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With over 2 million apps in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, you can find an app for anything. However, app publishers can struggle to get their apps to stand out from the crowd. Various app marketing techniques have proven to be helpful in order to improve app store discoverability, the most cost-effective being App Store Optimization (ASO).
ASO is often compared to SEO, as it’s the process of optimizing certain elements in order to rank highly in app stores and increase app visibility. It’s a similar idea to how you would optimize a website to appear at the top of search results.
While both of these practices rely on the same core principles, they still have their differences. They take place in different ecosystems — people searching in the App Store behave differently than when they search the web. Plus, app store algorithms work differently, using their own specific ranking factors.
Given that over 63% of apps are discovered by general browsing or searching within the App Store, there’s no doubt ASO has to be part of any app marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll help you get started with ASO, outlining the most important elements that you need to optimize and their best practices. We’ll also provide you with some tips and advice to conduct effective keyword research with the help of useful keyword tools.
Before starting to even think about your app’s ASO and rankings, you need to make sure that your app is 100% perfectly designed and has a unique concept. Does your app solve a problem? Is it entertaining? Is your core functionality clearly defined? Does it offer a solid unique selling proposition that separates you from your competitors? Once you’re sure that your app is ready and functional, you can start focusing on optimizing your app’s Product Page.
By optimizing your app’s metadata, you will increase your app’s authority in the App Store and position in the search results. This will increase your app’s organic downloads and, hopefully, your conversion rate.
The first step in building your own strategy is to conduct a deep market and competitor analysis. If you understand your audience and your competitors, you’ll be able to find new opportunities that will increase your discoverability potential.
As previously mentioned, ASO and SEO are easily compared. Search engine algorithms use multiple signals to rank pages in the search results, all weighted differently. These rankings factors vary from one search engine to another. It’s the exact same thing for app stores.
Each store has its own rules and equations to rank apps. So it’s crucial to optimize your app according to the store you’re in. If both Apple and Google give indications on their ranking formula, a big part of the search results mechanism remains a mystery, therefore we can only make an educated "guess" as to how it works, based on experiments.
Just like for SEO, ASO has on-metadata and off-metadata factors ("on page" and “off page” in SEO). On-metadata elements are factors that the app publishers can control and optimize the way they want (e.g: app title, description, etc.). On the other hand, off-metadata factors are totally independent and can’t be controlled, although they can be influenced (e.g: app downloads, reviews & ratings, etc.).
Let’s review each ASO factor having an impact on your app’s rankings and see how you can optimize each of them.
You only get one chance to make a first impression. Don’t ruin it. Your app’s icon is one the first elements that users see when browsing the app store. Visual assets are one of the most influenctial factors, so they need to be perfectly crafted and designed.
Since app users are probably confronted with many other apps similar to yours, you need to focus on your icon’s uniqueness. Your icon is your first opportunity to show off your app’s purpose. Together with your app title, they both should reflect what your app’s about.
Your app icon needs to be appealing, relevant, memorable and eye-catching. All this in one tiny graphic asset. This makes the task quite challenging, so it’s essential to dedicate enough time to it. Try using a single focus point to capture users’ attention and avoid using details or text.
Test your icon against different wallpapers as well. Don’t forget that app icons will constantly appear on your users’ background and that they will be tapped to open the app. A great trick is to use a border to reinforce the contrast with the background.
The Apple App Store and the Google Play Store have their own requirements regarding sizes and rendering. Make sure to carefully follow the iOS Design Guidelines and the Android Graphic Assets Design Material.
Like your app icon, your app name should be appealing, easy to understand, straightforward and unique. It should be understood right away and reflect your app’s purpose.
App titles are not only important in terms of conversion, they also play a notable role in app rankings. Indeed, both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store algorithms allocate a huge importance to the keywords from app names. App names’ SEO sibling could be the title tag.
Use your strongest keywords in your app title. Apple recently announced that iOS app titles should not be longer than 50 characters, in the aim of improving user’s experience and reducing keywords stuffing.
On Google, the limit is even shorter at 30 characters. Keywords from app titles are therefore need to be chosen wisely.
The best practice is to use a nice, simple brand name with 3 - 4 keywords creating a relevant sentence. Don’t forget to use URL-friendly characters so that the App Store can properly scan your keywords.
Keywords certainly represent the biggest challenge in ASO. Whether on Apple or on Google, apps need to target specific keywords they want to rank in search results for. App keywords can actually be compared to the page content tag in SEO.
Here again, Apple and Google work differently. Apple provides app developers with a 100-character iTunes Connect keyword field while Google scans keywords from the app description. Other keyword placements are also taken into account. Indeed, keywords from the app title, the app publisher name, the in-app purchases and the app category are used to rank apps as well.
