Yelp App Store Optimization Audit

- Comin' up, do you believe that ASO is dead? Well, I'm gonna do an ASO review for Yelp to show you what they've already done to their ASO strategy and the impact on rankings and how I would take it one step further. Stay tuned. (mechanical gears turning) What is up AppNation it is Steve P Young, founder of appmasters.co and in this video I'm gonna share an ASO review that I did for Yelp. Now I'm not, full disclosure, I'm not associated with Yelp, they didn't hire us for it, I just started noticing that they changed their app name because for the longest time it was just always Yelp and I noticed more keywords showing up in the app name recently.

I was like, "Hey, let me dig deeper onto this to see what kind of impact it has made and how I would take it one step further." To show you that big companies, to show that big companies that there's a huge opportunity in ASO if they only realized how to do it. Because what these big companies have that we indies don't have is the millions of downloads, the funding, the ability to run different acquisition campaigns at the same time which only help us with ASO.

So we're gonna take a look at Yelp and again they did not hire us, I'm just sharing you public information that you can get through the various tools out there. So without further ado, let's get started. All right, here is the Yelp ASO review and let's, before we start let's take a look back at the history of Yelp. Now, for the longest time I've always known Yelp as just Yelp in the app name and just recently March of 2017 I actually saw that they switched their app name around and they started adding in more keywords, I was like, "Ah, finally!"

Bigger companies are starting to take notice. And so I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper and as I dug deeper I just thought it was a March 2017 type of change, but as I dug deeper they actually started makin' that change back in November. So, November 29th they changed their app name from Yelp, which has always been the case, to Yelp: The Best Local Food, Drinks, Services, & More. And here's where they they were ranking for certain keywords.

So I pulled out restaurants, I added that in, but the rest of the keywords that I put in here for the rankings were keywords that are in the app name. So if you think about ASO the biggest weight that you're gonna get, the biggest bang for your buck, is gonna be the keywords in your actual app name. So I pulled those keywords and here's before the optimization, how they were ranking for those particular keywords. So restaurant they were already doing well because they're a brand name.

Yelp they're number six, drinks they weren't ranking for, services they weren't ranking for, and local food they were number four. Okay, let's take a look just a week after the update what happened to the rankings. Now as you can see, restaurants they went up to number one and they're probably around number two, number three right now, but drinks, boom, immediately started ranking for 17. Now this is like literally a week after they optimized it, right?

And in services they're number three and local food they're number one. So, as you can see real impact almost immediately based off goin' just Yelp to Yelp: The Best Local Food, Drinks, Services, & More. So what happened? I don't have the downloads 'cause I'm not working with Yelp, but what all I can see is the rankings. So let's take a look at their U.S. rankings after the optimization. No let me go back real quick.

So, here's what happened, all right, and I wanted this slide up here too. I wanna go back to this slide. As you can see, before the optimization, the week after, they're hovering, here I'm gonna pull this, yeah here I go, they're hovering around the 50-75 range in terms of U.S. overall, right? Travel they're doin' great, they're always in the top two, but U.S. overall they're just hovering around this 50-75 ranking. Now, after the update here's when they made the change, you notice that they're starting to go up.

All the way up. Now they're in the 20s to 30s range. So, they had an immediate impact right after they made that change. Those keywords drove real volume. Now I don't have the exact downloads numbers, but I can just look at the keyword rankings and see that hey this, there's some stuff goin' on right here. I don't know what happened with this big dip right here, but there are some real good rankings based off just the optimization.

This is just my hypothesis, by the way. They could have been running more acquisition campaigns, but I can see that based off the keyword rankings, the increased keyword rankings and the volume based off those keyword rankings, that ASO had a part of the, is a part of the reason why they saw the increase. All right, now let's take a look at the current day when I actually noticed the keywords in there. So, they are in the number three and they made a recent change around March, the end of March 2017 and it went from Yelp: The Best Local Food, Drinks, Services, & More to Yelp: Nearby restaurants, Shopping & Services again.

Actually, I think if I were them I woulda had restaurants instead of local food in the very start because they're already ranking really well for it and having that in the app name would even get them to the one or two spot already. But hey, they finally realized and here's what it looks like on the app store. Yelp- Nearby Restaurants, Shopping & Services. So, here's what I would do. Because I don't have the keyword rankings yet, this was just, I'm recording this on March 28th and this app name was updated around March 23rd, so I don't have enough stats or rankings to show hey, is this a better improvement or not?

But we do, we can look at the rankings and I'm gonna show you what I would do of I were Yelp on how to improve this a little bit more. Number one, I would target local food instead of shopping. And I'll tell you why. If you look at shopping they're ranking number 32 for this, but if you look at local food, here I can do this, I love this thing, they're ranking number 32. There's a lot of traffic for it, so it's good, but if you look at local food, pretty decent traffic, 32 that's not bad at all and they're number five.

So they were number one when they had it in the app name, but since they took it out they dropped to number five. Now when I think of shopping I think of maybe Zappos or Amazon or things like that, I don't immediately think of actual shopping or Yelp, right? So, I think one it's not, it's a very generic term and it doesn't really signify what Yelp is good at, which is nearby. So maybe even malls is a better term than shopping.

So I don't really like shopping there and I see that local foods since you're already really high for that term, why give it up? So, I would probably take shopping out and then find something different in terms of like malls or I don't know boutique shops, those type of terms that kind of signify local things nearby rather than just shopping generic, because that could be anything. It could be online shopping, Amazon and so forth.

