Opinion: Is ASO the new SEO?
Raymond Doyle, mobile marketing manager at Coral Interactive, explains why the importance of app store optimisation will only increase further
I have been working in the gaming industry for over seven years and the three letters every operator seems to be semi-obsessed with are SEO. However, over the past 18 months a new acronym has crept up and is fast becoming an essential to-do for gaming marketers. That acronym is ASO, or app store optimisation.
With mobile marketing becoming ever more important, ASO is quickly becoming just as important as its more established organic search cousin. Put simply, ASO is the technique of allowing your app to rank higher in App Store search and category rankings.
Understanding how important ASO is to your app is the easy part. According to mobile analytics expert App Annie, there are more than two million apps on Google Play and iOS, while 82% of users never search past the first 25 apps, giving mobile marketers a significant challenge to get their app noticed. In fact, according to Flurry “ another mobile marketing expert, 60% of apps are never downloaded at all.
With these staggering figures in mind, the failure to get ASO right can lead to the death of your app and undo all the hard work the developer has done. Given Google’s current stance on gaming apps and their ban from the Google Play store, it’s crucial to get maximum search visibility for your iOS app. So what should operators do to ensure they are competitive in the ASO world?
It is vital to understand what keywords you want to be competitive for and focus your efforts on these. In order for Apple to allow the smaller apps to compete with bigger brands, you are only allowed to submit 100 characters with every release. Taking this into account, a strategic view should be taken in identifying the ‘right’ keywords for your app.
No matter how big or small your brand is ASO can be a real challenge. It isn’t simply a case of getting it right for one app release and then repeating the process for the next ten. As Apple adapts its ASO algorithm on a regular basis, what worked six months ago may not work now.
At Coral, we faced some challenges over the last 12 months with gaining visibility for our sports app. But through some sharp analysis of brands which ranked well and those which ranked poorly for our desired keywords, we started to notice patterns of what was helping the top rankers achieve their positions in the app store.
Shakespeare famously asked the question: “What’s in a name?” I’m pretty sure he wasn’t referring to ASO but the importance of a ‘correct’ name can’t be understated. Recently we’ve seen a large percentage of operators within the industry implementing targeted keywords in the name of their apps, with the intention of ranking naturally for those terms in the app store. But is it working?
The crucial difference between ASO and SEO is of course the fact that all keywords, app names, screenshots and description text must get approved by an actual human being and not scanned by an automated bot originated by Google, Bing or Yahoo.
Traditionally it seems that the mobile development team at most operators took care of all aspects of ASO with little to no input from the marketing department. It is crucial that this changes and both departments work together to ensure the correct elements are inputted into each release.
With recent figures showing that 62% of active players on Coral.co.uk are placing bets via a mobile device, it’s clear that this mobile bubble is not going to burst any time soon. So although SEO may be ‘King of the Acronyms’ for now, ask me the same question in 12 months’ time and I may just have a different answer.