For the App Store, it is important to use all the available characters and to separate each keyword with commas instead of spaces. It is also highly encouraged to use single keywords instead of longtail keywords because it gives the algorithm more possible combinations.
For Google Play, the mechanic is closer to SEO. Repeat each targeted keywords (choose about 10) 4-5 times and scatter them throughout your marketing-oriented copy, combined with various other keywords. Pay attention to keyword density and avoiding keyword stuffing.
A great keyword is a keyword that is relevant to the app with high search volume and low competition. Indeed, the whole difficulty is to find keywords that users would type but at the same type would not bring too many app results.
A great way to find effective keywords is to use the help of an online keyword tool. There are a lot of tools that you can use. Google provides the AdWords Keyword Planner, and although it focuses on the web, it can already give you a lot of ideas.
Our personal favorite is AppTweak, the "WooRank of apps". AppTweak provides a complete ASO report reviewing any app’s ASO performance as well as the tools and data required to find the best keywords for your app. The volume estimation relies on multiple parameters taken directly from the App Store.
AppTweak also provides the KEI (Keywords Efficiency Index) for each keyword. This is an indicator between 1-100 that helps you understand keywords performance in terms of ranking difficulty. The higher the KEI, the higher the chance of ranking for the keyword.
AppTweak also provides a lot of keywords suggestions such as the most used keywords in the app’s reviews; the app’s top ranked keywords; the app’s category top ranked keywords; auto-suggestions from Apple or Google and much more.
Keyword research should always start with an in-depth competitor analysis to understand how your competitors are positioned in the store. Examine all the keywords present in their app name, description (for Google Play) and use the "Ranked Keywords" feature from AppTweak to check their top ranking keywords. These are certainly some of the ones they target in the iTunes Connect Keyword field (or description).
The best practice here is to analyze as many keywords as possible (at least 100 per app and per language). Basically, any keyword that could be relevant to your app and that is more or less close to your app’s universe.
From there, remove keywords that are too generic or popular. Make sure to avoid small KEIs and those you tried to rank for but never succeeded.
A great strategy to annoy your competition is to take keywords for which they are ranking well (between the 1st and the 50th position) and use them in your app title, description or keyword field. Try using this strategy with apps at the same level as yours. If they’re ranking for these keywords, why wouldn’t you?
However, it is also important to distinguish your app from your competitors by targeting keywords they don’t. You’ll need to find the right balance.
The most important aspect to understand is that keyword rankings change often according to trends, app store changes or the competition. So it’s important to regularly monitor your keyword rankings and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Your app description will appear truncated on your app’s Product Page. If users tap on "more," they’ll be able to view it entirely. This is why it is very important to maximize your efforts on the first lines of your copy.
Make sure that it depicts what your app offers and its main features in just a few lines (2 - 3). Place a strong CTA there. Your app description should be customer-oriented, as it is a powerful conversion tool.
Users don't usually read app descriptions all the way; they’d rather quickly scan so make it as easy to read as possible. Using bullet points (or dashes) to list your unique features and benefits is a great trick to use.
Do everything you can to convince users to download your app. Don’t forget to include your contact details at the end.
Regarding the algorithms, Apple does not officially index keywords from app descriptions but it seems that they might have a small impact. However, iTunes app’s pages are indexed by web search engines, so make your Apple description SEO friendly.
On Google, app descriptions are very important in terms of ASO and therefore should be optimized accordingly. As mentioned above, try targeting about 10 keywords and repeat them about 5 times each, combined with various other keywords.
Don’t forget to update your description with any new features, changes or keywords.
Continue reading %Your Guide to App Store Optimization (ASO)%
If you've been looking for a theme or want to build a theme from scratch, you've most likely seen the words 'Theme Framework' appear somewhere in your travels. Theme frameworks are becoming increasingly common and in this article I'll cover a few of the most popular options available.
It’s important that you understand what a WordPress theme framework is before choosing the right one. I would describe a theme framework as the core or foundation of a theme, which allows users to create their own child themes even if they have little or no experience in coding.
In this article, I'll cover 8 of the most popular WordPress theme frameworks including premium, paid options and also free frameworks.
Continue reading %8 of the Most Popular WordPress Theme Frameworks%
Generally speaking, clients tend to have a bad reputation that stems from the fact that they don’t understand the amount of effort, time and skill that goes into the work they’ve hired you to do. However, many freelancers don’t realize that they must share some of the blame when the communication breaks down as a result of this. My favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and there’s a quote that’s always resonated with me.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” — Atticus Finch.
