The Critical Problem With App Store Keyword Optimization
And a simple method to set it up effectively
App store search plays an essential role in app store optimization (ASO), where the rule is simple: Get your app to rank for the best keywords based on certain criteria, such as highest volume and closest alignment with search intent, and do so for as many of those keywords as possible. This makes modern strategies for keyword optimization in ASO equally simple — so much so that seems oversimplified. Why? Because there’s only one type of such strategies that exists: “Use keywords effectively” to “get discovered” and, eventually, “downloaded via search” results by as many mobile users as possible.
The problem with this is: It lacks the flexibility or versatility that supports you well when:
- You face dilemmas where equally valuable keywords are available but not all can be used.
- You need to adapt to diverse goals and purposes.
- You perceive new opportunities that require outside-the-box solutions and, thus, strategies.
This is why it’s critical to make sure your keyword strategies are versatile.
But How?
Keyword optimization requires an elaborate step-by-step process. Each of these steps would, then, has its own requirements and logic. When you strategize each step properly, you give the complete keyword strategy a strong component. Therefore, it’s essential to set up these componential strategies the right way. Here are the four major components to focus on:
- How to find keywords
- How to use keywords
- How to measure keywords
- How to optimize keywords
Here’s how to develop strategies for them.
How To Find Keywords
The first piece of the puzzle is central to keyword research: How to find potentially useful keywords for your app to rank for. While it looks straightforward, it’s by no means simple. Three factors need to be considered:
- Where to find keywords
- Who to find keywords with
- How often should you find new keywords
To figure out where to find keywords, identify relevant sources of keyword ideas. For the purpose of this guide, I’ll focus on automated ways to find keyword ideas, such as using keyword tracking tools, due to higher scalability compared to traditional methods such as brainstorming or word association in brand/market research. You can use such tools to scan for keywords from the following two sources: The apps that are active in-app store search, and the ways they interact with each other.
To start with, most of us are used to spying on direct competitors as a reliable keyword source. This is great, yet incomplete. You may also find very good keywords from non-competing apps that rank for the keywords you desire as well. For example, if you work on a cooking guides app, keywords like “healthy food” may prove to be interesting, but they are sometimes found in fitness apps as well. The key, then, is to look beyond business competition and try to understand search competition.
Next, the same app can be analyzed multiple times to extract keywords in multiple ways. Use a keyword tracking tool to scan and reveal keywords in its metadata, the keywords it ranks high for, or the keywords it converts the most installs from, among other dimensions. In this stage, you get to understand each app’s search behaviors, and they serve as a great source of keywords as well.
To identify who to find keywords with, consider the match between the language keyword research is done in and the proficiency in that language of the person doing it. If the match is poor, the person doing keyword research doesn’t comprehend well what the keywords mean and, hence, doesn’t understand the complex contexts that imply their search intents.
The strategy, in this case, is to rely almost entirely on automation options provided by keyword tools. This is where decision-making depends more on quantitative data, e.g. search volume, ranking positions, and estimated downloads on a keyword level. Finally, the best keywords with the highest perceived quantified value should be passed on to someone with high linguistic skills like a copywriter to formulate metadata assets.
By contrast, if the person speaks the language well, e.g. on a native level, qualitative data should be included in keyword research. This means possible variations of each keyword (spelling, grammar, etc.) can be introduced early on. It also means quality control may come in from the beginning as the person can spot errors effortlessly. This is where a slow but sure strategy may fit better than an automated one.
Finally, as keyword research may be repeated or revised over time to support iterative optimization, it’s important to define how often you do it. You can do it once or twice per year, end up with a massive backlog, then gradually refining it by eliminating irrelevant or low-performing keywords over time. Or, you can do it every week or month, each brings in a fresh set of keywords at the cost of your time and labor. Either way, there’s a decision to make, and wherever you make decisions, you already strategize.
How To Use Keywords
After you’ve done the keyword research, you need to decide how to use its result for the highest possible impact. Since it’d involve hundreds or thousands of individual keywords to consider, decisions have to be made. Eventually, the decisions you make form the foundation of your strategy for how to use keywords.
In general, there are five factors to consider when developing such a strategy:
- Search volume
- Relevance to user intent
- Competition for high ranks
- Combinations formed by selected keywords
- Either keyword occurrences (Play Store) or keyword phrases (App Store)
I’ll skip the part where each factor is explained since it belongs to ASO 101. The focus of this piece is on making sense of their mixture and make better multidimensional decisions. The key here is “change and adapt” based on a variety of factors, which is rarely ever highlighted in modern ASO keyword optimization, simply because it relies on one single rule: “Max out” the positive factors, “min down” the negative ones.
To be more specific, keywords with the highest volume, highest relevance levels, the highest amount of good combinations that and lowest perceived competition are used and used repeatedly in Play Store metadata, or in exact phrases in App Store metadata. This is the standard procedure. It’s being treated so much like the holy grail of ASO that it gets overlooked. It is this oversight that blocks marketers from being versatile with their keyword strategies.
For example, think of a context where your app has humble brand awareness, market share, and industry, like a word-of-the-day dictionary app. Only a couple of keywords seem to be used by searchers, their volume isn’t that great, and they form almost no combination that can be utilized. It’s common sense that the standard approach won’t get you anywhere, and an adapted strategy is required, e.g. focusing more on competitors’ names or broader keywords to compensate for low reach that’s inherent to such a niche market.
