There are more than 1.6 million apps available in Apple’s App Store. The Google Play Store and the Apple App Store are the biggest app stores worldwide, with a combined total of over 5.6 million apps available.
As the number of apps keep growing over years the chances to get your app visible in Apple’s App Store are low if you leave your product to the algorithm’s will and do not optimize your app’s visibility in the Store. Your app launch as well as your app publishing process should be part of your mobile marketing strategy to be able to market your app in Apple’s Mobile Store and promote it in this overcrowded market. Optimizing your Mobile Product Page in the App Store is therefore required as a solution to boost your app’s visibility and should be included in your app publishing plan.
How to prepare your Product Page for the iOS App Store?
In iOS we have three key elements in the mobile product page that we should optimize: Title, Subtitle and Keyword field. On the other hand, in Google Play we’ve also got 3 main elements: title, short description and long description but we must keep in mind that the optimization process and the way to include keywords in each mobile store is different:
- Google Play’s algorithm focuses on keyword density and keyword repetition across the product page. Find more information about Mobile App Optimization for Google Play
- Apple’s algorithm focuses on the concept of combinations between words. In this sense, keyword density is not important.
During the process of optimizing each field it is important that each word has traffic volume, is highly relevant to our app and can be combined with the rest of the words we selected in our product page. Remember that only titles and subtitles are visible in the Apple’s App Store.
The biggest difference between Google Play and iOS comes in the keyword field because while in Google Play we have the long description, in iOS we have the keyword field in the mobile product page – although the keyword field is not visible to users. The keyword field consists of a set of words – maximum 100 characters – that we consider very descriptive for our app. It is important to bear in mind that it is not advisable to repeat words in this field since in iOS the density does not determine the rank of an app.
In addition to these three fields, iOS lets us enter a promotional text and the description of our product, which is a way to compel our potential users to download the app although they do not have an impact on our app’s visibility.
Apple’s App Store Visibility in Search Results
The first strategic step to boost your presence in the search queries in Apple’s App Store is optimizing your store listing page for organic visibility, what the so-called App Store Optimization (ASO) does. This way you ensure that the 3 key elements of your app are the most effective ones in terms of traffic volume and also you make yourself relevant for user queries in the store.
The next steps to be followed depend on your audience, budget and app characteristics. You can pay for your presence (via advertising), remain with a purely organic traffic strategy by doing App Store Optimization or mix both strategies to boost your organic and paid traffic.
Google Play and App Store Differences when doing App Store Optimization
Once we understand the usefulness of this information, the difficulty relies on combining ASO with the features we want to highlight in our app, that is our visual assets (icon, screenshots, video) to maintain a realistic overview of our app in the product page. So, summarizing our main differences between Google Play and the App Store:
- Google Play’s algorithm focuses on keyword density while Apple’s algorithm focuses on keyword combination and combining potential
- Both stores have 3 key elements in their product page that we need to keep optimizing to be visible in the mobile store and appear in search results. On Google Play we’ve got the title and descriptions while on the App Store we have title, subtitle and keyword field
- We should repeat our most relevant words across the product page on Google Play while we must avoid duplicated words on the App Store.
We are continuously supporting mobile app developers with their optimization strategy so feel free to reach us out if you have any questions – we’re happy to help.
Learn more about our Mobile Marketing Services
