Nowadays, having an app for your business is mandatory. But your task does not end here. There are countless similar apps and in the midst of these apps, your app can get lost in no time. All your efforts and money spent on the app would be futile, then. It’s true that app marketing has greatly enriched the overall marketing strategy of the businesses. At the same time, the rapid emergence of apps poses a great challenge to the businesses, or you can say every business needs to go through a struggle for their app – struggle for existence!
In the year 2013, the number of available apps in the Google Play Store was 1 million. In March 2017, the number is almost 2.8 million. Apple stands next to Google Play Store with 2.2 million apps, while Windows Store occupies the third position (669,000), followed by Amazon Appstore (600,000) and Blackberry World (234,500). From this stat, the level of competition is expected to be crystal clear to you.
Are you getting nervous? Don’t be! If you want your app to survive in this highly competitive field of mobile app marketing, you need to draft and execute a proper app store optimization (ASO ) strategy. Let me give you a relief. I am here to guide you to the right track. Like search engine optimization, keyword is the base of ASO. In this article, I am going to discuss how to choose Google Play ASO keywords and how to use them properly in order to get a satisfying result.
How to Choose the Right Keywords for ASO?
1. Keyword Research
Before delving into the detail, let me tell you that you need to employ only “download” keywords. I mean, you should choose only those keywords that people are more likely to use to download an app similar to yours.
A Few App Store Keyword Ideas
Let’s start with 50 app store keywords. You might want to ask me how you can get app store keywords. There are certain standard tools that can come to your rescue. You can get a plenty of keyword ideas from these tools. These tools include:
- Google Keyword Planner
- OneLook Reverse Dictionary
- Mobile Action
- Ubersuggest
Apart from the tools mentioned below, you can go through the reviews. Reviews are a great source for getting keyword ideas. Avoiding too generic keywords can help you stay safe. Long-tail keywords are the most effective for ASO. In ASO, multi-word keywords are considered as long-tail keywords. Most of the app publishers commit the mistake of choosing target-based single-word keywords that fail to compete with the long-tail ones.
If you need keywords for different countries, you can use Google Trends to determine how popular your keyword are in several countries.
Record all the keyword ideas you are gathering in a spreadsheet. Don’t forget to record keywords, ranking difficulty, traffic, and important notes. This is just a draft. You are free to expand it later before the final selection.
Opponent’s Choice
Well, I am not asking you to act like James Bond, but a little spying would be beneficial for you. Before finalizing the keywords, have a look at your competitors’ keywords that are ranking well. I am not telling you to use the same keywords. I want you to get ideas from those keywords as they are doing pretty well. You can use Sensor Tower to spy on the Google Play Keywords for apps, similar to your apps.
2. Keyword Metrics
Now, you have got a list of keywords, right? Then, let’s work on them. It is important to look for some hard data on each keyword. To make the thing clearer, take the example of the game Clash of Clans into consideration. We all know how popular this game is. Let’s take the keyword “Castle” for this app. In a tool, like Mobile Action, you can set the name of the app, ( Clash of Clans in this case) and add “Castle” to the list as the keyword. You can add other keywords as well. Now, focus on two things, the Search Score and Chance. Search Score is how many time a keyword is searched. The higher search score assures more traffic. The metric, Chance, measures the probability that an app has of ranking in the list of top ten for a particular keyword (here, for castle).
Different businesses have different metrics. For instance, The Sensor Tower may differ with Mobile Action the metrics. The former, however, use Difficulty Score, and Traffic Score. If your traffic score is high, there are chances that your keyword would get more searches in a month.
Apart from Mobile Action and Sensor Tower, there are many other ASO platforms. Though the concept is the same, each of these platforms has different sets of terminologies.
3. Final Selection of Most Suitable Keywords
Now, we need to move to the final stage. This is the time to pick only the best keywords for your mobile app store optimization. If you are targeting keywords with a lot of traffic, you are doing wrong. Usually, these keywords have no shot to rank for. In such a case, you can never rank the keyword, even if it has a billion searches. When you aim at ranking in the top ten for a particular keyword having some traffic, you can get more downloads than ranking in the 100’s for a keyword having a number of traffics.
Your final selection of keywords should be based on:
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Download Relevance
I have already discussed download relevance earlier. While analyzing a keyword, consider whether people will search this keyword to download the app or it’s not more than a generic keyword.
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Ranking Ability
It would be better if you start with keywords which are easy to rank. These keywords have a high chance (or, low difficulty score). Another measure you can use to determine the ranking ability of a particular keyword is competition level.
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Searches
Now, you need to look at the search volume that each keyword of your list is getting. When you have all the data before you, pick the ones having higher traffic.
Let’s Wrap it up
Keyword selection is the basic stage and the entire optimization is based on the keywords you are going to choose for ASO. During the optimization phase, you should place the chosen keywords in your app title, and description.
Is there any other question floating around your mind regarding Google Play App Store keywords? Please feel free to comment below to let us know.
Jose Lopez
Jose Lopez is a Software Engineer, currently working as a Product Manager at Mobixed, the leading mobile application development company of California. In his 20+ years of experience, he has built robust apps that are simply loved by mobile users. Jose is well-versed with the art and science of creating mobile apps that successfully market businesses.