This week, we decided to share what we have learned about keyword research to conduct a proper “App Store optimization”.This will be the first in a series of 3 posts where we will describe the strategy we implemented to pick a better set of keywords for our app.
Months after the launch of our app, we realized that we had the wrong set of keywords to be searchable by users in the iPad App Store. After doing some quick research about mistakes to avoid, we learned that:
- It’s not necessary to include your brand as a keyword.
- There are 100 characters available keywords.
- Phrases must be included as separate keywords. For example, “take notes” needs to be included as “take, notes”.
Long story short, we ended up with some extra characters to spare. We decided to make some changes to the keywords first used when launching bContext’s in the App store – replacing some, and adding some new ones. This small change allowed us to understand the impact of selecting the right keywords to drive more downloads.
The first day we debuted the new keywords, the results were clear. We were able to increase downloads by 3x. Upon refining the keywords again, we were able to increase downloads by approximately 4x.
Since then, we’ve continued to refine the process of picking keywords. We spent time studying the App Store, our competition and the differences between being discovered by Google searches and those within the iPad App Store. The first lesson we learned was that the App Store provides a lot of information about each search. Some key stats for each search include:
- The number of apps competing for that specific keyword or phrase
- The average rating for each app within each search
- The number of people that rated each app
- The relative rank within each search
Taking into account this information, we developed our own method for selecting keywords. Please click the voice-slide below to hear our explanation on why it’s important to spend time researching keywords to conduct an “App Store optimization”.