Often, after an app has been released in the App Store, it gets a boost in the rankings for a week and then slowly slips down in the rankings, before gradually getting lost.
I’ve seen this happen with every app I’ve released. I know this is a really frustrating and painful experience because I felt helpless when it happened.
One day, I came across a post that was discussing something called ASO, which I soon learnt stood for ‘app store optimization’.
Although I was familiar with the old fashioned SEO (search engine optimization), I had never heard about ASO, and so I decided to start researching it further.
After a day, I had discovered three important things:
- ASO is crucial for downloads.
- Indie developers can’t survive without it.
- The tool that will help you achieve higher ratings, more downloads, and thus more $, is named SensorTower.
Now, next I will show you how I used SensorTower’s free plan to boost one of my apps from 1 download per day to 12 per day!
Researching the Relevant Keywords
The first thing I needed to do was to find out what keywords were relevant for my app. My app was initially named ‘iFast’, which, in my opinion, was a catchy name, but the reality was different…
To my disappointment, I discovered (with the help of Sensor Tower) that no one actually searched for the phrase “iFast”. I realized that I needed to find a keyword to use in my app’s title that people would actually search for!
So, I started to brainstorm relevant keywords and I came up with the idea that people might search for ‘intermittent fasting’, as it was relevant to my app.
So I typed this phrase into the Sensor Tower keyword tracking tool, and, to my surprise, I saw a keyword that had good traffic, low competition and few apps. I also typed in “fasting diet” and this one didn’t look too shabby either.
Checking My Rankings
To my disappointment, I was not ranking for these keywords at all (see image). In fact, I was doing really poor, and my app was in last position both for the iPhone and the iPad, which sucked big time!
However, I knew that by adding those keywords into my app name, I would be able to catapult my app into the first eight in the rankings at the very least, as the competition was really low!
As I didn’t want to change too many variables, and was instead intent just on testing one thing at a time, I decided to use those two keywords as my app name, and after playing around with them for a while, I came up with the name ‘Intermittent Fasting Diet Tracker’.
As I had a small bug fixed, this update came in handy, as I was able to resubmit the freshly-titled app along with the small bug correction.
The Result
After a week, the app was accepted with the new name, and immediately I began to see an increase in downloads. Beforehand, I had usually received around one download per day, but suddenly I was achieving 10 paid downloads, which really freaked me out!
I immediately logged onto my free trial account of SensorTower and found the reason for my increased amount of downloads!
As you can see in the image below, I currently rank as number 4 for iPhone and number 2 for iPad for the keyword “fasting diet”.
However, even better still, for the keywords ‘intermittent fasting’, I was ranking as number 2 for iPhone, and, amazingly, as number 1 for the iPad!
Lesson Learned
As you can see, I have not used rocket science to come up with the keywords for my app. Instead, I sat down for about 15 minutes and this investment increased my paid downloads for one specific app from 30 per month to over 300 each month.
The next thing I am going to do is to research the keywords for my app for iTunes as well, as I am sure it will significantly boost my download frequency there too!
Seriously, if you are still not using SensorTower, which is considered by many to be the best of the best ASO tool on the market, you are really missing out on a huge opportunity to get more downloads, increase visibility in the app store, and, of course, increase your earnings as well.
This should be a no brainer for you, so grab your SensorTower trial today!