For another example, let’s say you have a good backlog of high-volume, high-relevance keywords, but most of them are sensitive to seasonal changes due to the nature of your industry, like e-commerce or gardening guide apps. This means most of the factors that make such keywords good are only reliable temporarily (seasonally). This would make the standard approach only partially reliable, as even the best-ever keywords aren’t good all the time. Your strategy, thus, should be about having multiple backlogs to substitute for each other in different seasons.
In shorts, how you decide to use keywords also needs its own strategies. Don’t take one-size-fits-all, standard processes for granted.
How To Measure Keywords
Tracking, measuring, and analyzing keyword-related data usually seems simple and straightforward. However, this is often an illusion because many tricky decisions sometimes need to be made for how keyword measurement should proceed. This means knowing how to strategize it is crucial, and it depends on the following.
1. Prioritization
If keyword optimization is a critical success factor for your ASO performance, then measuring related data must be on top of your list. This means watching how keyword ranking positions, search volume, and other related details need to be done frequently, on a weekly or even daily basis, and at scale. You’d need a fast and powerful solution (such as a professional or enterprise subscription on a keyword tool) to handle large amounts of data quickly.
On the contrary, if its priority is low, either because performance is already solid or the overall potential impact isn’t promising, then you’d only need to measure those keywords occasionally. What’s more, the amount of keyword data to track would likely be smaller, making keyword measurement as a whole a lighter task. This is where a compact solution would already suffice.
2. Depth of analysis
Keyword data can be split into multiple categories on different levels. The most direct yet also lowest one involves simple metrics like your app’s ranking position for a keyword, its search volume, and what kind of apps also rank for it. These are meant for a quick glance at what’s going on. The second level would involve the estimated search visibility of your app based on all tracked keywords, the number of installs they bring over time, and so on. Here you get a more complete perspective on the performance of your keyword strategy.
But that’s not all. The third level is one often overlooked by many. It’s the overall search-related KPIs like search impressions/visitors, installs, and conversion rate. While it isn’t easy to isolate the impact of keyword optimization on app store search performance from other factors, such as search ads, these data points help you understand the impact beyond the keyword level. If your app ranks high for a plethora of keywords but the search impressions fail to improve or it doesn’t get many installs from search results, there’s no point ranking for them in the first place.
How To Optimize Keywords
No optimization is realistically achievable in one try. Continuous efforts are needed to improve keyword performance repetitively, iteratively and incrementally, by extensively testing different options and scenarios. This equals the need for a strategy of how keywords are optimized.
1. Repetition
Like other app marketing areas, the general optimization process for keywords involves finding good candidates, test them, track their performance, decide what to do with them moving forward, and repeat. How you manage this repetition process makes a major building block for the entire strategy.
Certain elements need to be determined and monitored in such a process. They include the frequency or how often you repeat the process, depending on how much you trust the test results. You may need to let tests run for longer and, thus, less often, just to be on the safe side in some cases, and test more rapidly in other cases. They also include the scale or how many keywords you’re willing to test per iteration. The more keywords are tested at once, the higher the risk and the greater the reward.
2. Iteration
Test results usually come with at least a hint for a change you should make. If a test shows an unfavorable result, involved keywords should be removed and the list of keywords to focus on should be narrowed down. If it shows a positive one, it’s safe to keep them and think of additional uses. Either way, changes need to be made over time, and one at a time — that is, iteratively. Therefore, it’s crucial that you also define how you want the iteration of keyword optimization to work for your app.
It can be aggressive, targeting larger sets of keywords to be tested at once, thus prone to more risks, yet quicker to improve performance. Alternatively, it can be conservative, where improvements are slow because you go the safe path. Ultimately, how you make iterations will partly define your strategy.
3. Incrementation
The end goal of all optimization is to reach the highest possible level of performance, capacity, or efficacy. This translates into, for keyword optimization, having the best possible mix of keywords to add into your app’s app store metadata. The role of a strategy is to incrementally fill up the space of the said metadata with the said keywords until they’re fully loaded.
This “loading” process needs to be strategized as well. Would you prefer to go for a vertical approach or a horizontal one? Vertical means incrementally optimizing one keyword at a time and expand to more after positive results are consolidated. For example, one keyword can be added to the Play Store long description first, then, in turn, moved to the short description and title, then gets repeated in more sentences, until your app becomes #1 for it and converts really well. Then, you do the same for the next keyword.
By contrast, a horizontal strategy involves spreading out a handful of keywords across the metadata, then incrementally optimizing that mix by forming more variations, making different sentences with them, and swapping their positions in different assets, such as between the title and the short description. This is less linear and straightforward than vertical, but it allows more creativity as your work with a variety of keywords.
Whichever options you choose, decisions need to be made. More importantly, you can mix together many options for such decisions. Based on how you repeat, iterate and increment keyword optimization differently, you’ll eventually develop a specific strategy for it.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no universal path to keyword optimization success. It demands a proper strategy, formulated based on your app’s specific needs and settings. To help you get closer to the goal of developing a complete strategy as such, I’ve outlined its four vital components. They make a FUMO framework as follows:
- How to Find keywords
- How to Use keywords
- How to Measure keywords
- How to Optimize keywords
Once each component is managed with a decent strategy of its own, their combination makes the final, complete keyword strategy for your app in ASO.
