Building an App Store Optimization Strategy From Scratch

By 2015 the App Store and Google Play together listed well over two million apps, and most of them got discovered through search inside the store rather than through an ad or a link from outside. App store optimization is the practice of making sure your app is the one that shows up, and gets tapped, when someone searches for what it does. Here’s how to build that from nothing.

Step 1: Research the keywords people search

Start with the words a potential user would type, not the words your team uses internally to describe the app. Look at competitor apps in your category, note what appears in their titles and descriptions and check the autocomplete suggestions the App Store and Google Play show as you type a relevant term. iOS gives you a hidden 100-character keyword field separate from the visible description, so every one of those characters should carry a real search term, not filler words or punctuation.

Step 2: Get the title and subtitle right

Your app’s title carries more search weight than any other field, which is why competitors so often stuff a keyword into the title alongside the brand name. That works, within reason: a title like “Brand: what it does” tells both the algorithm and the human scanning results what they’re looking at. Overload it with keywords and it reads as spam and hurts trust, so balance matters here.

Step 3: Design the icon and screenshots for the search results page, not the app itself

Most people decide whether to tap into your app’s page based on the icon and the first two screenshots alone, seen small, in a results list, next to several competitors. Test your icon at actual thumbnail size before finalizing it. For screenshots, lead with the single strongest feature or benefit, captioned simply, rather than a generic tour of every screen.

Step 4: Build a plan for ratings and reviews

Store algorithms weight ratings and review velocity heavily, and a low average rating suppresses visibility regardless of how good your keywords are. Prompt for a rating only after a positive moment in the app experience, not on first launch, and make it easy to leave one. A steady trickle of new reviews signals an actively used, trustworthy app more than a burst followed by silence.

Step 5: Treat downloads as an ongoing input, not a one-time launch metric

Install velocity, how many downloads happen and how quickly, feeds into ranking on both major stores. This is why a coordinated launch push (a newsletter blast, a press mention, a paid burst) timed together tends to outperform the same total downloads trickling in slowly over months. If you can concentrate some of your promotion around specific update releases, do it.

Step 6: Localize where your audience is

If your install data shows meaningful traffic from non-English-speaking markets, translating the title, keywords and screenshots for those store locales is one of the highest-leverage moves available, since you’re competing against a much smaller pool of localized listings rather than the entire global category.

Step 7: Watch what changes and adjust

Store search algorithms shift, competitors update their listings and a keyword that ranked well six months ago can quietly stop working. Revisit your keyword field, screenshots and description every quarter rather than treating the initial setup as finished.

None of these steps requires a large budget. What it requires is treating the app’s store listing as a piece of marketing in its own right, worth the same iteration and testing you’d apply to a landing page, instead of an afterthought bolted on after development wraps up.

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More from the Marketing Analytics archive, everything published in 2015 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.