ASO 101: App Store Optimization Beginners' Guide

0:00 Hello everyone. Today I'm going to talk about app store optimization. This is a very big topic. So the goal of today's video is just to get you started, give you some intuition of how the ASO process works, how to do basic ASO. Consider this as the prerequisite course for diving deep into advanced ASO. After this video, you can jump into any of the ASO focused channel or blogs and understand what those people are talking about. Again, like my past videos, I like to put the conclusion on top in case you already know what ASO is. The question is, should you do ASO? The answer is yes, you have to do it. The

0:47 majority of the apps can get a lot of organic downloads just by doing ASO properly. It can also help you improve conversion rate and reduce churn. That being said, it's a very very complicated topic and it's very hard to do it right. It requires a ton of iteration. It requires trial and error. It requires you to pay some tool to track your progress. So, don't try to do it perfectly right away. It's more like a marathon, not a sprint. And yes, as I mentioned, you do have to pay to do ASO. Seriously, uh, but there are different price range of tools out there. I doubt you would need a $300 a month ASO tool when you don't know what you're doing yet and probably making5 or

1:35 $0 a month. So, now let's dive into ASO. I will give you a summary of how to do ASO from top to bottom at the end of the video, but I do recommend you to watch the entire video to gain some intuition about the process. So, what is app store optimization, ASO? It's a very important tool to allow a user to find your app, uh, download it and potentially pay for it. Here I will use a real world example to demonstrate. Imagine you want to find an app that helps you to track your sleep talk and snoring and you happen to have an iPhone. The first thing that comes to your mind maybe go to the app store and search for sleep talk and

2:22 snoring and you see a list of apps that you uh would like to try. Most user will find an app or multiple apps from the top five of the search result and ignore the rest. Uh when we say app store optimizations, we are largely talking about trying to get your app onto the top five results. So potential user will have a good chance of downloading your app instead of your competitors. So now it seems obvious that we want to do a good app store optimization. I'm going to give you two more reasons why you might want to do it. Part of the app store optimization process is called keyword research. This process is essentially a process where

3:08 you look at the list of keywords and find out how many people are searching for these keywords in the app store and how likely your idea will rank high in the app store. So if you're not building an app out of your passion and you just want to make money, this is a good step to call your idea into question. Maybe nobody's looking for this thing. Maybe you will not make any money with this idea or vice versa. A lot of people are searching for it and you have potential to make a lot of money. Last reason, it's a bit personal. ASO, it's a very reliable way to put your app out there without doing traditional marketing. Marketing requires you to build your own audience. Maybe you can find the target audience of your app on Reddit, on Instagram, Tik

3:55 Tok or any tech website or even newspaper. But to do a very good job on those front, you have to be able to communicate with people really well. And I do encourage you to gain that skill. But if you think that's not your forte, ASO is a good starting point. So what are you actually optimizing for? aka what is the input you can control when you perform a ASO. It is actually very simple on the surface. You have four direct inputs for app store optimization. App name, subtitle, keywords and screenshots. Those are what you can see from actual app store connect. You see

4:40 name, subtitle, keywords and screenshot. So every single time you submit your app to Apple, you will be able to customize all these fields. There are indirect inputs for the ASO as well. Those will help your ASO, but you can only influence them but not modify them. For example, the amount of downloads, reviews, average ratings, how much money you make. In general, the higher number you have for these fields, the better your app will rank. You can influence your customer by prompting them for review and ratings. And there are good resources for teaching you how to do it. So I will not go over those today. Maybe in the future video. Now what are the outputs after

5:27 you do all these works for ASO? How do you measure your ASO success? Well, first and foremost, your app should rank high in the app store for the keywords you included in your app. Imagine your app ranks number one for 10 of the most popular keywords. Uh you will get thousands if not tens of thousands of downloads per day. Second ASO should help you your customer conversion meaning that whoever downloads your app is actually looking for your app. You don't want to get irrelevant customer coming in downloading your app and deleting it right away. What you see on screen right now is an actual screenshot of uh both my apps with poor ASO. The conversion rate is

