How To Choose Keywords For Apple App Store SEO

Learn The Exact Methods I Use To Get Apps To Rank & Get More Downloads

Ever since I’ve started out in the app business I’ve become obsessed by App Store Optimization (ASO or otherwise known as App Store SEO).  I have quite a bit of experience in the world of search engine optimization and I know the power of ranking highly within search results.  While it takes a lot of effort to reach the number one position, the results are well worth it, with a potentially ongoing stream of leads, customers and revenue.

My main marketing effort since launching the magazine and my other apps has been to improve their organic search rankings.  In my interview with Chad Mureta (in  Issue 2), I was astounded to learn that he did not expend any effort on external marketing but rather he focussed on internal marketing within the app ecosystem, including of course ASO.  Before investing time in outside marketing, I wanted to optimize my search rankings as much as possible.

So the first question you should ask yourself is “does ASO actually work?”  In an article I published on my blog, I revealed how a bug in the iTunesConnect system caused most of the keywords of my first app to be wiped out.  My partner and I debated whether to defer the actual launch of the paid app, but we decided to release it and test the market.  As expected the app was a total flop… The first day we got about 8 downloads and then it petered down to 2-3 downloads a day.  This was the pre-ASO state of our app.

Once we launched the updated version, with all our keywords in place, our downloads immediately and instantly shot up.  Did we do any external marketing or have any other reason for the increase in downloads? No.  This was purely related to traffic coming from search.

before and after app store optimization
The red dot shows where the updated keywords were entered. Note the marked increase in downloads purely from search.

You can see from the graph above how dramatic this change in downloads was:  from an average of about 4 downloads per day to an average of about 20 downloads per day, an increase of over 500%!  This change meant for us a change in revenue from $84 per month from this one app to over $400 per month, after Apple’s cut.

So, yes, ASO is real and it does work.  Using my own experience and research I went on to optimize the keywords for other apps.  For example, using careful keyword selection I managed to increase the app downloads for Guitar Skills Magazine  by 100% and using just one of my suggestions, Matt Clark (internet marketers turned app developer) also managed to more than double his downloads and rank his app Ab Workouts Express in the top 20 Medical apps in the US (previously being ranked 260 in Health & Fitness).  My good friend and fellow magazine publisher, Meron Bareket, using some of my ASO tips, managed to increase the downloads of Inspiring Innovation Magazine by over the astounding figure of 700%.

ab workouts express before and after app store seo
Ab Workouts Express shot up to the top 50 medical apps in the US straight after integrating basic ASO principles.
Guitar Skills App Store SEO
Guitar Skills Magazine managed to improve their rankings from an erratic #10-20 in the Movies & Music section of the Newsstand to a steady ranking of #2-3 by implementing my specific keyword suggestions (yellow dot).

So how did I manage to achieve these results?  The purpose of this article is to outline the lessons I’ve learnt and my own workflow to determine the best keywords.  By the end you should be able to achieve the same results.

5 Important Lessons In ASO Strategy

There are a few rules that I learned about ASO strategy that I’d like to share with you.  Firstly, ASO is not a “fire and forget” method.  If you are serious about getting traffic from search, you need to constantly monitor and optimize results.  What does this mean?  When you select keywords, you are making an educated guess.  Once the results are reflected in the App Store, that’s when you’ll know if your hypothesis was right or not.  For some keywords you might not rank highly or not rank at all.  You need to pick these up early and swap them out for keywords that have a chance of ranking, otherwise you are wasting precious space in your app name and keyword fields.

Another point to note is that you really need to use one of the great ASO tools that are out in the market.  I don’t get paid to promote these products, I just truly believe in them.  If you were to manually track your keywords you would need to spend a lot of time entering queries manually into iTunes.  This not only takes a lot of time, but can also be totally inaccurate.  iTunes search results can often be quite different to the results on devices and your device is usually locked on to a particular country’s App Store.  This means that if you want to track results in the US and your device showed up results from the Australian App Store you wouldn’t get a true reflection of your US search rankings.  Do yourself a favour and invest in one of these tools.  In this and previous issues we have presented the various tools available, including MobileDevHQ, AppStoreRankings, Searchman and Appcod.es.  My personal favourites are AppStoreRankings.net and AppCod.es and you can sign up for them for as little as $15 per month.

