For those of you who don’t know, I have recently joined a company who develops mobile apps. Social casino apps to be specific. This is a crowded and highly competitive space where people fight tooth and nail to rank in app stores and spend gigantic marketing budgets to acquire new users. When I accepted the position, we discussed that although I’m confident with my SEO skills, I have never done ASO so would have to learn.
So, I have been learning. I dove head first into a pool of uncertainty, hoping that some of the tactics I know with SEO would translate to ASO. So far, this has not been the case.
Before I go any further, let me explain what these words mean.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is when you optimize a website to increase your Google search rankings, therefore increasing your organic traffic. For example, if you are an Italian restaurant in Reno called Bella Pasta, you don’t want to just show up in Google for “Bella Pasta,” because that only helps people find you who have already heard of you. You also want to show up for words like “Best Italian Restaurant,” “Best Chicken Parmesan Reno,” etc. so that people can find you when they are searching for terms about your product or service. The more “organic” traffic you get, the more new people are finding you through Google, Yahoo or Bing without you having to pay for ads to show up in the first or second spot in the search engine results.
ASO, or App Store Optimization, is when you try to tweak keywords, title, subtitles, images and descriptions to try and rank higher in the app store search rankings, whether it is the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or Amazon App Store.
I have spoken with numerous companies in the last few months who all have their own methods and ideologies, all promising to get your app ranking in the top 10 if you spend a bazillion dollars. I have been given tips, tricks, insights, and have read hundreds of pages of content all with conflicting ideas and some kind of goal to get you to spend more money and trust them. But the moral of the story so far, from what I have seen and learned, is that this is all a guessing game that everyone is still trying to figure out. Including Apple and Google. So, for all of you digital marketing nerds out there like me, here are 2 major differences I have found so far between SEO and ASO and some quick tips that I have found to have success:
#1: You are Extremely Limited on Content with ASO
When optimizing a website, you can add landing pages, blogs, image galleries, pretty much as much content as you want. This helps to build your website’s credibility and paint a picture of you being an information source for that topic. With ASO, you do not have multiple pages, you do not have the capability to upload endless images, you do not have interstitial links. You have 1 app store page with a description, a what’s new section, a fixed number of keywords, 5 images and 1 video. That is it, forever. Plus, you are limited on the words you can use. On iOS, you cannot use the term “Free” (which is what most people search for) and you cannot use competitor names.
#2: Paid Search Ads Actually Impact Organic Results in ASO
In conversations with Apple representatives for clarity, I have been told that the more your Apple search ads show up, the more they can test if your app is converting people, which in turn will increase your organic ranking. The way it was explained, they want to see if your app is good enough to convert players who click on your app store page, so they reward you for keywords that you are getting good paid conversions for by increasing your organic ranking for those keywords.
To any of us who have successfully executed organic SEO campaigns, this thinking is the opposite of what we typically see to gain organic merit. The message here is that if you spend more advertising dollars with Apple, they will help your organic rankings. This makes it very difficult for startups to compete with the large wallets of the big guys to increase their App Store ranking.
Some tips I have found effective:
- Optimize your keywords for highly searched and highly relevant terms with as little competition as possible. This is a difficult balancing act, but by constantly optimizing keywords, you will find some gems that pertain to your app, get traffic and drive conversions!
- Images matter, A LOT! I lean on our lovely and talented Art Director for graphics and videos that will stand out from our competitors. She works wonders.
- Keyword stuff your description. For those of us who are used to SEO, this will sting a little, but it does help.
In the end, this is all a learning experience and I am having a lot of fun figuring it out! All I can do is research, test, analyze and test some more. There is no exact science, and that is what I love about marketing in general. Testing things and making data driven decisions is our way of life. We have to continually optimize our plans and be better marketers, or we will no longer produce continually increasing ROI.
No matter what new technologies or different challenges marketers face, a good marketer is adaptively confident. We can adapt to all of these new situations with confidence that we have what it takes to figure it out and get better and better results.
Here is to hoping my tests produce results that get a return on investment and produce actionable lessons! And sorry to all of you who read this whole thing and don’t care at all about SEO or ASO 😊
Note: yes that is a big of my dog playing one of our casino games, I just thought it was fun!