ASO: how to get your app found in the store

For a local business app, the good news is that search competition is usually small. Someone searching the store for "pizzeria" plus their neighborhood is not comparing a hundred apps. What decides it is having the right name, the right words and a page that convinces in three seconds.

The two halves of ASO

Separate them from the start, because each one has a different fix:

1. Being found. The app shows up in search for the words your customer types. What matters here is the name, the text fields and the install history;
2. Being chosen. The person saw the app in the list and decides to open it and install. What matters here is the icon, the screenshots and the rating.

Many people work only on the first. Showing up third with a confusing icon and a 3.1 rating is worse than showing up fifth with a well-made page.

The text fields in each store

The two stores read different things, and this is where most old tutorials get it wrong.

The name

It is the field with the most weight in both stores. The formula that works for a local business is brand plus what the app does: "Bella Massa Pizzeria Delivery" says the name and answers the generic search at the same time.

What Google forbids in the name, and Apple also rejects: "#1", "best", "free", prices, emoji and decorative capital letters that are not part of the brand. It is the metadata policy, and an app that insists on it gets removed.

Apple's keyword field

It is 100 bytes, and the bytes detail matters if your listing is in a language with accents: an accented letter takes more than one byte, so a word like "promoção" uses more space than it looks. The rules Apple itself publishes:

• separate terms with commas, with no space after the comma;
• do not repeat words already in the name, the subtitle or the category, because they already count;
• do not use the plural of a word that is already there;
• do not use the name of a competitor, a celebrity or a brand that is not yours;
• avoid generic words like "app".

An example for the pizzeria named above: pizza,calzone,wings,snack,dinner,takeout,order,menu,south side. No "pizzeria" and no "delivery", which are already in the name.

The description on Google Play

Since Google reads the text, write the description for people and let the words appear naturally: the neighborhood, the type of food, what you can do in the app. Repeating the same word twenty times is what the policy calls keyword stuffing, and it hurts instead of helping.

The first lines are the ones shown before "more". Put what the app solves there, not the company's history.

What convinces: icon, images and rating

In the results list, people see the icon, the name, the rating and, in many searches, the first screenshots. That is what decides the tap.

• Icon: simple, readable at the size of a fingernail, no small text. There is a whole guide on that;
• Screenshots: the first two do almost all the work. Show the app in use with a short sentence above each one;
• Rating: it is the factor that weighs most for someone already looking at the page.

Ratings: how to ask the right way

A good app with few ratings loses to an average app with many. What works:

Ask inside the app, at a good moment. After an order is delivered, a booking is confirmed, a workout is finished. Never on first launch and never after an error.

Use the store's native prompt. On iPhone, the system limits that prompt to three showings per year for the same person, and decides on its own when to show it. Google Play has a similar limit. That is why asking on every screen gets you nowhere.

Reply to reviews. Both stores let you reply publicly. A polite reply to a low rating shows the people who arrive later that someone is on the other side.

Do not offer a freebie in exchange for five stars. Both stores forbid incentivized reviews, and the risk is losing the listing.

Language and country

Both stores let you have different text per language. If the app serves only one country, make the listing complete in that country's language, with a name, subtitle and keywords thought out in that language. A listing translated in a hurry does not show up for people searching in their own language.

If you serve tourists or another country, then a second localization is worth it. For a local business, it is not.

What moves the ranking and what is myth

Moves it, according to the stores themselves: the text in the indexed fields, relevance to the search, the rating and the number of reviews, installs, and whether people keep using the app after installing.

Moves it little or not at all:

• stuffing the description with repeated words. On Apple it is not even read by search; on Google, stuffing is a policy violation;
• changing the name every week. Each change on Apple requires a new version, and you lose the consistency search had already learned;
• buying installs or reviews. The stores detect it, and the penalty ranges from deleting the reviews to removing the app;
• putting a competitor's name in the keywords. It is forbidden and, when it gets through, it brings people who did not want your app and uninstall, which makes everything else worse.

Test before you conclude

Both stores have their own A/B testing tool for the page: Google Play calls it store listing experiments, and Apple calls it product page optimization. You can test one icon or one screenshot order against another and see which converts more visits into installs.

For a small app, traffic may be too low for a conclusive test. In that case, change one thing at a time and compare one month's installs with the previous month in the store dashboard.

And before all that, having the app in the store

ASO only starts once a listing exists. On Fabapp, the app you describe first becomes a web app, which can already be used through its link, and then a native app submitted to the App Store and Google Play under your own developer account. The listing, the ratings and the install history stay with you.

The walkthrough inside the product is in the guide Publishing your app to the stores. The text fields, keywords and screenshots are still yours, and they are what this guide helps you write.

The summary

• ASO is being found and being chosen, and the two halves need different care;
• the name weighs more than anything: brand plus what the app does, with no "best" and no "free";
• on Apple, use the 100 bytes of keywords well and do not repeat what is in the name;
• on Google, the description counts, written for people and without stuffing;
• ask for ratings at a good moment, with the store's native prompt, and never in exchange for a freebie.