6:13 about 4% which is way less than industry standard uh 2 to 3%. And the downloads for the past 30 days is quite low. I want to achieve about 15 downloads a day, but I'm only achieving around three. Um, by having a good ASO strategy, you should be able to push your own app closer or better than industry standard conversion rate and I get a good amount of organic downloads on a daily basis. So now we understand the input we can control and we understand the desired output we want to achieve. Can we go ahead and improve our app's downloads by like 50% by following some robust formula? Uh the answer is

6:59 unfortunately no. The challenge is the black box that converts your input into output. Apple's app store algorithm. The algorithm is very situation dependent and it's very nuanced. There are no people in the industry actually has a handbook of what kind of algorithm Apple uses. However, that does not mean the algorithm has not been studied enough and experimented enough by industry giants. Unfortunately, those giant has shared their knowledge with us for free. Uh they do make their money in some other ways which you will find out. But we can go pretty far with ASO without spending too much or without spending

7:47 anything. Next, the keywords. This is the most important part of your ASO. I've listened to or watched at least 30 hours of content on this topic. Uh this part contains the title, subtitle, and keyword list. There are a few rules that are agreed upon among almost every single expert doing ASO. First, title is more important than subtitle and subtitle is more important than keywords. Meaning that the biggest keywords in terms of uh bringing traffic should be in the title and put the next important keywords in the subtitle and put the rest in the keyword list. Next, do not duplicate your keyword in most situation. Apple has this mechanism of mushing

8:34 everything from title, subtitle and keywords together. Let's say you put a sleep tracking app and reasonably you want to put sleep tracking in your title and then just to make things better you put tracking in your subtitle as well, right? Maybe better sleep tracking as shown. Uh and in the keyword list you mention sleep tracking again. The keyword sleep and tracking has been repeated three times and it gets diluted each time you repeat it. Now, your chance of ranking high for sleep tracking is actually less than if you just put sleep tracking in the title and nowhere else. For the next point, you might not need to use it unless you're coming up with

9:21 too many keywords and you find that 30 characters in the title and 30 characters in the subtitle and 100 characters in the keyword list is not enough for you. Um, luckily in the US app store, which is where most money are spent, uh, more than one localizations are indexed. We are going to go into this in more detail in further slides. But these 10 localizations are uh Spanish, Mexico, Russian, Chinese simplified, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Brazil, Chinese traditional, Vietnamese, and Korean. Now, knowing all these knowledge will help you prevent some fundamental mistake. However, it does not enable you

10:07 to have a successful ASO just with these. Uh let's look at a simple example. Imagine you have a recording app that is focusing on snore and sleep talk. Now you are filling up your title, subtitle, and keywords as I demonstrated on the screen. Um can you tell me what is the problem of this keyword list? Well, uh there should be no duplicates. uh each word is actually isolated into individual unit. Take sleep, talk, snore, recorder in the title. That's four keywords and these four keywords should not appear in anywhere else. Let's go ahead and uh get rid of

10:52 them. Now, you notice that I got rid of talks as well. While talks is the plural of talk in United States localization, this will be done for you automatically. So you don't have to deliberately add talks into your keyword list. On top of that, I kept record because the verb and the noun are not merged automatically. You might ask, how do I supposed to know these kind of rules and uh are there more rules like this? Well, uh, their really true answer is, uh, you learn as you go. I haven't really find a single blog post, one video or channel that covers everything. And to be honest, if a video covers everything, it

11:38 will be overwhelming. So, it's the best to start small. And I hope to ease your fear with this video. We can do this. Now, let me give you a bonus tip. The extra space between the comma and the words does not do anything. it's better for you to just get rid of it. Uh, now let's h clean this up a little and make the subtitle a complete sentence without duplication. Okay, with this, are we good to go now? We don't have duplications. We don't have extra spaces and every single field is within the character limit. I really hope I can say yes. this is all you have to do to ship to app store and have a successful ASO campaign. Unfortunately, that's not the

