App Store Optimizer (ASO) Interview Preparation Guide

Download PDF

The primary goal of an ASO strategy is to facilitate quality app downloads. Secondary goals can include increasing brand awareness, improving app reviews and audience engagement.

We use a number of third party and in-house tools for ASO. We use these tools to understand the search volume score, competitor tracking, app listing, download estimates, etc.

After understanding your marketing objectives from ASO, we will work closely with you to estimate your budgets. Its a function of efforts based on your optimization status quo, number of keywords, competitiveness of the category, etc based on which our team will share a customized quote with you

There are 4 places in an app’s listing that will determine whether it is eligible to rank for keywords:

☛ App name
☛ App keywords space
☛ Developer name
☛ App in app purchases (exact match only)
Apple has also been evolving its algorithm to rank apps for keywords not necessarily found in an app’s listing, such as:

Partial keyword matches (e.g. ranking “Spotify music app” for “music player app”)
Competitor names (e.g. ranking Spotify for Pandora)
Common category or other contextual keywords (e.g. ranking Spotify for music-related searches)
Additionally, if a keyword is removed from your app listing (e.g. keywords space), you typically will become immediately ineligible to rank for that keyword.

I’ve worked in the mobile industry for the past 5 years. Having come from a mobile innovations and insights background, I was quick to realise the importance and impact that mobile would have on brands, businesses and everyday users for the foreseeable future.

I currently work at ABC Mobile, which traditionally focused on effective user acquisition through paid media. Although we still undertake plenty of user acquisition activity for global and local clients, we now closely focus on the optimisation of key elements that drive the success of the app and organic growth.

Retention, retention and retention. As smartphone users are maturing, the time that they spend with apps becomes a lot more limited, and as a result a lot more valuable. Sure, you can blow huge budgets on acquiring users. But what good is it if those users do not come back to the app.

Industry stats show less than 18% of new app users return to the app after first use. The bottom line is, if you can’t get your audience to stick around and build a rich, durable relationship with your brand, you’re going to be at a major competitive disadvantage. A lot of what we do here at Yodel Mobile has this focus very much in mind. It’s about leveraging the analytics to devise strategies that can reduce churn, increase re-engagement and essentially drive LTV.

Users tend to leave reviews if they like the app anyway. However, you can also encourage them to do so within the app itself. If you have a game, a good time to ask for a review would be after winning a game. But be careful, you can get penalized if you push it too hard. On iOs for example, you can ask for a review up to three times a year.

App Store Optimization (ASO) is a technique used to improve your mobile app ranking within app store ecosystems like Apple App Store, Google Play Store, and Windows Store. It is also known as App Store Marketing or Mobile App SEO.

A quality and keyword rich app description support in ASO as its indexed by the app store search engine. The app description should showcase the best features of your app to ensure user engagement and increase in conversion rate. It should also include important keywords for which you want to rank for, along with emoji’s to make it attractive

There are three main ways to estimate what the search volume of a keyword is. Here are a few of the most common methods:

☛ ASO tools (e.g. Mobile Action, SensorTower, Appcodes, TUNE) – these will provide you with a search volume score, which indicates the popularity of a keyword; TUNE will actually provide a real estimate of the number of searches per month. These tools compile data from several sources including their proprietary databases, the google keyword planner tool, store autofill results and trending keywords.
☛ App Store Autofill Results – by typing a keyword into the search box you can see the most popular keywords that include that word, such as “free (games, music download, music”). For keywords that are popular enough in the app store, related keywords will also show at the top of a search done from an iPhone or iPad.
☛ Google Keyword Planner Tool – this handy, years-old tool provides data on what people are searching on Google.com, which while not the same as app store searches, provides generally applicable search trends.
☛ Google Trends – this tool allows you to see the popularity of a Google search trend by country or state. While keywords must have significant volume to show up in Google Trends, Trends can help visualize the popularity of a search trend over time better than the keyword planner tool can, even providing data by the hour.