6 Tips and Tricks to Get the Most Downloads for Your App App store optimization is the most cost-effective method to organically increase your installs.
By Andrew Tang Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Many startups spend huge amounts of money on advertising, yet neglect app store optimization. App store optimization is the most cost-effective method to organically increase your installs for a couple of reasons:
- According to Forrester, a staggering 63 percent of all app installs come from general browsing in the app store. By optimizing your app to be discovered through search, you can dramatically increase the number of downloads you receive for your mobile app.
- It's free! If you have a solid app store optimization strategy and execute properly, you will get tons of organic and free installs to your app.
Here are a few tips and tricks:
1. Choose the right title.
The title of your app ranks more heavily than the rest of the meta-data, so choose it wisely. Make sure you target words in your title that you want to hit the most, words that you're confident about. Tools like SensorTower and AppAnnie can provide you accurate traffic volumes and difficulties of certain keywords. Also, make sure you don't keyword stuff the title; the app store will reject your app.
Related: How Can App Makes Improve Revenue and Keep Users Engaged?
2. Select situational keywords.
Depending on how many downloads and how much traffic your app is already getting, you must adjust your keywords. For example, if your app is already getting high traffic and downloads, you can target more competitive keywords that have higher traffic. If you are just starting up an app that nobody knows about and isn't getting featured, I recommend choosing keywords that have a low difficulty level and medium traffic (according to analytic tools like SensorTower or AppAnnie). There are likely some keywords that are gems that others are not targeting and may have decent traffic.
3. Localize by country.
As every app store is separated geographically by country, it is really wise to localize your app to optimize it for discovery across different languages. The app store allows you to change the meta-data within your app depending on which country is searching for your app. Some companies have used a mixture of Google translate and native speakers to help localize their apps, so it shouldn't be too difficult for you to localize as well. Localization is a huge aspect of having an effective presence globally. Just think of all these untapped markets that you can reach and how easily you could acquire more users with these markets.
Related: The Top 5 Myths of Mobile Apps -- And Why Believing Them Will Hurt Your Business
4. Use powerful images and wording.
Once people are able to discover your app, the rest is up to how well your app listing converts into downloads. To optimize conversions, you must use beautiful images to entice users to want to download your app. Make sure to include the most attractive aspects of your app and to include captions in the pictures as well. You'd be surprised at how a simple tweak of an image or word can translate in terms of conversion percentages.
5. Pay attention to ratings, reviews and the description.
When was the last time you downloaded an app that had one star? Ratings and reviews don't factor in as much to discovery as the keywords and the title, but they do have a huge impact on conversion rates. Users are probably more likely to download your app if it has received a large number of positive reviews. Make sure to also include an interesting and enticing description to explain to users what your app does!
Related: 10 Steps to Building an App People Will Love
6. Follow the data.
App store optimization is an ongoing process that takes experience, time and testing to get right. Make sure to thoroughly test out keywords over periods of time, and also test out the images/description of your app to see which ones are converting the best. At the end of the day, data doesn't lie, so make sure you follow the data and find out what works for your app specifically.