12:25 reality we're living in. That being said, this is already a massive improvement compared to the first revision. So, if you really just want to ship your app like right now, at least do the stuff we tal about up until this point and hopefully you will come back to do more ASO following the rest of the video. So that begs the question, what is so wrong with the keyword list below? The answer lead us to the big money maker of the ASO industry that is the keyword research. So what is keyword research? Keyword research is a process where you go through the list of potential

13:11 keywords, try to determine how effective these sets of keywords are, test out these keywords in your app's metadata, observe the result of the keywords, and iterate on top of it. And there are many many tools helping you to do keyword research. Most of them are paid, some of them are free to extent, but as far as my research goes, none of them are completely free. if you want to do extensive keyword research. So what does these two provide you and why do you want to pay for them? Uh let's take the four keywords in the title from previous slides and I will explain what most of the keyword research tool provide you. First the data that all of the

13:59 keyword research tool provide you is popularity. You should not buy or pay for any tools that only offers you this because this information is publicly available on Apple search app. Although different tools seem to parse this information differently. So you will get slightly different results from different tools. Popularity as its name indicates it tells you how much search traffic a keyword is receiving. The higher the popularity is the more traffic the keyword receive. the lowest popularity score is five, you should really avoid using a keyword that's that unpopular. If the popularity is around 50 60, it means the keyword is very popular. If you rank really high on

14:46 these keywords, you will receive a significant boost in downloads. However, the more popular keyword is, the more likely you will have a lot of competition on this keywords. That means it will be very handy to also know how competitive a keyword is. Which brings us to the information where most of the keyword research tool locked behind a payw wall. Difficulty. Difficulty is not public information. Each keyword research tool have their own proprietary way of determining how difficult it is to rank a keyword. Therefore, they want to charge money for this secret sauce they provide you. Each tool will charge you a different price, and they don't really display the exact same difficulty score.

15:32 They have to come up with their own way to calculate it. Some are more accurate than others, and some are more expensive than others. You're looking at paying between $100 a year to $100 a month depending on your budget and how accurate you want the data to be. I will dive into those tools in more detail in later section of the video. Now, once you have a tool at hand, you would need to find a keyword that has very low difficulty score. As you can see from this chart, the difficulty of all four keywords are pretty high. As a matter of fact, anything above 60 is very difficult to rank. So the chance of you to rank number one for even the least competitive keywords snore is very slim.

16:18 So with these two metrics popularity and difficulty you are already able to make a informed decision of what kind of keywords you should be using in your app. You should aim for keywords that has high popularity and low difficulty. Now what kind of uh popularity and difficulty should you be aiming for? Uh, for a relatively small app that probably has hundreds of reviews or even just five to 10 reviews, you should probably be aiming for popularity score between 15 to 35. If you're brand new, like you just launched it into the app store, you can go maybe slightly higher, maybe 40, 45, because Apple will give a brand new app 7-day artificial boost of

17:05 visibility. Of course, after this boost, your app will be dropping back to where it's supposed to be. Next is difficulty. For a smaller app, you should be aiming for below 40. Anything higher, you're most likely going to have a no chance to fight against the already established app. Again, if you're just launching your app, you can try higher difficulty as well. Now let's do a demo using the cheapest tool I have found Astro. Uh yeah, we'll come back to the presentation after the demo. So now right now we are looking at one of the cheapest ASO tool called Astro. Astro charges you roughly $100 US

17:52 a year. That sounds very expensive because that's about how much you pay for one year of Apple developer program. Uh however, if you look into typically how much these kind of tools charge just so you can check the popularity and difficulty, it's usually much more than this. You're looking at $30, $40 a month or even more $80 $100 a month. So comparing with industry norm Astro is actually pretty affordable. However, I cannot really say how accurate these popularity score and difficulty score is. All I know is that a lot of developers anecdotally have uh shipped their app and they use this tool to do

18:39 ASO and have pretty good result. For the sake of this demo, we're just going to assume this data is fairly accurate. If you find anything else, leave a comment in the comment sections. So, I'd like to check that out as well. I'd like to save some money as well. So, uh we look at these individual keywords. The difficulties are all very very high. Uh means it's very hard to rank very high uh for these keywords. And as you can imagine, you can add more singular keywords into the list. For example, this is a recording app. I'm just going to add record as a verb. Corey and I'm going to add what else? Uh, sleep. I'm going to add dream as well. Maybe I'm going to add cat because