Moving on, when targeting keywords you need to choose your battles wisely.  Specifically, for your new app, you are going to need to target less competitive phrases when you start out.  Since where you appear within the search results is determined by factors such as total downloads, download velocity, number and quality of rankings (for further details read Ian Sefferman’s in-depth article in Issue 4), a new app has a lower chance of ranking highly.  To get that initial momentum, pick battles that you can win and as your downloads increase and you get positive reviews, you can start targeting “meatier” search terms.

Another lesson that I learnt is that not all apps are as easy to optimize.  While games and novelty apps can definitely benefit from optimization, they are much more of a challenge.  For games, people tend to search for a specific app they have heard of or they might search for very broad terms such as “fun games” or “games for children”, which are extremely competitive.  Optimizing productivity and utility type apps are much easier in terms of targeting long-tail specific functions that users are looking for.

Lastly, another element to be aware of is that paid apps are also more of a challenge to optimize.  This goes back to the point that rankings are based on downloads numbers and since paid apps are downloaded about 10 times less than free apps, paid apps have an uphill battle to rank highly in search.  Again, paid apps can definitely be optimized, although free apps are likely to see more of a significant change in downloads.

What I Learnt About Targeting Keywords

Most of what I learnt about targeting keywords came from a very important interview with Matthäus Krzykowski of Xyologic in Issue 2 of this magazine.  For those who aren’t aware, Xyo is a search engine for apps, similar in its concept to Chomp, which was bought out by Apple in 2012.  Since they are a consumer-facing search engine for app discovery, the Xyo team has some great insights into how people search for apps within the App Store.

Firstly, 80% of people type in “category” or “genre” type searches, such as “games”, “magazines”, etc.  The Holy Grail of ASO is to identify a type of genre search which is still not overly competitive.   In order to find these types of opportunities you normally need to spot trends early – for example optimizing your apps for terms such as “gangnam style games” or “London Olympics”.

Of all searches, only 5% or less are searches for specific app titles (such as “Angry Birds”).  Targeting specific app names is somewhat “black hat”, although it certainly is a valid tactic.  A point to note here is that Apple will often backlist certain terms, especially if they are concerned you may be violating existing trademarks or copyrights.  From my experience, if you try and optimize for a generic sounding name, such as “Angry Birds”, you will normally be fine.  However if you try a target a unique name such as “Kindle” you will find that your app simply won’t be indexed within the search results.  You can still try and target uniquely named apps if you believe that achieving search rankings will result in a lot of traffic, but be sure to monitor and quickly cut out the keyword if your app is not appearing in the results.

Continuing to dwell on Xyo’s data, 5-10% of searches are “inspirational searches”, such as “great apps” or “new apps”.  Adding on these types of adjectives such as “great”, “new”, etc is important in order to target this type of search query.  The great thing about these adjectives is that they can cause your app to rank for multiple keyword permutations.  You shouldn’t throw these adjectives in at random, but rather research the individual keywords you are targeting to make sure that you have a chance of ranking (see the next section below).

Lastly, 5% of searches are “transactional searches”, where searchers are looking for a particular app function, such as “crop photos” or “download videos”.  These types of phrases are great for optimizing utility and productivity type apps.  An obvious but important point is to make sure that your app actually delivers what the user was searching for.  Otherwise you might find that although you are ranking highly for a certain term, your conversion rate will be very low.

How I Find The Best Keywords

So now this is the section that will make you money.  I’m going to reveal my own workflow for finding the best performing keywords.  But first we need to ask ourselves, what actually is the ideal keyword?

The best type of keyword is obviously a word or phrase that a lot of people are searching for, yet that does not have too much competition.  So there are two variables that we need to know about regarding any keyword combination:  how popular is the search query and how many competitors are there?