Resolving conflicts by empathizing with the other person, by seeing things from their perspective, is a core theme in the book, and it’s a technique that has always worked for me whenever I’ve come head-to-head with somebody in life.
Especially when disagreeing with a client!
Not involving the client along the way is a recipe for total disaster. If you make all of the decisions by yourself you’ll feel the clients’ fiery wrath when they receive the fully-furnished (but not what they expected) end result. You’ll wind up either making a horrendous amount of changes at your own expense, or forcing the client to pay for more of your time. You could end up in a payment dispute and lose the client as well.
It doesn’t end well for anybody involved.
Working with the client can be hugely rewarding for two reasons. First of all, you’ll establish a friendly relationship with the client, increasing the odds of them hiring you again. Second of all, they’ll see more sense in your concepts. Because, if they don’t see your process, they won’t apprehend your value.
Showing off your knowledge with fancy buzzwords doesn’t communicate your value, it only confuses the client. You can totally explain why an idea isn’t viable without using fancy terms, but you’ll need to find that sweet spot between speaking full-on nerd and “Sorry that won’t work, end of story.” Even though the client might suggest/request some frustrating or even completely nonsensical things sometimes, you have to come to terms with the fact that they’re not an expert like you (much like how you’re not an expert at what they do).
Quick tip: ask the client about what they do — it makes you subconsciously aware of the fact that you’re actually both intellectual equals specializing in different fields. The client is educating you as much as you’re educating them. We all have a bit of an ego to uphold and there’s nothing wrong with that.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all reached that awkward stage where boundaries have been crossed and it can be very tempting to remind the client of the fact that they’ve already received a huge discount in your services, but this is a huge mistake.
Remember, the client doesn’t understand the time and technical skill that goes into the work that you do, so you do need to “dumb it down” a little (without being condescending) and communicate this beforehand — the client needs to know what he or she can expect with their limited budget. If you feel that their budget won’t facilitate their expectations, either renegotiate something more realistic or walk away. You should never complain that they’re not paying you enough after the fact. If the client asks for something “extra,” politely remind them that the extra is outside of the agreed scope of work.
Continue reading %Freelancer Mistakes: 5 Things You’re Saying to Make Your Client Hate You%
When learning JavaScript one of the basics is to understand how to use variables. Variables are containers for values of all possible types, e.g. number, string or array (see data types). Every variable gets a name that can later be used inside your application (e.g. to read its value).
In this quick tip you'll learn how to use variables and the differences between the various declarations.
Before we start learning the various declarations, lets look at the lifecycle of a variable.
Note: while
varhas been available in JavaScript since its initial releast,letandconstare only available in ES6 (ES2015) and up. See this page for browser compatibility.
Syntax:
var x; // Declaration and initialization
x = "Hello World"; // Assignment
// Or all in one
var y = "Hello World";
This declaration is probably the most popular, as there was no alternative until ECMAScript 6. Variables declared with var are available in the scope of the enclosing function. If there is no enclosing function, they are available globally.
Example:
function sayHello(){
var hello = "Hello World";
return hello;
}
console.log(hello);
This will cause an error ReferenceError: hello is not defined, as the variable hello is only available within the function sayHello. But the following will work, as the variable will be declared globally – in the same scope console.log(hello) is located:
var hello = "Hello World";
function sayHello(){
return hello;
}
console.log(hello);
Syntax:
Continue reading %Quick Tip: How to Declare Variables in Javascript%
In an earlier piece here at SitePoint on a history of CSS image replacement, Baljeet Rathi goes over a number of image replacement techniques, each one more ingenious than the next. These techniques were all focused on solving one problem — how to convey textual content in a beautifully artistic form on the web while keeping it accessible, both to people and search engines. Achieving such a goal in a world of web design without the readily available custom fonts and powerful CSS tools of today was quite a feat.
Taking my cue from Rathi's article, I set out to tackle the following questions:
Let's begin by looking at the best tool for the job.
If your content is text, use text, don't use images of text.
With the tools at your disposal today, you will hardly need any images in order to relay textual content in a beautiful form.
Easy access to a staggering number of custom web fonts, great browser support for the CSS @font-face property and font streaming services like Typekit and Google Fonts all give you enormous power to communicate a brand, convey emotion, and make an impact with stunning typography on the web.
The capabilities of modern CSS make it a breeze to control transparency levels, add text shadows, blend modes, and even animation to your text – no Photoshop or JavaScript sleight of hand required.
Below is just an example of what you can do with web fonts and CSS:
Continue reading %It’s Time to Be Honest about Image Replacement Techniques%
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Smart Designs website displays great typography without any images, only web fonts and CSS.[/caption]