19:26 there are cat noises as well. Maybe I'm going to add dog. Yeah, just add those and see how popular and how difficult it is. Right. As you can see, all the individual keywords I entered are extremely difficult to rank. It makes sense because when people search for this individual keywords, they're not really, let's say they type in record for example, it's not really exactly targeting your uh sleep recording app that track people's snore and sleep talk. So for this case, we would like to introduce something called longtail keywords. That's where you combine several keywords into a singular keywords. So you only targeted people

20:14 that for example search for sleep talk instead of sleep or talk. So let's try that. Going to add sleep talk. Now you look at the popularity at 20 and the difficulty to be 62. So this is not bad at all. Ideally would like the popularity as we mentioned in previous slides to be a bit higher and the difficulty to be a little bit lower. Uh, so maybe we can try Snore Talk. The popularity is atrocious. Difficulty is good though. So yeah, you can consider adding that to your keyword list. How about something crazy

21:05 long? Sleep, talk, and snor. as you get longer and more specific, the popularity drops. So five, that's not really uh acceptable here. So you want to go with something higher. So let's see in this demo we can find that uh magic keyword that will track people's sleep and track people's snore. We'll do snore tracking. Do sleep tracking as well. So, snore tracking is five with difficulty score. That's quite high. What about sleep tracking? Yeah, sleep tracking is not

21:51 bad. Uh, okay. So, let's sort by difficulty. So, we have two keywords that we can potentially use, although the difficulty is a still bit high. Okay. Now, how about we try sleep recorder? Do sleep recorder. Oh, okay. So, this is the best keyword we find so far. Uh, sleep recorder has popularity of almost 40 and difficulty level of below 60. It is still not very ideal to have a keyword that is um quite difficult still to rank. Uh we can probably massage play

22:38 with this three keywords and then make that into our app title and stuff like that. And uh but sometimes you just cannot find that keywords just by this manual labor. So Astro recently introduced uh a pretty good feature that will give you suggestions. Just click on this. I'm just going to uh use my own app to demo you uh what kind of uh suggestions I would receive. Now, look at this suggestion list. So, let me just sort it by popularity. Uh let's just look at more popular keywords. Sound recorder uh has a lower difficulty. Sure, I can potentially use this. Should I? Sure. But I think it's the same name as some other apps that's already in the

23:24 store. So yeah, you got to be careful with that. Sleep monitor. Uh pretty good popularity and a pretty good difficulty. Uh sound monitor, free sleep tracker, noise meters. So noise meter and db meter, while they are really good keywords with decent popularity and the decent difficulties, they're not suitable for my app because people seeking for these keywords are not looking for a dream snore voice recorder. So yeah, that's the gist of using a keyword research tool to find the keywords. We're going to go back to the presentation. Welcome back. Now, let's take a look at the process of doing the keyword research using the tool Astro.

24:10 So, first we brainstorm a bunch of keywords um usually longtail keywords because it's really hard to rank for short keywords. Then if the keywords meets the popularity and difficulty requirement, you add them to the list so you can potentially use them. Once you have a list of keywords, um you want to add them to the title description and put the best keywords in the title if you can and of course avoid duplicates if you can. So as you can see from uh what we have done this is a very labor intensive process. It requires you to have a good understanding of your app and have a good sense of what kind of keywords is

24:56 related to your app. And I do recommend you to look into using chat GBT perhaps to generate bunch of keywords and check them in Astro at least this way it will make the brainstorm part slightly easier. Now the question arise, do we have to do this? Is there a tool that really give us a one-click solution to help us basically do all of these steps? Well, there kind of is. Uh there are more powerful tools that although they do not completely eliminate the manual process, they significantly reduce the pain of the keyword research process by automatically doing a lot of these stuff. I'm just going to list a few that I have

25:41 personally heard of. Some of them I have actually used or more accurately I have used their free trial. Um I will show a few screenshots from different tools that will give you an idea why some ASO tools charge more. For example, on App Tweak, you are able to use their AI keywords generator to find relevant keywords to your app, especially loan keywords. Now, if you click on the plus button, you're adding this keywords to a list where you can see their stats and determine if you would like to use these keywords. Very handy, isn't it? Now, let's also look at the another important way to gather more keywords idea that is spying on your competitors.

