How to Optimize Mobile Apps for the App Store

Both Android and Apple Mobile App Stores are exploding with popularity as the number of active mobile devices on the planet continue to rise at a very fast pace. Mobile app stores are becoming much like self-hosted search engines, utilizing similar principles that search engines like Google would utilize to rank websites based on their overall performance on the web, mobile apps are starting to get the same treatment.

Almost all of the popular apps today have at least a dozen copies of them available, and are any of them really better than the original? Sometimes developers do come up with interesting ideas and concepts to expand upon previously built ideas, but how often do we see those apps climb the mobile app ranking and/or sales ladder?

Optimizing mobile apps for the most popular app stores is really not that difficult, so please sit back and enjoy the number of tips and insights on how you can ensure that your mobile apps will get noticed more often, and especially by those who are looking for the kind of features and capabilities your apps provide.

App Presentation Optimization

To begin with, any mobile app has its own sales page. This sales page is much like your website, so when we look at the bigger picture it becomes clear that we can optimize our mobile app sales pages with similar tactics to those used in search engine optimization.

Metadata
First up we want to make sure that our app title reflects everything there is to know about the primary focus of our app, without having the user spend any time on reading the description. Devices sizes differ, and so does the allowance of title lengths at any given app store, work with what you’re given but don’t over-bloat your titles with useless keywords that will drive people away instead of forward.

The description part of the application is that explains what you’re trying to do and what the main goals and features of your app are. Most app stores offer a certain character limit, which is usually more than 5,000+ words so you have a lot of space to work with in order to best explain the best aspects of your apps. One sentence descriptions just don’t work, and never did.

Keywords are another big part of app store optimization, and although not all app stores offer a way to specify keywords, we can use the type of keywords we are trying to rank for within our written content like titles and descriptions as mentioned above. Place keywords carefully and with the user questions in mind and you’ll see that more and more people find your app by default.

When it comes to showcasing your app to others, perfect your snapshots so that they truly reflect what your main features of your application are, having good snapshots can make or break a download. In some cases you may want to consider launching a promotional video that explains your app into a little bit more detail.

External Factors
All of the previous tips we looked at can be considered internal factors since all of them work within the app configuration panel itself. The second part which is external factors is more about the involvement of the actual app users and how they can help to promote your app in front of a new audience.

First up we have the ratings system that each app store provides. The better our mobile app rating, the easier it is to attract people to explore and give your app a try. Although there is no one single way to ensure positive reviews all the time, one thing app developers can do is provide an excellent support system that will definitely earn an extra positive review or two.

Whenever someone leaves a comment on your app, it strengthens the overall keyword ratio that you have, so encouraging people to comment (perhaps with a reward in mind) is actually a good idea, but quite often users themselves will decide whether they want to leave a comment or not.

Just like in SEO, building links for your apps can strengthen the overall position in both the app store that you’re trying to optimize for, as well as the most popular search engines that take link building into consideration.