Firstly, regarding competition, how do we know what is a reasonable level of competition?  For this, you need to keep in mind how search results are displayed on the App Store.  On the iPhone with the new iOS 6, results are displayed one at a time and therefore users are highly unlikely to scroll past the 10th result.  On the iPad, with 6 results displayed at any one time on the screen, users are unlikely to click on anything beyond the 30th result.  Obviously the higher up you are ranked, the more likely users are to click through on your app description and to download your app.  A study conducted by Optify regarding click-through rates (CTR) and position in search results on Google shows the importance of positioning:  sites ranked #1 in Google have an average CTR of 36.4%, #2 ranked sites have an average CTR of 12.5% and sites ranked #3 have an average CTR of 9.5%.  The CTRs deteriorate further with each drop in rank.

On the iPhone, my guess would be that the CTRs would be much higher for #1 ranked app and much lower for the subsequent apps when compare to the Google data, with the first result probably having a CTR of around 50-60% or more and sharply dropping off after that.  Remember, in Google, the top 10 results are all displayed on the first page at once, while on the iPhone users must scroll through the results one at a time, so intuitively this will results in a much, much lower CTR for all results beyond #1.

optify CTR curve
Optify study [December 2010] showing click through rates based on ranking in Google search results. Note the marked drop in CTR after the #1 ranked site.
The implication for this data is that in order to generate significant traffic from search, you pretty much have to be ranked within the top 3 results on the iPhone and within the top 6 results on the iPad.  Therefore I will generally only try and target terms where I think I can rank within these positions. This means selecting terms with very few competitors, or where most of the competitors are relatively “weak”.

The tool that I normally use to quickly check the number of competitors is AppCod.es.  You can even use this function of theirs for free. Go to http://www.appcod.es/ and click on “demo account” and on the next screen where it asks for your email you can just press “skip”.  In the search bar on the right, type in your search term, for example “guitar” and you will see the total competitor count displayed (in this example “110”, which essentially means there are more than 110 apps).  This tool also includes a useful stat, which is the “Max Chance” to rank within the top 16 results on the iPhone and can give you a quick indication if you have a chance of ranking in a meaningful position.  I will normally target terms where I have the maximum chance of ranking in the top results according to AppCodes (93%) and where the total number of competitors is under 10 (and preferably under 4).

How To Use AppCodes To Find Keywords For App Store SEO

Beyond just the total number of competitors, I also look at the strength of the competition.  To do this I peek at the number and quality of the app ratings and also whether the top results are paid or free apps.  If a lot of the top results have low ratings and also include paid apps, I might consider competing for this phrase even if there are more than 10 competitors because this can indicate that the competition is fairly weak.

While we need to target low competition phrases, we also need to make sure that lots of people are actually searching for this in the first place.  Appcodes again provides us with important data to make an educated decision. To get an indication of the search volume I will again look at the total number of ratings of the top apps, with the number of ratings being proportional to the download numbers.  AppCodes also pulls in data from Xyologic, displaying a download estimate on a monthly basis and overall.  For me, the more important piece of data is the previous month’s download estimate.  My “ideal” keyword will have very few competitors (under 4 as I mentioned before) and the top results will have hundreds of ratings, with previous month downloads in the 10’s of thousands, indicating high search volume. 

While I was just discussing using AppCodes here to research keywords, I also use  AppStoreRankings, which is also an amazing tool, however you will need to pay in order to access this function of theirs.

Now you know the exact workflow that I use to evaluate whether a keyword is worth targeting.  But how do we find potential keywords in the first place?

If you want to learn how to generate a list of awesome keywords to target in your App Store Optimization campaign, do yourself a favor and download MAKE APP Magazine to your iPad.  Read our two part series on ASO in Issue 4 & 5 in order to learn how to generate more app downloads, for free.

Click Here To Download on your iPad or search for “Make App Magazine” on the App Store.

