App Store Search / Ranking Optimization Strategies

Learn how the pros make their apps rank at the top of the store.

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The editorial team within the App Store makes the ultimate decision on which apps to feature in the store— including the App of the Week, Staff Favorites, and the themed rooms.

Here are the things you can control;

Presentation – Definitely looks are the most important factor that you can...

[techhive]

App downloads to hit 102 billion in 2013, spurred by an avalanche of freebies

91% of apps downloaded will be free, but don’t worry: Developers have big plans for in-app revenue.

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[VIDEO] What is App Store Optimization? 

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#31 - The Big Launch

Depending on your financial resources and the type of app you're building, a big launch may be the way to go. The idea of a big launch is to make a big splash and drive as many downloads in the first week as you can in an attempt to get onto the App Store leaderboards. Once on the leaderboard, if people like your app, then you'll may be able to maintain your position.

Getting onto an App Store leaderboard can easily mean thousands (or tens of thousands in games and social categories) of downloads per day. That is incredibly valuable free marketing - which is why people spend so money to get there!

The best way to do the big launch is to get Apple to feature your app. This sounds difficult, but I know multiple people and companies that have had apps featured at launch - even one built by a sole developer.  

Here are some tips for attracting Apple's attention:

Know someone at Apple. Seriously, the App Store team is pretty big, and working personal connections is absolutely the best way to get featured. This is obviously easier for publishers located in Silicon Valley.

Show off a new way or unique way to use the device. Apple makes the vast majority of its money selling iPhones and iPads, so they LOVE apps that show off the power of the hardware (as long as those apps don't run on Android). Notable apps using this strategy included Flipboard (iPad as a reading device), Bump, and Frontback.

Do something different in a less popular category. The App Store is full of incredible quality games. But get out to the smaller categories like Business or Productivity and there's lots of dreck to wade through. Nonetheless those categories get their own featured lists, so if you build a good app, with a  good twist, in a less popular category you've got a good chance to get noticed.

Quality, quality, quality. Apple rewards people that put as much effort and attention to detail into their apps as Apple thinks they should! High quality is essentially a requirement to getting featured. Note that it also makes app approval a lot easier.

Beyond getting featured by Apple, you need to get "big press" if you want a big launch. Give Techcrunch an exclusive on launch day. Then approach 20 bloggers and ask them to review your app. Contact Robert Scoble and offer him a "sneak peak". 

Finally, you can buy downloads and reviews, from 3rd party services. This is great if you have the money, and believe me, many of the top app publishers do this regularly. For the little guy, you need to think a little more guerilla.

[appstorehacks-blog]

#30 - The Quiet Launch

There's two ways to launch in the store: quiet or big. Each has their advantages. Launching quiet means you get a smaller user base up front, so more time to work out any early bugs. This can be important because if you launch with bugs, especially crashes, you get easily garner a bunch of 1 star reviews right up front. Then you have that hole to dig yourself out of.

When you launch quiet you'll mostly be inviting friends and family to try out your app. Go to Twitter or Facebook and try to gin up some activity. Apple automatically "boosts" new and updates apps in the store so you'll likely get some organic downloads, especially if you've done decent ASO upfront.

Launching quiet is lot of more viable if your app is relatively unique. Launching in a less crowded category (like "Productivity") can help you stand out in a smaller niche. Your uniqueness means it'll be easier to reach a smaller, early adopter community.

On the other hand, if you are launching into a crowded market - think games or calendar apps, then you may HAVE to pursue a bigger launch in order to get noticed at all.

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#29 - IAP Turkey Titles

We talked about turkey titles in hack #22. But something that many people don't realize is that Apple indexes words from In-app purchases for search. This means that all the rules about keyword stuffing in titles and descriptions applies to IAP Titles as well.

Where this gets really fun is when you combine IAP turkey titles with brand squatting. Our old friends at Camera LLC(TX) have done this with their spammy "Baby Chimp" game:

Awesome! They've stolen keywords from other games an packed them into their IAP titles. 

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#28 - Brand squatting

Brand squatting involves purposely naming your app in order to be confused with another more popular app, thereby leveraging someone else's app or web brand to more downloads.

In its worst form you publish a very crappy app and title your app to match searches for popular apps and confuse users into downloading your app instead. Although it's often used in a clearly "black hat" manner, you will find lots and lots of gray hat uses in the store - where legitimate (non 'scam') apps include keywords popularized by their competitors.

I just did a search for "temple run" - a hugely popular runner game, and came upon this awesome example of branding squatting:

Haha! I can see at least 3 other top game they're brand squatting on. I may do a case study on this app because it's such a great example of so many hacks: brand squatting, brandwords, astroturfing, and more.

The results of the astroturfing are very evident. Despite 172 1 or 2 star ratings out of 624, these guys have managed to keep a 3.5 star rating through astroturfing and aggressive in-game rating prompts.

