How to Increase Your App Store Ranking in 4 Easy Steps

This video provides a 4-step guide to App Store Optimization (ASO) and explains how you can increase your app store ranking and your mobile app downloads with ASO.

Transcript on App Store Optimization – increase mobile app downloads with these 4 easy steps

Hi, my name is Daniel Russell and welcome to another tech talk. Today I’ll be going through App Store Optimization.

Just like any search engine, app stores have a search algorithm that determines which apps show up first and which ones show up last. As I’m sure you can imagine, the apps that show up first get a whole lot more downloads than the apps that show up last. If you want to get more downloads, there’s a couple of things that you can do to improve your app’s rankings in the app store. These include modifying your title, the app’s description, improving your app’s reviews and ratings, and increasing your app’s download rate. Now the title and description are fairly similar – it all comes down to keywords and keyword research.

Title

For the title we recommend including your app’s name as well as two or three carefully chosen keywords. These keywords are typically higher in search volume and very accurately describe your app. For example let’s say I have an app called “Pulse” and monitors people’s heart rates. After doing some keyword research, I find that heart rate and heart rate monitor are very frequently searched terms. They also happen to accurately describe my app. So, in the app store, it would make sense to make my title “Pulse”, maybe with a dash after it, heart rate monitor or even heart rate monitor app.

Description

Next up is the description. The description gives you a lot more room for keywords than in the title, but it’s still good to be fairly judicious with your keyword selection in your description as well. Make sure that your app is accurately described. But then also make sure you do a good job selling why people should download it because again download rates will impact the ranking of your app.

Reviews & Ratings

Next up is reviews and ratings, and unfortunately this is an area where you don’t have a ton of control. Apps with higher star ratings and more reviews typically rank better in the app store. One of the best ways to increase the number of reviews for your app is to ask for reviews inside the app. Something that’s a little more difficult is improving the rating. Now besides just improving your app and making it a better user experience, we also recommend making sure that your customer service is properly set up so that if people have issues with your app they can contact you and report a problem rather than going on the app store and writing a long review about the problem and giving you a low star rating.

Download Rate

Finally, the download rate. If an app store sees that almost every person that comes to your app’s page is downloading your app, chances are you’re going to go up in the rankings. Now again besides just making a killer app it can be difficult to increase these download rates on the app store. But there are a few things that you can do to improve your chances. We recommend doing some A/B testing with a couple of different items. These include the app icon, the screenshots of the app that you include, the description, and of course the price. By tracking your ranking in the app store and the number of downloads that you receive over time, you can start to get a pretty good idea of which of these items has the most impact for your app.

I hope this has been helpful and again if you have any questions please feel free to contact us. We’re happy to describe it in detail. Thanks, have a great day!

About Daniel Russell

Daniel is a Partner at Go Fish Digital and a licensed attorney. During his marketing career, he’s helped structure market research programs for global companies like Whirlpool and Zynga, managed SEO audit projects for Wikipedia.org and The New York Times, and consulted General Electric and Monster Beverage Corp on their online ad campaigns and web presence. Daniel is frequently invited to speak on topics such as CRO, Reddit, and A.I. at the marketing industry’s top conferences including MozCon, Internet Summit, Google I/O Extended, and INBOUND. He’s also been a featured expert in interviews for Search Engine Journal and the Time for Marketing, Growth Hacking, and Marketing Agency Leadership podcasts. Before joining Go Fish Digital, Daniel was the founder of Attentiv (a communication software), a law clerk at Magruder (a corporate litigation law firm), a sales manager at Qualtrics (an XM software, now part of SAP), and a risk management analyst at Marubeni-Itochu (a Japanese trading conglomerate). Daniel was a Fulton Scholar Award recipient at Brigham Young University where he graduated with a degree in Economics and History. He later received his J.D. from the George Mason School of Law where he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy. Daniel was admitted to the Maryland Bar in 2015.