I know of real people who are garnering millions of downloads and earning millions of revenue just by ASO and purely through organic search so here are some things to do:
- In Google Play, you need to focus on the app name/title, the short description and the long description. The two biggest impacts that we have seen are by optimizing the app name and the short description.
- On iOS, you have the app name, the subtitle, the keywords field and the app description. We usually optimize the first three and we have seen pretty good growth using these.
When you have already optimized your app for actual search and downloads, you then look at your app icon and your screenshots. For some clients, we A/B test live in Google Play and are able to grow downloads to 50% by doing nothing else but change icons.
I have also gotten 15 apps featured in the App Store and we know that getting featured equates to tons of downloads as people believe that yours is a good app. You got to do the leg work to get featured but the returns are substantial. If you are deciding between PR and an Apple feature, go for the latter. The best time to reach out to Apple is before you launch (this goes out for games) and you can start by going to Appstore.com/promote. Note that you need to pitch your product at least 6 weeks ahead.