How To Do App Store Keyword Research

August 17, 2014

Many people are familiar with keyword research because they have been doing SEO for for the web. ASO (App Store Optimization) keywords research is similar to SEO keyword research, but they are not the same. Let’s go over a few of the major differences.

Difference Between ASO And SEO

The first major difference is that a website can have many pages and an app has only one listing. Each page on a website can attempt to rank for slightly different keywords. Since there is no limit to how many pages your website can have, there is also no limit to how many keywords your website can try to rank for. This is not the case for apps. Apps in app stores get one listing which is usually approximately a thousand words or so. That means that you can try to rank for a few main keywords and a few secondary keywords. That is it. This presents a few difficulties because the people searching app stores for apps also tend to use a narrower set of search queries that are also shorter in length.

As an example, let’s take a look at the keyword research for my business plan Android app, which ranks #1 on Android for the term “business plan” and the term “business.” If this was a website, I could make individual pages that target many specific terms like “business plan for a restaurant” or “business plan for a coffee shop” or “business plan for a home repair business” or any other similar term. But on the app stores, people tend to enter a narrower set of shorter search queries. That means that the main terms like “business plan” or “business planner” or “plan a business” get most of the search demand. What that means for you as the marketer of your app is that you will be competing for the same few keywords with every other app that is similar to yours. Now imagine if you have a photo app. Will you be able to compete with and beat Instagram? What if you have a puzzle game app, will you be able to compete with thousands of other very similar puzzle apps? Some niches in the app stores are brutally competitive, and it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to compete with them if your marketing budget isn’t in the thousands of dollars per month.

Understanding the competitiveness of your business niche, and your app’s ability to compete within a particular business niche should be part of your business planning even before you sit down to write the very first line of code for your app. If you don’t consider these things before you start, you may face a rude awakening months later when you face these facts as you try to get your app to rank in the app stores.

Just like some niches may be extremely competitive, other niches are wide open, and you can easily achieve high rankings for your app in those niches. The problem there may be a lack of search demand. Recall an earlier point about the narrowness of the kinds of searches that are done on mobile app stores.

You can use two tools to attempt to gauge search demand in mobile app stores. Of course, this data isn’t made available by the Apple App Store or GooglePlay, but you can get an approximate idea using the Google Keyword Tool and an app store research tool named SensorTower. You can easily find both by Googling for them. The Google Keyword Tool tells you about Google searches, and gives exact volumes of demand while SensorTower gives you approximate information of searches and volume of demand in mobile app stores.

With the ability to approximate demand volume and the level of competition, as a part of your business strategy and your marketing strategy, try to find a sweet spot where you will be able to compete in app store search for searches that have reasonable demand. As your app grows stronger in app store search, your app will eventually be able to compete for more competitive searches. So you need a search strategy for the beginning, and a search strategy for once your app matures and gains strength in search, and will be able to compete for increasingly difficult searches to rank for.

Without downloads coming from app store search, growing your app will be extremely difficult.

Mobile App Marketing Book And Course

This tutorial is just one section of my mobile app marketing book. Check it out on Amazon. It is available on the Kindle which means that you can read it on the Kindle app of any smart phone. Or take my mobile app business course on Udemy.