You have launched your app on the app store but are not getting enough downloads. Although, you have a high-quality app and applied App Store Optimisation (ASO) techniques including a kickass app icon, amazing screenshots, great app title and high-volume keywords still you are not ranking in the top 10 for your keyword on the app store.

Unfortunately, this is the story for a lot of app entrepreneurs out there. But what is missing here?

The answer is a secret ingredient called long tail keyword.

What Is Actually a Long Tail Keyword?

Before downloading your app, users have to know about your app. As per Tunes 2015 survey, the best mode of app discovery is App Store.

In fact, a staggering 67% of the users discover an app through the app store.

But how does it vary by ranking within search on the app store?

As per Mobile Action, a startling 82% of users never look past the top 25 search results, so achieving a top rank is crucial to generating a significant boost in downloads. In fact, the top 3 results generate over 50% of the downloads (30% position #1, 17% position #2, and 12% position #3) for a given keyword.

And long tail keywords do help with getting your app ranked higher for those keywords.

Thus, it’s more important for example to rank in the top 10 for ‘icecream cone game’ search than maybe as #365 for ‘icecream’ search, even though ‘icecream’ might have more searches than the long tail keyword – ‘icecream cone game’.

So, this begs the question what actually is a long tail keyword?

The graph below represents the distribution of all keyword searches. The vertical axis is the number of searches that a keyword gets and the horizontal axis represents each individual keyword, ordered by the number of searches.

The green area represents approximately the top 20% of keywords that are most frequently searched for. On the other hand, the yellow area represents keywords that are not as frequently searched for. Since the yellow area is longer and thinner, it is known as the long tail.

Another example from App Radar is mentioned above. While ‘socks’ is a short tail keyword, ‘how to knit socks’ and ‘how to knit socks with circular needles’ are long tail keywords. In fact, ‘how to knit socks with circular needles’ is extremely specific long tail keyword with a high probability of ranking better.

Why Bother with Long-Tail Keywords, If They’re Less Common?

It may seem counter-intuitive, but in aggregate, long-tail keywords still represent a significant number of searches – up to 80%, as per the data collected by Gummicube since 2011.

These include words like ‘share photos’, ‘learn a language’, ‘cheap flights’ or ‘free photo editing’. The remaining 20% of searches are generally 1 app/brand name searches like ‘Facebook’, ‘Instagram’ or ‘Duolingo’.

Using the data from Datacube, the results for search term ‘edit photos’:

So, for the same query using mobile search, you can see the results are feature and brand based:

Feature Queries – “photo blender”, “photo editor”, “photo effects”, “add text”, “photo collage”, “add music”

Brand Queries –“camera 360”

Long-tail keywords also represent a less competitive area than the most common keywords, which can allow you to edge out other apps.

In other words, using long-tail keywords is about getting the right views, that are more likely to result in user downloads.

For example, if your app helps high school students practice vocabulary in order to prepare for standardized tests, the keyword “education” might come to mind. But “education” is going to be a difficult term to be competitive for, and pretty generic.

Something like “SAT vocabulary word prep” would be a good keyword idea. And ultimately, it will be easier to rank for, resulting in more downloads.

How to Find the Best Long Tail Keywords?

The best way is to go with a three-pronged strategy based on the following characteristics:

Relevance – The first and most important characteristic is keyword relevancy. Apple’s App Store algorithm will boost your rating if you have a good conversion rate. So, you have to make sure that if a user searches for a specific keyword that you are targeting, they are more likely to download your app.

Competition – The second most important characteristic is keyword competition. Choose long-tail keywords where you can rank your app in the top 10 with little competition. Users won’t scroll beyond the top 10 apps.

Search Volume – Finally, focus on keywords popularity or search volume. If you have synonym keywords with same relevance and competition, go for the one with higher search volume. With Apple Search Ads, Apple now provides the exact Search Popularity for English (US) keywords.

Remember that it is always better to be in the top 10 results for an average-searched keyword than having a low ranking on a highly popular keyword.

Great Strategy for App Keyword Selection

In fact, Incipia has used this strategy for keyword selection to great success.

Start with high volume terms to see if you can get a good rank on App Store. For the keywords on which the app won’t rank, shift gradually to longer-tail until you get a satisfactory rank Over time, return to the high-volume terms as the app’s visibility would grow overall.

Final Words

App Store Optimization using long-tail keywords is not a ‘fire and forget’ strategy.

First of all, a change in keywords might take some time to show actual impact in app store rankings number of downloads. Although, it is much faster than web SEO, still takes some time. So, you have to be patient.

Secondly, you have to keep tracking your keyword ranking regularly. If you find a certain long-tail keyword for which you can’t rank well within a month, remove it. Try the next long-tail keyword and see if it provides you the required ranking push.

In this manner, keep testing till you find the right combination of long-tail keywords.