and this is why I feel like going after high traffic keywords is so valuable so there's a client of ours that was doing roughly about 80 downloads a day without really any big ASO they had a brand term that had high traffic so about 4.0 traffic and they were number one and there were number one for this other keyword that was decent traffic and it's not a lot but I think the 4.0 is driving most of the traffic and so you can kind of guess that okay a 4.0 would probably translate to about 60 downloads 60 to 80 downloads right so they're just doing number one for that that was the big keyword driver in my opinion because they weren't ranking really well for anything else when we updated it we saw that we got to 300 downloads a day

3:45

so literally almost 5x their downloads right and what we saw was we went after this really generic high traffic keyword and were able to get number five for that ranking and obviously there are these nice keywords that have decent traffic and low competition where two and four but this was the big driver and when we got to number two for this particular keyword we're driving thousands of downloads a day so that's the power of search when you can get it that high alright so really having this keyword in the title helped jump it from I think we're number eighty to number 5 and we're able to see that huge increase in downloads so that's why it's really important to have those high traffic no matter the competition key words in your app title now I have shared different hacks on the AppMasters Academy on how do you rank well for these set by keywords that trick is working still but not working as well as

4:38

it did back here in this case study but you gotta have to check out Appmasters Academy because I can't share for free I'm here alright the next thing you want to focus on is generating a lot of App Store ratings a lot of them so I've shared that you can buy some right be careful when you do that but one of the best things you can do is integrate that iOS default iOS review prompt because it allows users to review your app without leaving your actual app and going to the App Store so I see this from a lot of app stills but you have to integrate this don't use that default message won't like our game and then it takes me to the App Store I don't leave it but I can easily leave it here and we've seen clients double the amount of ratings by integrating this app store prompt so here's an example of Zinio that I absolutely love and Zinio what they do really well is sort of lead the user to a five-star so the first screenshot is

5:37

love our app please rate us five stars or would you rate us five stars and if they say yes they say right now, no, no problem they don't the once they hit right now then they show the prompt right because there are limitations to showing this prompt you can only show it about three times in a given year I think that's what the limitations are it may have been upgraded but it was just three three times you can show this prompt three times in a year span okay see it's put know things cool I'm not gonna show you this problem but they said would you rate us five stars well it says here please rate us five stars and they'd be in a phenomenally grow the amount of ratings that they have so look at this in a nine year span they had about seven thousand you know over seven thousand five hundred five star ratings but from launching this campaign they're able to get a ton more just out pace the past

6:30

nine years in just one month alone so just that leading the user be like hey do you love our app would you rate us five stars if they yes then ask him for it can really filter the people who love your app and aren't gonna give you that five stars so you're kind of leading the user to a five star rating next is all about creative optimization like I said before keyword optimization isn't as important anymore and so creative optimization is truly truly important now this is what we're trying to help our clients do as well so for those who want to play a game I've shared this case study in the past but which Icahn led to a 50% growth in downloads without changing the keywords without changing anything else A or B and I'll give it a little bit of a pause here so you can decide okay so it is actually A that one it led to a 50% increase in downloads so really pay attention we didn't change anything else

7:30

we only change icons so really pay attention especially on Google Play when the App icon is very prominent in the search results all right again screenshots so important and this is what I do with every single screenshot optimization that we're working on is talk about what the app does for a screenshot and why you should use us the social proof what we do and why we're cool essentially right and this led to a 91% increase in downloads by just changing the screenshots we didn't do anything else to the keywords nothing else just change the screenshots around so we had this saying look here's what exactly what we do and look at we're trusted so you want to tell them be clear on what you do don't try to be clever be clear on what you do and give them some social proof if you don't have that social proof then what I would say is borrow it meaning Einstein said this or blah blah blah said that all right so like these things are variables of social proof anything

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that you can say like right here 91% increase in downloads it's sort of social proof and some odd number that you can put so not like 100 some non-round number that actually leaves some more trust so the fact that I'm saying 91% increase in downloads is much better than me saying 2x increase in downloads although they're very much similar right because there's more trust inherent trust when I just tell you that any 1% rather than just sink 2x and round it up so try to get as specific of a number as you possibly can All right next backlinks still working well on Google Play so if you think about SEO and building up backlinks to your website and that helping with your overall keyword rankings same thing applies on Google Play so that is literally linking the keyword that you're targeting to your Google Play app store and that signals to Google hey this keyword is very relevant to this particular app I've got case studies with clients where they're

9:26

ranking really well for very competitive games by building backlinks so here's just a screenshot again for proof that here the app was ranking close to 10 for this particular keyword but because we're building backlinks they're able to get it to number 2 for this particular keyword and it's a very very competitive keyword this is on Google Play so that requires a lot of work but if you need help let us know we're happy to help out but it does require a lot of work because we have to reach out to blog publishers and let them know hey this app exists and essentially pay them and link back to our App Store link alright so the before and I would say this is late 2019 before we could do keyword optimization and we would see instant growth now I feel like keyword optimization doesn't lead to instant growth that's not to say keyword optimization isn't important that's just to say if you're just thinking that

10:23

keyword optimization is gonna lead to instant growth you're probably not gonna see those instant growth metrics what you need to do is still have that foundation but focus on all the other variables that are related to ASO so here the factors keyword optimization still important although I just want to curb your expectations creative optimization running search ads and Google Adwords focusing on Appstore reviews and definitely focusing on monetization and retention so those are the factors you've got to focus on you can't just do keyword research keyword optimization and poof you're up and running it's gonna be a part of the puzzle now and I think it's becoming an equal part of the puzzle with all these other factors I that's it guys let me know what you think and what you are experiencing in the App Store's with ASO because frankly this YouTube channel is a community let's help each other out here's what I'm noticing what are you noticing if

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you don't want to tell me publicly just email me Steve@appmasters.com or Steve@appmasters.co and let me know I'm happy to chat with you and kind of just share some knowledge and trade knowledge with what's working and what's not working for us. Alright if you want to see some of our tactics go check out AppmastersAcademy.com that shows you all the ASO strategies that we have in our arsenal and get access to that along with PR Apple feature like everything we do for our clients is in there everything I know about how to grow app downloads is in at AppmastersAcademy.com alright guys until next time I'll see you on the next video you