26:28 So, usually that kind of ability will charge you heavily. However, there's this one tool that allows you to look at your competitor's keywords uh for mostly for free, at least for now. The name of the tool is app follow. So, take the keywords snore recorder. On the left hand side, app follow will suggest bunch of longtail keywords. You can add them directly to the list or you can see a list of uh competitors that shows up for the keywords snore recorder. If you click on the eye icon of a competitor, boom, magic happens. It would tell you what keywords your competitors are using. And you can add the more popular one by

27:14 clicking the plus button and analyze it further. Another tool is ASO mobile. It has this feature where it tracks the best ranking keywords for your app. You might wonder, why do I want to keep track of keywords that are not in the keyword list? Well, if you're ranking high for a keyword that is not in your list, there's a good chance if you add that to your list, you will rank even higher. Almost 100% of the keyword research tool provide this feature as well. So what you see is just a small portion of what a proper and expensive ASO tool will provide you. Uh the general idea is

28:00 that the more money you pay, the more feature you'll be able to enjoy, the more time you'll be able to save when you do the ASO. Now, should you pay for these expensive tools? Uh it all depends on how much money you have and uh how much time you have. Um to be honest, developing for Apple is not a zero endeavor, right? So first you have to pay $100 for the Apple developer program. Next, assuming you're using the cheapest AOSO tools out there, Astro, you're putting up another $100. Then if you want to advertise your app in the app store, let's say um Apple Search app basics, you put in another

28:47 $100. Now you're spending $300 a year, meaning that you have to make $25 a month in revenue to break even without even getting paid for any work you put in. Right? So, my ultimate suggestion for you is that only spend the amount of money on ASO if you're actually making them back. Of course, uh this is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. If you don't do good ASO, you won't get good downloads. You won't make money and uh so you can't invest in ASO. But at least start with the cheapest tool and get a better intuition of how to do ASO, right? Just use Astro for now. And that means that means later when you are able to spend more money on ASO, you already

29:34 know what you're doing. That being said, I want to add that if you are serious about this as your business, feel free to pay for an ASO tool that's more expensive and more featurerich. Any business that has to pay rent to for a storefront, for example, restaurant will laugh at our $300 annual expenses because that might be what they burn through in one day or half a day or even less. Um, but I do want to inform you that uh for ASO it takes about 2 weeks to stabilize and see the result. So, you might be thinking that you're paying for a month of the ASO tool. Uh, you'll probably be only using it twice a month. uh you use it once, you wait for two weeks to see the result and use it again. It does help

30:21 you to ease the pain if you have multiple apps that you're optimizing for. Now, we have gone through the entire ASO process excluding the screenshot portion. Uh we'll summarize how the ASO process works and we will talk about screenshot maybe when I get better at it in the future video. First and foremost, you have to understand what your app does and what kind of target audience you are looking for and brainstorm. Come up with a bunch of keywords. List of keywords can be from chat GBT, can be out of your own brain, can be from ASO tool that generates bunch of uh keywords. H it can be for your competitors as well, right? It should be a combination of single

31:07 words and the longtail keywords which is the combination of multiple single words. A word of caution, if you do have a working set of keywords, you want to save them somewhere in case your ASO efforts mess it up. Let's say you try some experiment with some new keywords, your download maybe half or even worse. So if you back it up, you can always just roll back and try again. Then once you have this list of keywords, you should rank them from most likely to rank high to least likely to rank high. From the most relevant to your app to the least relevant to your app. A good keyword research tool should be able to help you understand the quality of the keywords by showing you