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#27 - Drop 'N Pop

This perfectly legitimate hack involves dropping the price of your paid app, usually to free, for a limited time in order to boost downloads and thus your app ranking. Once rankings and downloads have gone up, then you raise the price back up.

I have even heard of publishers who have automated the process of dropping their price when downloads fall, then resetting it once the rankings recover.

Drop'N'Pop works because of the inherent popularity persistence in the app store ranking algorithm. Because app rankings are so heavily driven by download numbers, a popular app is more discoverable, and therefore tends to stay popular. So a temporary boost in downloads driven by a price reduction can result in a downloads boost that lasts even after the price has gone up.

Pro tip: accelerate downloads by getting your app listed by one of the "app of the day" web sites or apps during your free period.

[appstorehacks-blog]

#26 - Molotov Ratings

Molotov Ratings - giving 1 star ratings to your competitor's apps. Whether this counts as black hat or gray hat sort of depends on your point of view. It's not clear that you are violating any written rules if you have 10 of your friends give 1 star ratings to the your nearest app competitor in the store.

However, now that Apple is reportedly including ratings in their overall search ranking, we can only expect molotov ratings to become ever more common. This is especially so given the anonymous nature of app store ratings.

The real problem with this technique is mutually assured destruction. If you start downrating other peoples' apps, what prevents them from doing the same to you?

Of course this this trick only works if you can control enough ratings to have an impact on the app in question. If you're trying to knock down the Pinterest app with is 30k+ ratings, then good luck. Similarly, the best defense against this attack is to get as many 5 stars legitimate ratings as you can.

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#25 - Keywrding

Most people have encountered typosquatting on the web.  This is where people buy misspellings of common domain names and park their own spam sites there. Youtube alone has a ton of them:

  http://tubeyou.com

  http://yotube.com

The app store version is keywrding - adding misspellings of common search terms to your keyword list to catch those searches. The white hat version of this technique uses misspellings of valid keywords. Here is an app using a misspelling of "calorie" in both its name and keywords:

The gray hat version of this technical is to use misspellings of a big brand name. This is closer to the traditional brand squatting. 

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#24 - Brandwords

I have labeled this a gray hat technique, but in fact it's used so universally that most people probably don't think of it that way. The idea is simply to stuff you keywords with brand names that people are searching for in the store.

Technically this is against Apple's Terms of Service, which prohibits the use of brand names in your keywords. In practice it seems that Apple doesn't enforce this prohibition at all. 

Here are the keywords for the number 1 Craigslist app:

Basically half the list is someone else's brand name. Obviously this technique works a lot better if the brand is actually related to the function of your app.

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#23 - Astroturfing / 6-star reviews

Good reviews are critical to getting downloads in the store. It's one of the things that draws people in to download an app. And now Apple is reportedly including ratings in the ranking algorithm for search results.

Astroturfing, or 6-star reviews, are ratings and reviews left by people with an interest in your app. These can be family and friends, colleagues or whomever. Especially when you've just launched an app, early reviews are critical to driving downloads. 

Besides the gray hat nature of astroturfing, you have to be careful that your planted reviews don't obscure valid user reviews. A common problem is app crashes - these will almost guarantee 1 star reviews. So make sure you're listening to the legitimate reviews since they are probably telling you something important.

The tell-tale signs of 6-star reviews are pretty obvious. Good spelling, cover a variety of features of the app, overall "great app" recommendation. If you don't want be obvious, avoid that kind of review.

Pro tip #1: Every time you update in the store, Apple hides your current reviews until you get up to 5 again.  So whenever you update you should renew your reviews so they show up on top.

Pro tip #2: Anyone can rate an app without writing anything. The real thing you want is a 5 star rating. You only need a few actual text reviews. So keep your astroturfing focussed on ratings.

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#22 - Turkey Titles

They're called turkey titles caused they're stuffed full of keywords. The title of an app, combined with download volume, are the strongest signal in ranking apps for search in the store. If you're Evernote or ESPN you can reasonably rely on brand recognition for people to find you by search.  But for everyone else, the number of users searching for the "FingrPicZer" app in the store is a pretty small number. Including keywords in your title gives you a much better shot at matching searches that include those keywords. So go with "FingrPicZer - Single Finger Photo Editor" instead. Take the business app AppMesh. They may be building a brand, but not so much to avoid the free marketing of a turkey title:

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The trick taxonomy

 White Hat

These are fully legitimate practices. Often they are "best practices" for marketing your app.

 Gray Hat

These are tricks or techniques that live in a gray area of acceptability. Generally you would consider these "unfair" or "immoral" in some way, but not strictly against the rules. 

 Black Hat

These are naughty, immoral, unfair tricks that may violate your Terms of Service. I recommend that you DO NOT use any of these techniques.