Why ASO is important

First of all, what is ASO? There are plenty of definitions that you can find, but there’s one that I like.

ASO are methods for increasing visibility of your app for relevant organic audience and improving metrics that are centered around maximizing the number of installs.

Why is this important? Simply because there are almost 5 million apps on Google Play and App Store and more than 80% of apps do not even have 100 installs.

Furthermore, 1.8% of apps on Google Play and 4.4% of apps on App Store generate 90% of installs worldwide. And not surprisingly only 0.06% of apps on Google Play and 0.15% of apps on App Store generate 90% of all income generated by Play Stores. You want to learn how much it is? It is 90 billion dollars.

Your app has to be somehow competitive. Doesn’t matter how good of a product you have. If it is not downloaded, then it is useless.

Especially if you don’t have that much of a budget. You can’t afford to spend a lot of money on ads daily. What is left then?

ASO.

I will not go into details on how to do it and what it exactly consists of, but in general there are two things that you have to do:

• Increase chances to be indexed by relevant search queries. At the same time, you have to rank high (top-5) to even have a chance to be downloaded.
• Increase CTR and IR via appealing icon, screenshots (they are both a huge factor that influences whether users should even pay attention to an app) and other elements of your app’s page.

Let’s talk about main cases that you will definitely encounter:

• If the app is not indexed by enough relevant keywords, how is target audience is supposed to find it?
• If the app is indexed by enough relevant keywords but doesn’t rank top-5 anywhere, then the target audience will NOT download it.
• If the app is indexed by enough relevant keywords and ranks top-5 for some keywords, but the icon and screenshots are not appealing to the target audience, then they will NOT download it.
• If the app is indexed by enough relevant keywords, ranks top-5 for some, has appealing icon and screenshots, but either has less that 4 stars of average rating or the most upvoted reviews are negative, then the target audience will NOT download it.
• You bought plenty of traffic on Facebook or somewhere else, but your icon and screenshots are not appealing / text elements do not say much what the app is about / reviews are negative — then, you guessed it, you have wasted money and the target audience will NOT download it.

There are more cases that are all connected with each other and ASO (along with good product management, business model and other crucial things) helps you make your app far more competitive.