31:53 the popularity and the difficulty of the keywords. Um, a good keyword should have low difficulty and very high popularity. Uh but unfortunately uh no keyword research tool will tell you how relevant a keyword is to your app. You have to check the relevancy at at your own discretion. Next, list all the keywords into your metadata field. This includes the title, the subtitle, and the keyword list. You put the most important keywords in the title, the slightly worse one in the subtitle, and the least important one in the keyword list. You should fill the title and subtitle for sure because there are only 30 characters each and you should be able to come up with at least that many

32:39 keywords. On the other hand, there are a couple school of thoughts on whether you should fill the 100 character limit with a keyword list. Some say you should come up with as many relevant keyword as possible and fill the 100 character limit. Some say doing this will make the algorithm unable to focus and you will have a mediocre ranking for all the keywords instead of a very good ranking for a few keywords. So experiment with this and see which approach works best for your app. Next you should know that for app store in the United States there are actually nine other localizations being indexed. Um that means you essentially get 10 times of the amount of keywords,

33:25 title, subtitles compared to other regions. Of course, you're actually localizing your app, you should do proper localization instead of uh trying to use that localization to index for United States. Um for example, if your app is actually being localized to Spanish, you should not use Spanish to help your US ranking. you should do proper Spanish localization. So if you actually coming up with that many keywords um how do you use the localization? What's the philosophy of making use of the localization? So I think Ariel from app figures give us a tangible solution. So what you do is instead of trying to fill

34:12 all the localization with every single keywords you're able to come up with, you divide those keywords into themes and each language will have a cohesive theme. For example, if your app can both record sleep and snore, you can have one set of keyword focusing on sleep in US localization and another set of keyword focusing on snore, for example, in Chinese simplified localization. Next, you should keep monitoring the performance of the keyword list. Basically, like for every keywords you put in your app's metadata, like are they ranking higher? Are they ranking lower in the past two weeks? Um, are they making top 10? And ideally, you

34:58 would have a tool that not only tracks keywords you have in your metadata, it also tracks what your apps ranks outside of the metadata list, right? This will give you an idea of what to put in your keyword list in the next iteration of ASO. Yeah. And uh, yeah, last but not least, this is not a dumb process, right? The keyword ranking varies dramatically depending on how popular your app is, how many reviews you have, what your competitors are doing, and in general uh how the market search trending is going. For example, when chat GBT exploded into the scene, the search for AI related stuff shoots off the roof. So if your app is actually

35:44 kind of AI related, it will be smart for you to catch this trend and add some AI related keywords into your app. Um, but at this point in time, it's probably too late to do that. However, if you keep observing the performance of your keywords, you should be able to stay ahead of the curve. you should be able to make modifications accordingly so you can always have a lively and fresh ASO and have a steady stream of downloads in spite of uh external circumstances. So with knowledge you equipped today, you should be able to do a decent ASO uh with however many money you're willing to spend.

36:29 However, uh to become an expert at it and adapting it to your own app, you will have to do a lot more research yourself, listen to a lot of podcast, and read a lot of blog posts. Uh without further ado, let's get to the resources you should be looking at after today. First is Steve from App Masters. Uh while Steve runs a business all about growing apps, he shares so many free advis uh including ASO advises on his YouTube channel. Personally, I would trust people who does ASO over and over again for many apps as opposed to people who does ASO really well for one of their apps. Next is also from YouTube is Ariel

37:16 from App Figures. Uh app figures provides a lot of uh statistic for your app and your competitor's app. It has a very good ASO tool and Ariel is very experienced in using their own tool app figures to optimize for ASO. Even if you use a completely different ASO tool, you should still be able to learn a lot from Ariel. And his content doesn't just limit to keyword optimization. He also does a lot of uh live stream about screenshots and he reviews some of the viewers app and Steve from App Masters sort of does the same thing as well. Two of them together I believe are the most valuable ASO resources I have come

38:03 across. Last but not least, you should also Google around uh blog posts for a specific topic you're interested in. For example, during my preparation for this video, I look at App Tweak's blog post about how long tail keywords works and uh what is the impact when you repeat the keywords inside of a longtail keywords. Now uh we have reached the end of the video. Thanks for watching. Like and subscribe if you find it helpful. I will see you in the next video.