How To Improve Your New iOS App's Keywords If They Didn't Perform As Well As You Hoped

How To ImproveYour New iOS
App’s Keywords
IF THEY DIDN’T PERFORM AS WELL AS YOU HOPED

A Word From Elaine
I’m a big fan of the Sensor Tower – from their keyword tools which I use
nearly daily, to the excellent Sensortower blog. Hugh Kimura & his team
consistently publish some really good content over there & I recommend
you pay them a visit.
Tracking and improving keywords after you publish an app is really
important, so Hugh kindly agreed to share his knowledge in this
presentation.

After All That Work…
After putting in a ton of work to develop your iOS app, nothing is more
disheartening than not getting the download numbers and keyword
rankings that you were expecting. You may not know where to go from
here.Was all that work for nothing? Luckily, there is always hope.
If it makes you feel better, almost nobody gets all of their keywords right
on the first try. Anyone who has been going App Store Optimization for
awhile will tell you that conditions in the Apple App Store are always
changing.

After All That Work…
You need to continually monitor and tweak your keywords to get the best
possible performance.
So pick your head up and let’s do something about those keywords. This
post will show you where to get started and give you specific tips for
choosing the right keywords.

Number 1
Find Out Where You Stand

Find Out WhereYou Stand
Generally, the first set of keywords that you choose without using any
research tools is not going to be very good. This is because the first words
that come to your mind are usually going to be the most common and
competitive keywords. But who knows, you may have picked a couple of
great keywords too.
So before you go on, you need to know exactly where you rank for each of
your keywords. This will allow you to remove the ones that are not working
for you and replace them with keywords that can help you get more
downloads.

Find Out WhereYou Stand
Use a Search Rankings tool to track all the keywords you are using. Once you
have this information, you can then move on to the next section on how to
choose your keywords.

Number 2
Choose The Right Keywords

This is the most important section in this post. After you learn this
information, you will know more about App Store Keyword Optimization
than a lot of your fellow indie developers and more than even some mobile
app managers at large companies.
Let’s start with the big picture. Your goal is to rank in the top 10 for all your
keywords and there are basically three parts to choosing the right keywords.
The first and most important criteria for choosing keywords is that they have
to be highly relevant to your app.

It doesn’t help if you rank #1 for the keyword “cats” if you have a game
about aliens. Be sure that you put a lot of thought into what people might
type in when they search for an app like yours.
The second thing to look at when choosing keywords is the Difficulty Score.
This is a measure of how difficult it will be to rank for a keyword, on a scale
from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most difficult.

Many developers make the mistake of looking for traffic first, then ranking
difficulty second. However, it doesn’t matter if a keyword gets a ton of traffic,
if you rank #1,252. Nobody is going to scroll far enough to find your app. The
key is to figure out the approximate Difficulty Score that will allow your app to
rank in the top 10.

For example, after examining your existing keywords, you might find that
your app ranks in the top 10 for a couple of keywords that have a Difficulty
Score of 2.1 or lower. Therefore, whenever you choose new keywords, you
should be looking for keywords with a Difficulty Score of 2.1 or less. This is just
a rule of thumb and you will have to do some testing, but looking at the
Difficulty Score is a huge help in quantifying the keyword selection process.
Finally, if the first two criteria above are equal, then choose keywords with the
highestTraffic Scores.

The Traffic Score is also measured on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the
highest. It shows approximately how many times people are searching for a
particular keyword.

The only time that you would completely disqualify a keyword is if it has a
Traffic Score of ZERO. Otherwise, consider any keyword that has at least
some traffic, but remember to prioritize relevance and Difficulty Score before
Traffic Score.
If you would like an in-depth tutorial on choosing and optimizing keywords,
with specific examples, you can check out our keyword selection post.

Number 3
Where To Get New Keyword
Ideas

Where To Get New Keyword Ideas
There are many resources that you can tap to get new keyword ideas. You
have probably already heard about the common ones, but here is one of our
favorites that not many people talk about. We think you will like it too because
app users literally do the work for you.
We call this technique Review Mining and it is simply the process of looking
through your app’s user reviews to find new keyword ideas. Anyone can do it
for free, here’s how.

First, open iTunes, then look at the profile page for your app.Then look the Ratings
and Reviews for your app, then sort them by Most Favorable. Here is what it would
look like for Clash of Clans.

You want to sort by the reviews with the highest ratings (most stars) because
you want to get ideas for positive keywords, or keywords that are associated
with features that users like about the app. People are more likely to search
for those keywords when looking for an app like yours.
Reviews with low ratings will have keywords that people don’t like about the
app. Common words that we see are things like: “crash” or “slow.” So the
ratings act as a great filter for finding the right keywords for your app.

Now start looking through the reviews and write down any interesting
keywords that you find. Be sure to have a notebook or spreadsheet open
before you start this process.
Yes, this is a tedious process and since you have a new app, you will not have
too many reviews, which will not yield many keywords.
Not to worry, we have the solution to both of these problems.

Our Review Analysis tool can mine the reviews of any app and display the
most app-specific keywords at the top, along with the user sentiment
associated with that keyword.
This is very helpful because certain words may come up in the reviews for your
app, but some of them may be generic terms that appear in the reviews of all
apps. So we do some major data crunching and compare how often a keyword
appears for your app compared to how often it appears in the reviews of all
other apps.

The keywords that are most specific to your app are displayed first. Here is an
example of the top results for Clash of Clans. As you can see, there are some
great ideas to start researching. These keywords can also lead you to other
keyword ideas that you may not have thought of. Take a look at this
screenshot.

Since your app might not have enough reviews to make this method effective
yet, just examine the reviews for apps that are similar to yours. Your can now
put your competitor’s users to work to help you brainstorm new keyword
ideas.
Regardless if you use our tool or do it manually in iTunes, we hope that was
helpful and gave you a new idea for where to find more keywords.

Number 4
Overcome Title Vanity

Before I let you get to work on your keywords, I have one more tip for you.
Putting a few of your keywords in the title of your app can help you rank
higher for those keywords.
Some developers are against putting keywords in the title of their app
because it doesn’t look as pretty. But if it helps you gain an advantage, why
not give it a try? You can always change it back later. If you don’t believe me,
let’s take a look at the Facebook app. You would think that since this app gets
millions of downloads, it would dominate all of its keywords.

But if we spy on the keyword rankings for the app, we find that it doesn’t rank
#1 for all of its keywords.
It still does very well, but we can definitely see that there is an advantage to
having keywords in the title of your app. For example, for the keyword “post”
the Facebook app currently ranks #5 on the iPhone. As you can see, all of the
apps that outrank the Facebook app for this keyword have the keyword in
their titles.

Be sure that the keywords you add to your
title form a sentence or phrase that makes
sense when people read it.
If you just add keywords randomly, your
app will be rejected by the App Store
reviewers.
Just Make Sure …

Closing Remarks
As you can see, improving your keywords is not a difficult process. However, it
requires continual testing and ongoing maintenance to stay on top of your
keyword rankings.
Many developers do not achieve the organic download results that they are
looking for simply because they give up too soon. Stick with it, keep testing,
and you will start to see results. If you are ranking well for all of your keywords
and are looking to get even more downloads, look at improving your icon and
screenshots. Test your app icon and screenshots to find out if you can improve
them.

How To Improve Your New iOS App's Keywords If They Didn't Perform As Well As You Hoped

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How To Improve Your New iOS App's Keywords If They Didn't Perform As Well As You Hoped