Winning Mobile: First, You Have To Win App Store And Google Play Search

forbes.com

If you want to win in mobile, you have to win in apps, which take 80-95% of our on-device time. And if you want to win in apps, you have to win in search.

Why?

Because 65 to 80% of all your app installs will come as a result of search. That might sound counterintuitive, but the “search” I’m talking about is not just search on Google or Bing, but search on Google Play and the App Store. Apple says that 65% of all iOS app downloads come after a search on the app store, and Fiksu has stated that 80% of quality organic downloads on Android are courtesy Google Play search.

So I studied the top 50,000 apps on the planet to out to find out how mobile publishers win search. I was particularly interested in how the major culture-shifting blockbuster apps differentiated themselves from the merely popular, merely successful, merely very very good apps that occupy the #20 through #300 spots in their category.

In other words, how do the winners of the winners, win?

First, winners rank for a lot of keywords

People search for apps with keywords, whether they know it or not. Someone who might end up installing WhatsApp or Snapchat might have searched on “social” or “messaging” or similar terms. People who end up downloading Clash Royale might have searched on “strategy game” or something like that. The more keywords your app is relevant for, the more chance you have to get found as a result of searches.

You have to pick keywords wisely, however:

“Do your research and see what words rank high in searches for the context of your app,” says app optimization expert Sunil Modi ofReachout Life. “A higher ranking keywork may also mean more competition, which is not good news. When you are competing with an app that is much more popular than yours for the same keyword, then your app won’t get picked. It is better to pick keywords that are a bit unique but still get enough search traction. Then you can leverage those to get higher ranks for your app.

Unpopular apps — 95% of the App Store and Google Play — tend to rank for perhaps one to three keywords. But top ten apps, the cream of the crop, typically rank for between 60 and 110 keywords. That translates into much higher potential visibility.

That potential, however, needs to be actualized. Top apps accomplish that by not just ranking, but ranking well.

Second, winners rank HIGH for many keywords

In business and in the app economy, it’s not just about showing up. It’s about crushing the competition.

Ranking for a keyword is fine. But ranking in position 35 — in other words, your app shows up 35th when a user searches with that keyword — isn’t going to help you very much at all. It’s like being on the 35th page of Google results for “news” … you’ll never get seen.

Top apps win by ranking first for six to seven terms, and second or third for another nine to ten.

People who are installing apps are in a hurry, and they don’t have the time to page through screen after screen of results. Either your app ranks in the top five to ten apps, or it almost doesn’t matter at all. This is the primary difference between the true giants of the app ecosystem and the merely successful. Even though the successful have beaten out 99.5% of their app competition, the last mile is the most important, since top 10 apps easily get hundreds to thousands of times more installs than top 100 apps.

One trick? Pick time or season-sensitive keywords:

“An often overlooked factor is launching your app when coverage to a related topic is there,” says Flynn Zaiger of digital marketing agency Online Optimism. “For example, pushing out an Olympics or Rio themed app [during the Olympics] would greatly increase the effectiveness of your launch. Not only are more users searching for these kinds of apps during this time, but the App Stores feature lists that are likely to include your app if they see it coming down the pipeline. This makes it the perfect time to get that ranking boosts.”

Third, winners understand their competition

Apps don’t compete against every other app on Google Play or in the App Store. A user installing Facebook does not therefore think: “I don’t need this game.” Instead, you compete against similar apps in your category.

For example, on iOS it’s a lot easier to rank well in the Books category, where average apps rank for 25-28 keywords, than in the Health & Fitness category, where average apps rank for over 100 keywords. Photo & Video is even more extreme — almost 175 keywords — and the Games category is the most competitive of all.

Of course, within the Games category are multiple sub-categories on both the App Store and Google Play, and some like Music, Family, or Board are much easier to rank in than Casual, Racing, or Casino.

“One thing that never fails is to research your competition,” says Isaiah Nwukor of StoreMods. “Find all the apps in your categories vertical that are similar to yours, and then see what sort of language they are using. Look for the trends in the most popular apps, and try to incorporate that tone of writing into your text alongside the main focus words that you want your app description to include.”

Fourth, winners get installs

If this sounds self-referential, that’s because it is. And the reason is simply that the mechanics of the app stores are set up to reward success.

“If lots of people click on the same result, it sends a strong message to Google Play and the App Store,” says Marcus Kay of Meatti, which does app marketing in China.

Google and Apple want to offer what people want to get. That makes their app ecosystems stronger. And so when people view apps and install them, that tells Google and Apple: people want this. People are installing this. I’ll show it more often. The opposite result has, of course, the the opposite effect.

There is a downside to this, and it involved cheating:

“Some Chinese App Store ranking manipulation farms even go so far as to boost an app’s ranking of specific keywords by searching the app by specific keywords, tap the app in the search results and download it by bot-farming,” says Kay.

The story continues

Of course, there’s a lot more to app store optimization than keywords and ranking. You need the right app name and description, well-crafted metadata such as a good description (and keywords on iOS), and many, many other factors.

The full report that this post is based on is available here, but the research continues.