Coming up, I will tell you what really matters when it comes to Google Play ASO by highlighting a case study that we just performed for a client. You will discover if changing the app title and short description have the most weight and how many times you actually have to repeat a keyword in the long description and more.
I will tell you exactly what we did to each section of the Google Play listing and tell you the results that happened from each round.
Round 1: Optimize the title and short description
You can easily locate the title and short description as these are the first two things you will find at the top. We put the keywords we targeted (those with good traffic and decent competition) into the title and the short description, and saw a 27% increase in downloads.
In our study, we only used two keywords because the characters are limited and I didn’t want too many keywords in there to monitor. These are the results.
- Keyword one jumped from rank 161 to rank 13
- Keyword two jumped from NA to rank 11.
- The keywords in short description increased but not significantly because it didn’t make into the top 15.
Apps with a good amount of downloads and thousands of ratings will likely see the same results. Unfortunately, optimizing the title and short description do not work for new apps.
Round 1.5: Optimize only the long description
In this round, we optimize only the long description and left the title and short descriptions as they were. The long description is the comprehensive explanation of the app. You will find this after the title and short description and it’s usually the longest.
In this round, we added certain keywords that we wanted, including the two keywords that we were targeting. After making this change, we saw only 2% increase in the downloads. There was no huge impact, but the two keywords we were focusing on did increase in their rankings.
- Keyword one jumped from rank 13 to rank 8
- Keyword two jumped from rank 11 to rank 8
Round 2: Repeat keywords in the long description
In this stage, we still didn’t touch the title and short description, instead, we repeated the keywords in the long description even more. In round 1.5 we made up to five different repetitions of the keywords. This round we jumped up to eight. After the changes, we saw a 9% increase in downloads. Here’s what happened to the keywords we targeted:.
- Keyword one jumped from rank 8 to rank 7
- Keyword two jumped from rank 8 to rank 6
Overall, if you are thinking about optimizing in Google Play, I’d have to say that the the biggest impact that you are going to make in downloads is when you’re optimizing the app title and short description.