Maximize App Downloads With This Detailed App Store Optimization Guide
Plus a keyword research template.
👋 Hey, I’m Casandra. I share research-backed business ideas to help you start and grow a business. This is a 🔒 Premium Edition 🔒 of Really Good Business Ideas.
Welcome back to Really Good Business Ideas! This week, we’re wrapping up our mobile app business series with a guide to app store optimization (ASO).
Why App Store Optimization Is Important 💭
The app stores (Apple App Store and Google Play store) are unique and powerful marketing channels for mobile apps.
Apple reported in 2023 that their App Store receives over 650 million visitors every week. And since we know that Android has ~70% of global smartphone market share, we can assume Google Play Store traffic is even higher.
While almost every business can leverage traditional online channels like organic search and social media referrals, only mobile app businesses can take advantage of the massive amount of traffic that flows through the app stores every day.
In fact, the app stores are such a powerful lever, a business I used to work with would make apps just to capture app store search traffic. We would then convert that traffic into leads and customers for our web-based product.
So, while mobile app businesses should be thinking about all the usual marketing suspects, it’s crucial to ace app store optimization to maximize your business’s potential.
What Is App Store Optimization 📱
App store optimization is the process of improving the effectiveness of the mobile app stores as an acquisition channel for your apps. This basically boils down to two things:
App store search engine optimization (SEO): Maximizing the number of people who are exposed to your app through searches in the app store.
App store conversion rate optimization (CRO): Maximizing the number of people who actually download and subsequently use your app after being exposed to it.
SEO and CRO are common inputs into all online growth but here we are applying them specifically to the app store ecosystems.
As
wrote in Growth Memo this week, CRO and SEO are connected at the hip. I couldn’t agree more. Think of them as two synergistic inputs into the app store optimization process. I’ve broken them into two sections to make it easier to understand but they are really two sides of the same coin.How to Do App Store Optimization 💻
Let’s dig into how to actually do app store optimization. Here’s what we’ll cover in more detail:
App Store Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
App store SEO is the process is trying to drive app store search traffic to your app page. It involves choosing the right keywords to target, optimizing your app page for those keywords, and signals that indicate your app is high-quality to the app stores.
Although Apple and Google don’t openly reveal all the factors that drive their app store rankings, most experts agree on what the biggest inputs are.