ASO, or App Store Optimization, is the process of optimizing an app’s listing on the App Store to rank higher in the search results and get more downloads. Similar to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it’s a long process and hard to get right. But if you put in the time and effort, there’s gold waiting for you on the other side. This is my story.

Background

Last summer I published an app called parkIt. The idea behind it was pretty good, but it was only my second app and the implementation was terrible. Despite this, it somehow got a lot of attention and traction in the App Store. High on the success, I took on a project way too advanced for my skillset and wasted about five months getting nowhere. But at one point I realized I was wasting my time, and should go back to what I knew.

After spending a few weeks remaking the entire app from scratch, it was ready for the App Store. However, I didn’t just want to push it out there. I wanted to do this properly for once. Making an app is only 20% of the process, getting users is the hard part.

Not knowing what to do, I started researching marketing techniques. After a while, I realized that traditional marketing isn’t very effective (unless you have a million dollar budget). Another thing I found out was over 70% of all downloads come directly from the search results in the App Store. Optimizing how high you rank when users type in a keyword is what you should do. And this is where App Store Optimization comes in.

The process

Having never done anything like this before, I started Googling ASO. A few YouTube videos later, I discovered a site called Sensor Tower. They provide (free) tools you can use to optimize your keywords and other things related to App Marketing and ASO.

But even better than their tool, they have a blog dedicated to teaching you ASO. I spent a few days reading and re-reading this blog, until I felt comfortable getting my hands dirty.

Keywords are the most important part of the ASO process. This is what determines how highly you rank when users type in a sentence, word, or name in the App Store search bar. You have to find keywords that are relevant to your app, can be used to make many different sentences, have high traffic and low competition. Finding keywords is a hard process, but take a look at competitors, reviews, and just brainstorm what you think people would search for when looking for an app like yours. As always, friends and family can be really helpful here.

I spent a few days coming up with, researching, and optimizing the keywords. If you want in-detail info on how to do this, check out the blog at Sensor Tower. In short, you come up with a set of words you think are relevant. Then you research their traffic and competition using Sensor Tower, and then put your keywords up to each other. Pick out the best ones that you can fit into the 100 character keyword field. Sensor Tower also helps look over this so you’re not wasting any space.

The keywords you put in the title will help your app rank even higher for queries containing those keywords, so put the most relevant and difficult ones there. But don’t just randomly list some, form a sentence users can read to get a short overview of what your app does before they even open the App Store page. I used “parkIt — parking location and expiry reminder”. These are highly relevant (but also really hard) keywords that helps explain to the user what my app does, and they’ve worked really well for me.

But not only do you need users to discover your app, they need to download it too. I went on Fiverr to get a cheap but professionally designed app icon that fit the style of my app. I also made five highly relevant screenshots that really captured the essence of my app. And lastly, I wrote a lengthy but easy-to-read description explaining the app in detail. For the first three sentences I used some simple catch phrases to get people to read more. From there on, I increased the complexity gradually for the people who were still reading.

When all this was done, I had a few friends look over everything from keywords and title, to icon, screenshots, and description to make sure everything was perfect. Now it was just submit, launch, and sit back and watch.

The results

It didn’t take long to see the results of my hard work. A few days of research and a few more of hard work led to download numbers beyond my wildest dreams. I went from a few (around 5) downloads a day, to far over 200. And just a few days ago, it reached 10k downloads in less than three months. These numbers are the results of ASO, and ASO only. I have done no marketing otherwise, and the positions I have reached in different Top Charts are again accredited to the downloads I got from ASO.