 

Author: David Janner

David Janner is a former M.D. and the co founder of Megarama Games. His passion is app development and app marketing.

856 thoughts on “How To Choose Keywords For Apple App Store SEO”

  1. David, this is such a timely article. Ed Dale posted yesterday about the importance of keywords for our magazine apps, and since I’m just about to publish my first issue, I was thrilled to read all about it in your article.

    Your results are astounding, and really prove the importance of getting it right. Thanks so much for sharing what you’ve learned and showing us exactly what we need to do. Much appreciated. Continued success to you! Thanks.

    1. Hey Leah,

      Glad you found it helpful!

      What I’ve found is that ASO, is definitely an important marketing avenue… However, keep in mind you definitely need to have other marketing channels as well….

      When you choose the keywords, especially with a magcast magazine, remember that you will only be able to update them when the magcast app is updated… which isn’t necessarily so often. So doubly important to get it right here 🙂

    1. Hey Norm! Thanks for the feedback! Sorry I've been too busy to post on the forum… things have been pretty hectic. But I'll try and post here some of the important lessons that I've been learning, so stay posted!

  2. David, this is such a timely article. Ed Dale posted yesterday about the importance of keywords for our magazine apps, and since I’m just about to publish my first issue, I was thrilled to read all about it in your article.

    Your results are astounding, and really prove the importance of getting it right. Thanks so much for sharing what you’ve learned and showing us exactly what we need to do. Much appreciated. Continued success to you! Thanks.

    1. Yep – definitely need to get that keyword research going. One hot tip – think of localizing your keywords to languages other than English…

  3. Thanks so much David for this article! This the BEST info I have ever found on the subject! It actually persuaded me to purchase both ASO issues on MakeApp/itunes. I really love this section the most:

    ” My “ideal” keyword will have very few competitors (under 4 as I mentioned before) and the top results will have hundreds of ratings, with previous month downloads in the 10’s of thousands, indicating high search volume…”

    Anyway I also started (just few weeks now) using Appcod.es (amazing tool by the way) and I am trying to find the best way to use it. Your rule above really helps since it gives at least a goal.

    I would love if you were able to write more about the practical use of Appcod.es! For instance I am able to find keywords but a lot of them seems to be either too competitive (>100) or when I found a phrase that I have any chance to rank, the numbers really are not there to support the app. I understand that Appcod.es is not for brainstorming new keywords but mostly to check them against the app store. I do use Google tool keywords and Google Trends for that.

    Anyway some more insight about the best way to use Appcod.es will be wonderful. Please keep up the great work!

    Mo

    1. Hey Mo,

      Thanks for the compliment! Much appreciated!

      Personally, I use AppCod.es to quickly check competitor numbers and to get a sense of popularity, both through their popularity index, the number of ratings that the top few apps get and the xyologic download data they pull in.

      Apart from that, the main use is tracking keywords, in order to discard keywords that clearly aren’t working and to track new ones that I insert.

      I sent out an email the other day (you can see the archive – http://archive.aweber.com/makeappsecrets/7uqIg/h/More_on_Keywords_App_Store.htm) that goes into a bit more depth, following up on some misconceptions that I picked up on.

      Otherwise there really aren’t too many other “secrets”. But if you have more specific questions I’d be happy to answer…

  4. That IS fantastic David! Thanks. Yes the email REALLY helped. I was stuck because for many of my keywords, I could see only 1 or maybe 2 competitors which had a tons of ratings/DL but most of the rest of the list had only >1000 DL for instance. I was not sure if that was good enough keyword. Your suggestion to simply look at the first top one really help. I also real like the idea of the table to track things. I have using Appcod.es very recently but I already understand that it main goal is to track keywords overtime and discard the one that do not work.

    THANKS! I hope i can get back to you if I run into trouble with Appcod.es!

