The App Marketing Snack is bringing you the latest ASO tips from app professionals. Our second episode’s guest is Ryan Kelley, ASO consultant, and trainer.

Below is the full transcript of the video above.

My name is Ryan Kelley, I’m an ASO consultant and trainer.

Can you share your top 3 ASO tips?

First of all, I always tell people to set realistic expectations. The expectation that you’re gonna rank top of your category or even the top for a lot of your search terms within the first one to two years, it’s probably not going to happen. It’s a very long-term play.

I always tell people to, and this is very contrarian, but if you want more installs, bring more people to the store. Don’t rely on people going to the store to download an app. Build a brand outside of the store and drive them to the store.

And the other thing I would say is learn paid search. Because the best ASO tool in the world is Apple Search Ads and Google UAC. It’s a great way of really understanding user behavior.

What’s the big ASO mistake everyone should avoid?

Keyword optimization is important to a point but the generic keywords that you’re using are gonna bring in the least number of your total number of installs. So when you focus too heavily, you over-index or you over-optimize. So I always tell people “Don’t repeat the keywords in the title and subtitle, and then repeat that in the hidden keyword field”. That’s a big mistake I see a lot of people using. 

And the other thing I’m starting to notice more and more and more is the fewer keywords you use, the better it is. This is kind of a tip, the subtitle remains indexed even after you changed it. So if you make regular updates to the subtitle and change some of your keywords around, your most important keywords, if there’s enough click-through, are going to stay indexed long after you remove those.

How often should you update your app’s listing page?

It really depends on the app but I work in a 3-month cycle where one round of optimization is 3 months. I would definitely not update any quicker than one month and I would not make an update of metadata and creative at the same time.

What if your ASO strategy doesn’t work?

The biggest impact is when things are not working. You have to test everything all the time and just because you’re not winning, like you don’t have a winning result, you’re still collecting data. You’ve got to test constantly for small wins but also losses, to see where there are things that you probably shouldn’t do.

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Marine Nozerand

Hi there, I'm Marine (she/her), I'm a Content Manager at Apptamin. Apptamin is a creative agency specialized in app videos (video ads, app store videos, etc.).

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