Coming up is the exact ASO strategy that we use to help our clients increase keyword ranking and increase their downloads on Google Play. It’s a dandy!
Transcript:
Coming up is a video on how to optimize your Google Play listing to increase downloads. I know I’ve been sharing a lot on the iOS side but this video will prove that I’ve got the skills on Google Play as well.Stay tuned. What is up App Nation, it is Steve P. Young the hostess with the mostess. Founder of appmasters.com.
The greatest. No. The app marketing agency where we are growth hackers really aimed at increasing downloads on a budget. If you got a spinning wheel already with acquisition, we can help you make that spinning wheel go faster. And if you haven’t gotten anything, any traction so far we can help you get that early traction and get that app moving along.
But today, the video that you are about to watch is the exact video that we have in a course called ASO Masters that walks you through step by step on our ASO process. Now this is a process that we’ve seen consistently increase downloads for our clients. And the proof, you just go to our website, appmasters.com, the homepage, we give you recent wins. Recent wins. Not just case studies that are two years old. These are things that are happening right now. And we feel so stinking confident with our ASO skills that I want you to test me. Test us.
But I’m willing to share all the strategy because we know we’re good. We know we are good. We’re going to keep pushing it. But this video that you are about to watch walks you through the exact process that we use on Google Play.
How do you come up with the app name? How do you optimize the short description? Which is really important. And how do you optimize the long description? How do you determine which keywords to actually pick when you try to do the optimization? We’ve seen some good results already for our clients.
We’ve helped the client go from number three, I know, he’s already pretty high, to number one for a really competitive term. And then we’ve helped other clients increase their downloads on Google Play, just with this exact process that you are about to see. So, if you want to learn more, if after the video you love the video, which I know you will love, but if you want to learn about the course, go to asomasters.co, or if you want to hire us and work with us feel free to reach out to us, appmasters.com, fill out the contact form and let’s talk.
Alright, enjoy the video. In this video, I want to show you how to optimize your app name and your app description in Google Play. So the key differences between iOS and Google Play are that one, iOS is a lot more fun, frankly, but you have the app name, you have the keyword field, and description. On Google Play, unfortunately, you only have the app name. And you even have less characters. So on the iOS side, you have 50 characters.
On the Google Play side, you only have 30 characters to play with and you’re reliant on the app description and the app name and that’s it. So it’s a lot less fun. There’s no double localizations and all this fun stuff that we can do on iOS. I found that it’s a lot more enjoyable for me to really work on the ASO on the iOS side. Google Play is just like meh, whatevz.
But also I want to be fully upfront with you, the success that we’ve seen from a downloads perspective has always been on iOS. So, I’m going to walk you through my process but I feel a lot stronger on iOS than I do on Google Play. And it’s a lot more fun anyways. So, here we go, this is again real data that I’ve pulled from a client. I deleted the app name and the actual keywords that we’re using, but you can see and get a sense. So it’s the same process that I do on iOS, if you watched that video but if you haven’t, here’s what we do again on Google Play.
Now with Google Play, you’re only going to get the traffic and difficulty and from what I’ve seen, pretty much every single keyword is really difficult on Google Play. It’s just weird like that. Especially with sensor power data, it’s just like what can I possibly target? Luckily, Mobile Action has a chance score where there is as you can see good volume so what I’ve done here is again, I’ve done conditional formatting.
Anything under three and under, it’s green and then anything with a 70 and up is green. So this is the difficulty scores from both platforms so that I can easily see if they both line up like this back pain, or even physical therapy. Alright, that’s a keyword maybe worth targeting for me. And you can use this data to actually build apps. So maybe somebody could come up with a back pain app or a physical therapy app that we don’t already have.
Alright, so again, what I do is I sort by search score. I actually rely on Mobile Action’s search score. I kinda like that a little bit better. And if it’s a keyword that I want to target, I put x’s. Start putting x’s again, that I want to target. So I go through the whole list, kinda think through the decent amount of traffic scores is relevant to what my app does and I’ll start putting x’s. And then I’ll sort the x’s. So on iOS, I kinda get to decide where they go. Does it go in the app name? Does it go in the keyword field? Does it go in the Spanish Mexico localization if you’re targeting the US?
You know, I took a tour to decide that. Watch that video for that. But for Google Play, I get to only decide one thing. Where does it go? App name or the description? So I really think through, if I put an x there, then I’m most likely going to be targeting it in the actual Play description. But for here, I kinda just decide well, you only have room for maybe the app name and another keyword. So for here, you know, based on the data, depending on what the app does, again I like to, above everything else, even above all the scores that you see here, it has to be relevant.
So if homeopath is not relevant to this app, I’m not going to have it in the app name. Or a good scenario is physical therapy isn’t that relevant to this app so while the scores are great and the traffic and the chance, the difficulty, they’re all great like everything is great about this keyword, I didn’t have it in the actual app name because the last thing we want to do is disappoint the user and say we’re number one, we’re top five for physical therapy. They download the app and we just don’t talk about physical therapy at all.
While it’s somewhat related, in the future we will have this, it’s just not something that we are strong in right now. So we don’t have that. So really think through that, like the end user is top of mind in all of this. So right now we have the app name and then we have, let’s just do physical therapy because we really like the data on that and we can see, we’re almost at 30. So here’s the length of this or 26. We have three more characters because of the space left. Okay? So, that’s probably what you only have room for. Your app name and a keyword that you might be targeting. So that’s the actual app name.
The Google Play description, here’s how I like to do it. This is a, you’ll have this worksheet as well, I have notes which are just the keywords that we’re targeting. And as you can see I’ve deleted the long description but this is just the amount of times that these keywords appear in the long description.
Now a general rule of thumb is about five times. I think you know, that’s nice, it’s just something that we can put in our head but keyword density is probably more important than the number of times it appears. So if you have like a keyword that appears five times in a 100 word description, then that’s really dense, it’s five percent of the time. So, I like to use the five times rule of thumb because our descriptions get pretty long but it’s up to you on how you want to do it. That’s my general rule of thumb.
If you want to go keyword dense or just the number of times it appears. The other thing to take note is Google has a short description that has only 80 characters so I treat this as a keyword field on iOS. So a lot of times you’ll see that the keywords that I really want to target, I’ll put in to the short description and it’s very important for me to do that. So if I had, going back to my earlier example, physical therapy, I might find great information on physical therapy or the best information on physical therapy. I’ll have that. I’ll double dip again on that just because I want to rank really well for it.
And then the long description, again, I’m going to try to repeat as many keywords as possible. With the long description what we try to do is you’re limited to 40 characters so really have a good description in place and I’m going to share with you sort of my thought process on how I write good app descriptions. Have that in place but think through which keywords you want to target and make sure you sprinkle them inside the long description as much as possible.
And if you’re targeting a phrase, so for instance, text messaging for this one, or text messenger, try to keep them together as much as possible. Definitely have text and messenger but try to have the phrase together as much as possible as well. There’s a lot of ways you can hack that system but you know, think through that as well. You know, Google Play, like I said, it’s not as fun because on iOS there are just so many different variables that you have to play with and you can control.
But reviews are important again and that’s in another video in another section if you want to figure out how to buy app store reviews. But Google Play again, relying on the app name and then descriptions.