    Mo

  5. I appreciated! One questions for you then!

    Many times I can see that Appcod.es says they are 30-80 competitors (count) but when I look at the list, most of the time (at least for the keywords I choose) I can only see few (maybe 1-3) competitors that have a large numbers of ratings and DL (for the previous month) Since you suggesting choosing a keyword with no more competitors than 10 (preferably 4) I will assume that you mean “real” competitors on the list of 30-80 that is returned by Appcod.es Correct? So looking at say on all competitors listed, I should just make a list of the stronger ones (a lot of reviews/DL) and not list the weaker ones (<1000 DL and few reviews)?

    Thanks again for your precious time!

    Mo

    1. Yeah, you touched on a good point.

      The figures I gave in the magazine were to simplify matters a bit and give readers a blueprint they can easily follow. The figures I gave there (for example: less than 10 competitors) I did mean literally. However when I analyze the competition I might look to compete for more competitive keywords after taking a bit closer look at the competition.

      If after the first few apps they don’t have that many downloads / ratings; or if some of the top apps are paid apps (where my app will be free), that might indicate to me that the quality of the competition is low.

      Personally, I don’t list all the competitors in my analysis. I just create a table same as what I sent out in the email – with the target keywords / number of competitors / popularity estimate. I might create an overall estimation of difficulty from 1-3 as well, with 1 being almost certain to rank in the top few results, 2 – moderate, 3 – difficult.

      Whatever the case, I will only target keywords where I am pretty much certain to rank in the top ~4 results. This means initially targeting very low competition keywords.
      If you don’t have a good way to bring lots of downloads, you shouldn’t be going after highly competitive keywords with 30 – 80 competitors, even if a lot of the competitors don’t get many downloads. Unless you have a certain major advantage over the other apps, you simply won’t get seen.

      You should start out going after the “low hanging fruit” with highly targeted keywords related to your app and with low competition. Once you get traction and get some download velocity and ratings, you can attempt to go for the higher competition phrases.

  6. Hello David.

    Every time I have some doubt about my keywords, I always come back to this page! Following your suggestions above I was able to really improve my rankings dramatically!

    But I am also figuring out that ASO is not simply picking up the right keywords. Once the people are looking at your app on their devices (thanks to great keywords) you also need to persuade them click the download button! That is why I am also starting to improve my screenshots (especially the first one…the one who sell) and the description.

    Now that I have the keywords selection down (actually always an on-going process) I am really struggling with the categories selection. My game (“Asteroids Defender Free – Space Missile Command”…..notice the keywords list:) ) Anyway, the logical categories would be “action” and “arcade” since the game is cross between the old games Asteroids and Missile Command. The problem is those two categories (action/arcade) are super competitive!

    I tried “Adventure” but not really great. I was told to stay from the 3 A’s (action/arcade/adventure) So I am experimenting with others like Family, Strategy and Simulation. I am waiting for the review process on those but I am curious if you could share your views and approach in choosing the “correct” category?

    I will think that category like “arcade” is super difficult but you get more chance of downloads. The trick I guess is that if your app is low in the ranking on that hot category then the extra downloads (because being a hot category) may not materialize (since you so low in that category) I also have a feeling that “games” in term of category is more difficult to rank because of the stiff competition…so choosing a category harder than say “utilities” apps.

    As you can see, I am little at loss in figuring out how to best choose the categories!

    Thanks for any suggestions or comments you may have.

    Mo
    @LairdGames.

    1. Hey Mo!

      Good to hear form you again and great to hear that you’ve seen some success with the optimization process!

      In Issue 5 I go into a lot of detail regarding category optimization. Basically what you are saying is correct – targeting adventure / arcade is going to be very difficult right now.

      Go for the less competitive categories initially. As your app gets more traffic you might consider switching to one the the more competitive but higher download categories.

      You’ll want to examine the list that distimo put out regarding the relative competitiveness of each category – http://www.distimo.com/blog/2012_05_quora-answering-series-download-volume-needed-to-hit-top-25-per-category/

  7. Hey David,

    THANK YOU SO MUCH for taking the time. I really appreciated. Yes, I have and love that issue. Everybody should read/have these ASO issues! ( I also have issue 4 and 2) Thank you for confirming that action/adventure is probably too hard to start with. I guess I was trying to go to fast! (a little bit like when i first release my app and was going for keywords like “fun” and “games”!)

