Increasing organic traffic through ASO

For the past four years building Fast Rhymes, marketing has not been in the focus. Organic traffic was pure luck from day 1. Then I started reading up on app marketing and Apple Search Ads, which lead me to ASO. You've probably heard of SEO, Search Engine Optimization. ASO, App Store Optimization, is the mobile equvialent for the Apple App Store and the Google Play store. Whenever I've read about these subjects it's always seemed over complicated to me, but after diving into it, it was a lot simpler than I thought.

After a month learning and implementing basic ASO techniques, I've increased the organic traffic to Fast Rhymes by 30%. Let me take you through some basic things you can do to optimize your ASO, with a focus on the Apple App Store.

Reviews

One of the factors that determines how high your app ranks in search results is the average rating, and how many ratings you have. You need to be proactive about this. Ask your power users to rate your app. Don't be intrusive, either do it after they've completed an action or when they first open the app, if that's not intrusive in your case.

Metadata

In the Apple App Store, there is mainly three types of metadata that determines if your app ranks for a specific search term, with the following priorities:

1. Title
2. Subtitle
3. Keywords

Then the app store will break down all the words in these fields to single keywords to determine what to rank your app for.

Special characters

One big catch is special characters. There's a bug in the App Store algorithm that counts special characters twice. So if you max out the character limit with a special character, the last word might not be included. So make sure to avoid special characters or have some leeway.

App Icon and Screenshots

It's also worth mentioning that the app icon and screenshots are important for conversion. If you rank high for a keyword, but nobody downloads your app, you will drop in the rankings. So make sure to have a good app icon and screenshots that convert. You can use A/B testing tools built into App Store Connect and the Google Play Console to see what works best. Rotato is also highly recommended for creating screenshots.

ASO Tools

Astro

There's a lot of ASO tools out there, and I'm no expert. However, I decided to go with Astro, as it's reasonably priced and did what I wanted, which was:

• Keyword position: how your app ranks for a keyword
• Keyword popularity: how popular the keyword is
• Keyword difficulty: how difficult it is to rank for the keyword

This way you can track how you're doing for important keywords and find opportunities for relevant keywords with high popularity and low difficulty.

Astro also offers two very informative books on ASO after purchase, which were a great read, highly recommend checking this tool out!

Minify ASO

Minify ASO is an awesome free tool that you can add all of your keywords to and it will automatically take care of plurals, duplicates, etc. Having duplicate keywords will actually rank you lower for that keyword, and plurals don't matter to the App Store search algorithm. This saves you precious characters as well, so you can rank for more keywords.

Process

1. Analyze your current keywords with a tool like Astro. And use that as a baseline. Back up your current metadata so you can roll back later on. Then you can use the suggestions tool in Astro, add inn keywords from your competitors, and experiment with keywords that you think are relevant for your app.
2. Look for opportunities, check how your app ranks for those keywords, how is the popularity compared to the difficulty, etc. Make a list of keywords you want to try. Add these keywords to Minify ASO to make sure that you don't have duplicates.
3. Submit the new metadata to the App Store and give it a week or two. Then analyze the results. If the traffic has plummeted, roll back. If it's just a bit better or not a substantial difference, then maybe give it some more time. Also check if the conversion has dropped, that might mean that the relevance for the keywords you are using is off. Then repeat the process.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the App Store search algorithm is a black box. Nobody can claim that they understand exactly how it works, but we can learn from what worked for others, until Apple decides to change their algorithm. Good luck with your ASO journey! If you have any questions or feedback, reach out.