App Store Keyword Optimization ASO Tools (optimizemyapps.com)

So you put all your Heart, Soul & Money  building your App. You eagerly waited for that message from God (email from Apple) saying  “Your app Status is Pending Developer Release” or “Your app Status is Ready for Sale”.  Then you wait which seems to be like eternity to check your iTunes Connect the next day…

You half expect to see a graph going through the roof, downloads hitting the hundreds if not thousands of your App.  However, the graph on the screen hits you like a ton of rocks – there a very few downloads. You curse Apple & all the other developers for having flooded the app store with cheap, ill designed, re-skinned apps. No wonder your App is not getting noticed, its drowning in a sea of filth.

Let’s be honest, if you are a first timer in the App Store or a geeky kind of Indie developer the above paragraph kinda is how it plays out.  Well a great app with great UI/UX is awesome; however people still need to find your app in the Ocean which is called the App Store.  The secret of getting your App found is called Keywords.  Yes, the very same things you type into Google every day of your life.

Let’s do a quick check shall we? Do you know the keywords for the App in the screenshot below? How do find out quickly without doing the manual keyword search which keywords this app uses? Read on to find out….

App Store Optimization Keyword Tools

Now you are thinking to yourself, there is no Google Keywords Tool for the App Store; How the heck am I going to find those high traffic keywords related to a App. You see, since Apple didn’t come out with their own Keywords Tool, many companies built their own version of App Store Keywords Tool.

My aim in this post is to introduce you to the existence of App Store Keyword Optimization ASO Tools & to give you a brief overview of each tool. So let’s review each of them in very briefly:

SensorTower.com:

In its very basic form it lets you research your Apps competitors. This it does by showing you the list of keywords used by your competitor.

For example:

• If you have a app which lets you try out the hottest celebrity hairstyles on your pictures then you might research the ”Hair Try On” App
• You get the list of all the keywords used by this App
• So for your App, you can pick & choose the keywords which you think people will search for
• Makes life much easier than searching manually by entering keywords in iTunes & finding the keywords used by competing Apps

App Store Optimization Keyword Tools

The above screenshot from SensorTower shows you all the keywords which are used for the Celebrity Pictures App

The positives of this tool:

• Its Free – for the basic version
• You check your competitor’s keywords

You can even register your App & see:

• Keyword Ranking
• Keyword Competition
• App’s Ranking history

Straply.com:

This is a great tool to find out all the phrases people are typing to find Apps. So you can use this to for instance see what phrases your competitor’s App is showing up for.

For example:

• We can see the high volume search phrases from the screenshot below of Straply
• This is the same app “Hair Try On”  we got keywords from SensorTower
• Here we see that phrases like “try on hairstyles” “hair makeover” “hairstyle try on” are all high volume phrases
• So you see keywords “try” “hairstyle” “hairstyles” “on” which we got from SensorTower in real word action i.e., the way people use these keywords
• Search Phrase Ranking – You also see the ranking for these phrases on a day by day basis

straply – ASO Research Tools

 The positives of this tool:

•  FREE – Still in Beta so for now there is no charge
• You check your competitor’s search phrases
• Shows you the Search volume for the particular Keyword search phrase
• Gives you ranking information for the Search Phrase relative to other Apps

Cons:

• The data sometimes is a little dated, a month or two old
• So, if the app is released very recently then you will not see its data

Appcodes.com:

This tool is a little different than the others. It gives you some probabilistic information, like the chance of getting into the top results

App Store Optimization Tools

The positives of this tool:

• Shows you how much of your Apps name will be visible in the App listing, if you have a long app name this become really useful
• Once you enter your Apps keywords it gives you a list of search queries your App ranks for
• It also Lists the number of Apps competing for a particular search query, so you get a fair idea of your competition
• Shows you the current ranking of your App for a search query
• Gives you a chance value out of 100 of getting to the top of a particular search query
• Gives you download estimates

Cons:

• Not Free
• You have to pay around $15 /month
• There is no trail version