All right, as you can see they were number one. This is what I wanted to point out, they were number one for local foods and so why do that ranking when you have that already? So go back into it. All right, number two, utilize the Spanish Mexico localization. Now, I'm sure if you've been following my blog for a long time, you'll have, you've heard me talk about this, but the U.S. app store actually indexes the Spanish Mexico localization.

So if you put English keywords in the Spanish Mexico localization then you can literally double the amount of keywords that you're targeting. And we've been able to get a lot of our clients ranking for really high traffic terms using this hack. Now I'm gonna show you what Yelp currently has in its Spanish Mexico localization. They've done a good job of localizing the content, so their descriptions localized, their app is actually localized, their screenshots are localized.

Everything is localized for it except the app name. Which, you know, like it's good. I'm sure the keywords are obviously localized too, but here's what I would do if I were them because in looking at Sensor Tower the majority of their users are in the U.S. and I don't even see Mexico in here. I might just can the whole thing. I might have a good description, but I might utilize the app name and the keywords for English for the U.S. market to really go after the specific terms.

That's what I would do, I get really aggressive. So here's my suggested app name for Yelp in the Spanish Mexico localization, all right. Cleaning services, what I found was if you look up services you'll find that if you just look at your phone and then you just sort of put in services it auto-populates that's one of my favorite ways of figurin' out which keywords to go after and cleaning services is one of them. So I was like, "Oh, that's interesting, let me put that in there."

And I pulled the data, 'scuse me, I pulled the data and you can see, here let me pull this with my little marker, that 96% chance, according to mobile action, that you can rank really well for it. And there's decent amount of traffic, 24's not bad at all. So I would put that into the app name, cleaning services, because there's a good chance that I'm gonna rank really high for it, that I would say, "Okay, let me put it into the Spanish Mexico localization."

And then lastly, I wanna go rank again for local foods. So, if Yelp said, "Hey Steve, you're baloney, shopping is a big growth category for us so we need it there." I'd say, "Okay, well let's put local food because you're already ranking well for it right now, you're number five probably as a keyword, let's out that in the app name, let's out it in the U.S. keyword and Spanish Mexico app name which will help you with the rankings and likely get you from five to maybe two or one.

Let's out it into the actual app name here because you're already number five, let's try to increase that rank." And then lastly food delivery, which Yelp is making a big push for, especially with the E24 acquisition, I would put that into the app name here too. I was running out of keywords and I wanted to target food delivery. I thought I could do it really good here because I still have local food and I have food delivery and I really like the traffic scores right here.

It's 55 and if you look at shopping it's 62. So, it's pretty close to what shopping already is and you're 126 which means you're not ranking at all for this term really and so if you put it into the Spanish Mexico app name you're able to increase ranks for that one. Okay. Lastly, if they wanted to do, just keep all the keywords the same because I don't know their strategy, I don't know what they're working on, I would reorganize the U.S. app name, okay.

And here's what I would do. I would call it Yelp-- so, right now, current day as I'm recording this, it's Nearby Restaurants, Shopping & Services, okay? Nearby Restaurants, Shopping & Services. All I did was remove nearby and put near me at the end. Now this still fits the 50 character link for Apple and there's two reasons why this. Number one, you want very important keywords to be at the left most of your app name.

So, Yelp is obviously the leftmost, you can't remove that, but if you can get Restaurants, Shopping or Services, into the leftmost, that's gonna be better. So, I removed that front nearby and I moved it into the back. And number two is there's actually more traffic for restaurants near me than restaurants nearby or even nearby restaurants, which they're ranking really well for nearby restaurants and restaurants nearby, both iterations, but there's more traffic, now this is Apple search ads so it's really from the source, were restaurants near me.

So you get a double win-win. One you get restaurants to the top, you know, close to the left of the app name and also you're able to rank better for a keyword that has significantly more traffic than restaurants nearby. That's what I would do. All right, that's it. So if you want to learn more about our ASO strategy there's a master course that we have, it is called ASO Masters, if you go to ASOMasters.co, ASOMasters.co you'll find that course there.

And if you're a big company and you want sort of our consultation or you wanna work together fill out the contact form up there on our website and let me know or go to appmasters.co if you're watching this on YouTube, appmasters.co/contact will get you there, but just go to appmasters.co the big contact form is there and we can schedule a quick little 15 minute chat and then talk about how we would execute on this strategy.

Hope that was helpful. If you're watching this on YouTube subscribe to our channel, comment, like the video. And if you got any questions or you want us to see a different review like this, this probably took me about 30 minutes to 45 minutes to put all together, but if you wanna see more of this I wanna target bigger companies in terms of like what I would do for these companies 'cause I do feel like even Uber if you look at it now it's just Uber.

If they optimized just a little bit, I'm sure they could do a little bit better. And it's not even a little bit better, much better like at here, this last thing I'll leave with, is this chart right here. If you look at the rankings this is just the keywords ASO, but if you look at the rank history let's end with this. You'll see that there were probably other variables, so I don't have the full backstory, there are probably other variables, but just that change alone went from staying within this 50-75 of top U.S. overall to all the way to 25 and 30, 25 and 50 and really when I look at it it's around that 30, 25-30 mark.

And so just that little optimization change made that quick shift for Yelp and that's the advantage of a big company, like you have those downloads, you have the branding, you have the leverage, people are actually searching for your brand already, so you're already getting those downloads. Just a few added keywords would just help you immensely. All right, that's it guys. 'Preciate your time. Hope you enjoyed it and I'll see ya next time.

Bye!