    Thank you again for your time.

    Mo

  8. Hello David.

    It is me again! Yes I know I should stop 🙂 BUT i am curious one thing I have noticed in those wonderful ASO issues (1 and 2) that most people do not search by actual app name (brand) but search “genre” or “category” (5% versus 80% according to the article.

    Until now I thought searching by app name was the way to go so I found keywords that were on my competitors app name but which are not brand names. For instance for “Galaxy on Fire” (a big game) I use “galaxy, fire,on….” and I happy to say that I rank pretty high for my “Asteroids Defender Free – Space Missile Command” app. I did that with many other big competitors (always using generic but relevant keywords) and so far so good.

    The problem is even so I am going up in rank, I am still around 500-700 which is much better than before but basically invisible to the IOS market…

    I then recently read that people mostly search for genre and categories. First I want to make sure what it means. Would that means that for my app (for instance) people are searching for the sentence “space games” which is the genre of games?

    Obviously if this is the case, then me ranking on my competitors app names keywords may only help so much. The big fish is the category or genre (according to the article in those issues) I looked “space games” with Appcodes and sure enough I have less than zero chance in getting ranked for “space games” or something similar that relates to the genre of games. (according to Appcodes 42% which is basically a coin toss but I think with less chances!

    Anyway I would LOVE to get your thinking about this issue. First if you agree that keywords based on app competitor’s names would give results but limited and of course what you suggest to approach that genre/category based search which again seems to be huge (80%!)

    As always, THANK YOU for your time and expertise.

    Mo
    LairdGames

    1. Hey Mo,

      It’s fine! I’m enjoying the conversation. Hope you had a good Easter mate 🙂

      This is a very important point that you raise. When you’re trying to choose the best keywords for app seo, as you read, the highest searches are those which are what Matthaus from Xyo calls “Genre” or “Category” searches. This makes sense and you can test it out yourself.

      For example, go the Google Keyword Tool and enter the keyword “games”, making sure you set devices to “mobile devices with full internet browsers” and “exact match” and order the results according to monthly searches. You will then have a really good indication of how people search for “game” related terms on their mobile phones. While you have to keep in mind that people search on the App Store somewhat differently, it still is the best corollary we have at the moment.

      The problem is, as you encountered, that when you try and choose a category such as “space games”, you’ll generally find you have no hope of ranking because there is too much competition – (BTW – One tip here, if you have a really big money keyword, say “Space Games” in your case, you’ll want to put this keyword in the App Name field, because at the moment Apple tends to give a boost to exact match keywords in the title. This is something that changed in a recent update to the search algorithms – for example, my magazine “Make App Magazine” was ranked actually fairly low around #7 if someone search for the keyword “make app magazine”, which was annoying and quite embarrassing. After the update a couple of months ago, now the mag is ranked #1, and this is most likely due to the exact KW match in the title).

      So, the trick is to find “new” categories, since most of the “old” categories are too competitive. For example, if you would have gotten onto the trend early, create a “Harlem Shake” app. Or an example I often give is create an “olympic games” app if the olympics is about to start, etc. In my mind, that is the way for indies to really get some serious traffic from app store optimization.

      That said, I use all types of keywords in my apps, including targeting specific app names as well as genre type keywords.

      Hope that helps!

      1. David,
        It’s really very very helpful for reading your articles and these conversation thread between you and MO.
        I am so excited that learned a lot from you.
        For the KW selection, I want to describe more here and appreciate your can give advise if I am not correct.
        Le’st take an example for a “duct hunt” game.
        First I prepare a set of KWs by my brain, eg. “duck,hunt,hunter,shooter,shot,gun”.
        And put them into GAWT, with option “exact match” on. (do we need turn on or off of the option before “exact” – widely?)
        And collect these output strings sorted by global monthly, then put into appcodes inbox.
        Is this enough to depends on GAWT? Or sometime we need use more time to think the search string by our brain?

