An app with no marketing budget is not without a distribution channel. Store search accounts for a large share of organic installs, & unlike paid acquisition it does not stop when you stop spending. Yet most listings are written once during the launch scramble & never revisited.
App store optimisation is unusually tractable. The surfaces are few, the rules are documented, & the competitive standard in most categories is low. Doing the basics properly puts you ahead of a large proportion of listings.
The two stores work differently, so stop treating them the same
This is the single most common ASO mistake. iOS & Android index your listing through different mechanisms & require different tactics.
The App Store indexes your app name, your subtitle, & a hidden 100-character keyword field. It does not index your description. That means the description is purely a conversion asset, & your keyword strategy lives entirely in three constrained fields.
Google Play indexes your title, short description & full description. There is no separate keyword field. That means your long description does double duty: it must read well for humans & contain your target terms naturally.
Writing one listing & pasting it into both stores wastes the keyword field on iOS & wastes the description opportunity on Android.
On iOS, never repeat a word between the name, subtitle & keyword field. Repetition adds nothing & wastes characters you cannot spare.
Research terms the way users actually search
Store search queries are short, functional & often descriptive of a task rather than a category. People search what they want to do, not what your app is called.
Build your list from four sources:
- Store autocomplete. Type partial terms into each store's search & record every suggestion. These are real queries, ordered roughly by popularity.
- Competitor listings. Read the titles & subtitles of the apps ranking for your target terms. Their choices reveal what they have already tested.
- Your own reviews & support messages. The words users employ to describe your app are the words other users will search.
- Category browsing. Look at what ranks in your category & note recurring descriptors.
Then classify each term by relevance to what your app genuinely does, estimated difficulty based on how established the ranking apps are, & estimated volume. Prioritise high relevance & moderate difficulty. Ranking third for a specific term beats ranking fortieth for a broad one.
Constructing the title & subtitle
Your app name carries the most weight of any field. It is also what users see & remember, so it cannot be a keyword list.
The reliable pattern is brand name, a separator, then two or three words describing the core function. "Nirvana Budget: Expense Tracker" gives you brand recognition & two indexed terms. Keep within the visible character limit, because names truncated in search results damage tap-through.
The iOS subtitle is 30 characters & should contain terms not already in the name, phrased as a benefit rather than a list. On Google Play the short description serves a similar role at 80 characters & appears prominently, so it must persuade as well as index.
The iOS keyword field, used properly
One hundred characters, comma separated, no spaces after commas because spaces consume characters. A few rules that recover wasted space:
- Do not repeat anything in your app name or subtitle.
- Do not include your category name; it is applied automatically.
- Do not include plurals separately; the store handles them.
- Use singular words rather than phrases. The store combines terms across the field, so "expense" & "tracker" as separate entries cover the phrase without spending characters twice.
- Do not include competitor brand names. It is against guidelines & can trigger rejection.
Screenshots convert, & most are bad
Ranking gets you seen. Screenshots decide whether you are installed, & the first two are what most users ever look at.
Design them as a sequence that tells a story rather than as a gallery of interface captures. Each screenshot should carry a short caption stating a benefit, in text large enough to read in the small preview size. Lead with your strongest single benefit, then the second, then supporting features.
Test them. Both stores now support some form of listing experimentation, & screenshot tests routinely produce larger conversion changes than any keyword edit.
Ratings & reviews feed both ranking & conversion
Rating is a ranking input & it is the first thing users check. It is also the area where product & marketing overlap most directly.
Prompt for a rating at a moment of demonstrated success inside the app, not on second launch. Use the native review prompt so the user never leaves. Respond to negative reviews specifically & publicly, because prospective users read the responses. & when you fix something a reviewer raised, say so in the response & in the release notes.
Update regularly. Release cadence is a signal in both stores & a stale listing loses ground steadily.
Localisation is an underrated lever
Adding a localised listing creates an entirely separate set of indexed terms. For an app serving Nepal, a Nepali-language listing reaches users searching in Nepali, where competition is far thinner than in English.
Localise properly rather than machine-translating. Search terms do not translate literally; you need to research what people actually type in each language. A poorly translated listing damages conversion even when it improves ranking.
Measure & iterate on a schedule
Track keyword rankings for your target set, impressions & product page views from search, conversion rate from view to install, & retention, because stores increasingly weight quality signals beyond installs.
Change one variable at a time & allow several weeks between changes, since store indexing is slower than web search. Keep a change log with dates so you can attribute movement.
Treat ASO as a quarterly discipline rather than a launch task. To plan it alongside your wider acquisition mix, see our app store SEO service, our full service list, or tell us about your app.