Now I've been talking about the Apple App Store and the Google Play store and there are a lot of things 1
that are common to both 2
for example keyword research or traffic versus difficulty. 3
But there are a few things that are different between the two of them 4
and this is just a table that summarizes some of those things. 5
So for example Apple app store 6
gives you more characters in the app name but Google only gives you 30 characters. 7
The other thing that's really important is your description. 8
Now in the Google Play store that is pretty much where most of your keywords will get taken out of 9
whereas on the Apple App Store it doesn't impact your keyword ranking so much although we are seeing 10
it becoming picked up. For the Apple App Store 11
as we mentioned before the majority of the keywords will come from the keywords field which is limited 12
to 100 characters whereas the Google Play store does not have a place where you can enter your keyword. 13
It has to be like a website. 14
They gather the information on the words that appear the most frequently in your app name and in your 15
description. 16
And the closer to the beginning of each of those fields the heavier the words are weighted. 17
Now the other thing that's really interesting is that words are counted as keywords in places that you 18
won't expect. 19
So for example when you name your in-app purchases, you'll think that "Oh you know I'm just going to come 20
up with a name that makes the most sense" but in fact those also count as keywords. 21
So make those names something that you want to rank for. 22
And finally through observing a lot of app performance on the Google Play and Apple app stores, you can 23
actually see that the things that people write in their reviews actually count towards your keywords. 24
Now obviously this is something that you can't control unless you decide to go and pay people for reviews. 25
But it's something just to be aware of and the reason why we know this is because somebody wrote on 26
the Pandora app, they wrote a review saying "I hate this app. 27
I prefer Spotify." And you start seeing the Pandora app appear when you search for Spotify which is really 28
interesting. 29
So this is just a couple of differentiation between ASO on the Apple App Store and the Google Play 30
store. 31
As always, study the platform that you're going to target and really understand how it works. For both 32
of these app stores listing your app on it is pretty straightforward. 33
The platform guides you through it's just filling in a whole bunch of fields but the intricacies lies 34
in knowing which fields get counted towards your keywords and how to make those keywords count towards 35
getting your ranking higher.