        1. Hey Tom,

          1) Regarding inputting KW into the GAKT – make sure to input 1 seed keyword at a time i.e. “Duck hunting game”
          2) I didn’t understand question regarding exact match – yes you need to turn exact match on, because this gives you the most accurate information regarding how many people per month are searching EXACTLY for that term.
          3) You should brainstorm seed keywords yourself + also use GAKT to find more possible options for seed keywords

          I hope I answered your question, I didn’t 100% understand your question

          1. David,
            Very thanks for your kindly response.
            1. Why only input 1 seed keyword at a time? I saw the hint in this input box is “one word every line”
            2. I mean: there is three option (match type) at middle of left of the page called wide,exact,string (may not exact called this but I can not change the page to english 🙁 ). What should we set for these three options?
            3. Thanks.
            4. another question, for selected keywords competitors, our rule is : choose the keywords that first app has outstanding and many reviews and download, but the other apps has very limited downloads, right? in appcod, there is a value of “popularity” and “chance”, are these not very reliable? this step also need human judgement and experience?

          2. David,
            Very thanks for your kindly response.
            1. Why only input 1 seed keyword at a time? I saw the hint in this input box is “one word every line”
            2. I mean: there is three option (match type) at middle of left of the page called wide,exact,string (may not exact called this but I can not change the page to english 🙁 ). What should we set for these three options?
            3. Thanks.
            4. another question, for selected keywords competitors, our rule is : choose the keywords that first app has outstanding and many reviews and download, but the other apps has very limited downloads, right? in appcod, there is a value of “popularity” and “chance”, are these not very reliable? this step also need human judgement and experience?

          3. David,
            Very thanks for your kindly response.
            1. Why only input 1 seed keyword at a time? I saw the hint in this input box is “one word every line”
            2. I mean: there is three option (match type) at middle of left of the page called wide,exact,string (may not exact called this but I can not change the page to english 🙁 ). What should we set for these three options?
            3. Thanks.
            4. another question, for selected keywords competitors, our rule is : choose the keywords that first app has outstanding and many reviews and download, but the other apps has very limited downloads, right? in appcod, there is a value of “popularity” and “chance”, are these not very reliable? this step also need human judgement and experience?

  9. Hi David, great post mate. I first heard your interview with Gabriel Machuret and was blown away to say the least, (probably inspired more to the point) by the content of the interview and your vast amount of knowledge. This post highlights to me just how important the necessity of good keywords is paramount to generating organic traffic in the appstore. Am looking to launch my first app later this year and am so thrilled that you (and Gabriel) have opened my eyes to the world of ASO.

    Without this knowledge I would have been flying blind and probably ended up with an epic fail on my hands! Am confident I will now have a distinct advantage over many people in my exact position. So thanks again David and keep up the great work!

    Shane Rawson

  10. Once again I missed your answer David. Very sorry about that 🙁

    INCREDIBLE response! This is exactly what I was looking for and more 🙂 Great info.

    Yes I found out by accident what your suggest in term of app name. I started with “Space Command” but then changed to “Asteroids Defender Free – Space Missile Command” because I wanted to rank for both “Asteroids” and “Missile Command” which is the two retro game genres that my game combines and emulate. Sure enough I jumped tremendously in both keywords…

    +1 Shane, I too found out about ASO through listening to Gabriel podcast and later through the Make App mag. Wonderful info that you cannot find anywhere else.

    Thanks again for your time. It is incredible that you can found the time to answer people so thoroughly!

    Have a GREAT day!

    Mo

  11. Your blog is highly interesting. Thanks for sharing it. i will refer it in future for sure. If you are looking for getting best services for mobile app testing, software testing, SEO,ASO, etc then, get services from Salvus App Solutions the most popular IT outsourcing company. Visit here for more details- http://salvusappsolutions.com

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