Dispelling an common App Store Optimisation Myth
Getting your app noticed on the App Store is hard. The Appstore now has over 1.96 million apps all competing to appear in the first screen of a given search term. App Store Optimisation (ASO) has become a big business, with a huge amount of blogs, vlogs and content about how to get your app featured above others in the search rankings.
TLDR
Keywords are important, do not think that having keywords in your app title means you can omit them from the keyword field.
I made an app that I had been using personally for around 10 years to keep track of my BBQ cooking times and recipes. When lockdown hit in 2020 and more people were going to be stuck at home, I decided that now would be a good time to redesign this to make it useful to other people in the vein hope that it would reduce the influx of pictures of banana bread or sour dough starters to peoples timelines.
After redesigning the app, I decided that it would also be a good time to learn SwiftUI and use this, however with busy client projects and also the release of SwiftUI 2 as well as some initial teething problems with SwiftUI, I ended up missing the most popular BBQ season altogether (I would like to say I have learned my lesson on picking new technology over tried and trusted, but I won’t lie to myself) But I digress .
With the pressure of getting an app out in a season out of the way, I was able to refine the app and look into to the aspects of app development often missed by Indie developers. ASO, I poured over blogs, tools, registered for services and created documents to score ranking words and their difficulty rating (this is a great summary of the tools and processes). I felt pretty prepared to launch the app, pre order a Tesla and put a deposit down on a castle while the millions rolled in from app revenue.
So with the app ready, instagram page getting a lot of attention, website ranking highly with Google I felt pretty good when I submitted the first version for review.
Keywords Vs App name
Now to the meat (no pun intended) of the article. Keywords Vs App name. In almost every article/vid I saw around ASO, there was a common theme of not wasting keywords if they were included in the app name. It seems widely accepted that a keyword in an app name is more important than a dedicated keyword. With this in mind I called my app “BBQ — Low & slow barbecue plan” the apps main feature is around working out a plan for long cooking sessions, when to start the BBQ, when to add he meat, spritz etc.
So although the title was hardly the work of the bards quill, it covered off the most important keywords I believed people would look for, “BBQ” being the most important. With this in mind I kept these terms out of my keyword field and added others that I believed would be good search terms in order to maximise the results. ASO experts had advised that duplicating App name and keywords was a waste…
Apple approved the app in under 24 hours (how far we have come from waiting weeks for review). I searched the app store for my app name and found it (as expected) but heres where things didn’t work out as expected. I began searching using keywords from the app name (that were not included in the keyword field). Searching for BBQ brought up a lot of apps, as mine was new I was not expecting to be featured in the first few apps, but as I scrolled down the list, I saw less and less apps that I would expect to appear above mine. In the end, mine didn't even feature for the first word of the apps title.
Disappointed, I resigned myself to the fact that the rankings and sorting of key words would take a while.
However fast forwarding a couple of months and revisiting the search, I was sure that the app had had enough time to propagate into appearing in related searches. I merrily tapped in “BBQ” into the Appstore search field, scrolled and I came across such well known BBQ gems as
“weed firm 2: Best drug dealer simulation”,
“Rhonna Designs: Overlay designs text and more”,
“Basket fall: Basketball Simulator”,
“The TBC Pub group”,
“Epic summer word search: The hottest word search ever”
“Udder”
“Baby panda party fun”
“Miss the moose”
None of these apps had BBQ in the title, but were still ranked above mine (actually mine was not listed for BBQ whatsoever). I figured maybe there was problem somehow so I reached out to dev support to try to work out what the issue was.
Apple support
Dev support were pretty responsive and I appreciate that they are in a tough spot with this sort of question as they are not allowed to disclose what makes up the search algorithm. However they did respond with the following:
Search results are working as expected at this time. “BBQ” is not one of the keywords for your app. You might want to add it in the next update of your app, facilitating the search. You can also search for the full name and it will appear in the results.
App Store search results are based on several factors determined by Apple-confidential algorithms. The fields that are weighted most heavily for the search are the names, keywords, and company names of apps.
There can be several apps displayed when searching, and your app may not appear amongst the top results.
This shed some light on the fact that having missed the word ‘BBQ’ from the Keyword and expecting it to be picked up from the app name was a mistake. I wanted to clarify if the app name was something that would have to be searched for in its entirety and the response I got was
Regarding your question about searching by the name, it’s necessary to write the full name of the app to find it in the search that way. As I mentioned in the previous email, you will want to add “BBQ” as a keyword if you want your app to appear in the search by that word.
So the long and the short of story is Name your app something short and sensible that people would search for & don’t be afraid to repeat words from your app name in your keywords. I am not claiming to be an expert by any means (as is evident from this woeful tale), however many people are, and the the truth is, most of the information out there is guess work. Only Apple know what truly makes up the search rankings, little nuggets like these support mails help to shed some light on this. However this is all subject to change behind the scenes without use really knowing. I hope this info is useful to some of you and saves you making the same mistakes I have.
Oh and if you are wondering, I still don’t have a Tesla, or a castle but BBQ season is about to start and my app may now start to rank in its keyword :)
