10 ASO Mistakes you Need to Avoid in 2021 - Quick Guide - FunkyKit

If you are starting out in the mobile app business, chances are that you’re making some major mistakes that can negatively affect the performance of your products in the app stores.

It turns out that, as with positioning in Google, in the app store it’s also necessary to have a well-defined optimization strategy to obtain the desired success. Or what is the same, App Store Optimization (ASO).

In this short, fast, and precise guide, you’ll discover what are the 10 most common mistakes that you should avoid at all costs when optimizing your application and improving your downloads. Let’s get started!

What is ASO?

To put it as simple as possible: ASO is for applications, what SEO is for web positioning — but each one with its important differences, of course.

ASO is the process of optimizing an application in an effort to make it appear among the first search results in the app stores.

Basically, it’s getting organic exposure for your apps; the higher it is, the more users will find them in their searches, and therefore the greater the chances that they’ll download your apps.

10 ASO mistakes you need to avoid right now

When preparing a strategy to “promote” an app through ASO positioning, both developers and marketers make a series of mistakes — often almost imperceptible — that can interfere with the main objective:

Make their applications more visible to obtain the highest possible number of downloads. Our goal in this case, is that you become aware of these errors to avoid them and get closer and closer to your goal.

1. Ignoring what ASO means

The first step is the most obvious; if you don’t know and master ASO, your app will pass without pain or glory through the app store.

Nowadays, not knowing ASO is something unthinkable if you want success for your app; this means maximizing your in-store visibility, improving your conversion rate, and getting organic downloads and installs.

Remember that organic downloads are the ones that are free, so they contribute to the reduction of distribution costs and therefore, influence the final price to the consumer.

Data indicates that more than 65% ofinstallsare search-driven, so this should be an incentive to take ASO seriously.

2. ASO is the same that SEO for apps

Although SEO and ASO are similar in function and purpose, they aren’t the same.

While SEO is used to optimize the visibility of a website or blog in Google searches, ASO is used to optimize the visibility of applications in the app store listings and thus improve the conversion rate and reduce user acquisition costs.

Another important difference is that paid campaigns have a much greater impact on ASO than SEO.

3. Not creating quality products

A large number of developers ignore this factor. This is a serious mistake, since both user engagement, retention, and even the reviews they make, are important.

If users complain about something, try to correct it quickly, since having a good and quality product is essential to have satisfied users who want to download more of your applications.

In addition, a satisfied user will speak well of your application, conducting a word of mouth marketing campaign for your app for free.

4. Not studying well the niche to which your app belongs to

A good niche market analysis takes into account several aspects:

What is your target audience?
Can you classify it by aspects such as gender, age, location, etc?
What is your target audience looking for in an app like yours?
What are your main competitors?

The idea i to get in tune with what users want and what the apps are doing in your target niche, all with the idea of identifying the mistakes and successes of the competition.

All this is important to analyze beforehand since it’s most likely that you’ll be facing apps that will have better engagement and that will receive constant updates.

5. Ignore the location

If we already know that there are more than 5.27 billion smartphone users around the world, you should be taking advantage of it. Today, it makes no sense to limit yourself to a single country or a language.

That’s why it’s important that you try to localize your app’s file in as many countries and languages as possible; as long as you observe that there are a good number of potential users who will install it.

In addition, this practice will help you improve searches in different markets and improve the conversion rate.

Also, take into account that localization process involves a bit more complexity, since you will need:

Analyze the new market
Explore the most relevant keywords
Make a good benchmark
Study the Top Charts in detail
And more…

6. Not being careful in the use of keywords

While there is less competition for keyword usage in the app market, that doesn’t mean you should ignore this aspect.

The best practice here is that you try to focus on the “long tail” words and for this, you can help yourself by using keyword suggestions and autocomplete.

Try to create a list with a good number of words and then try to place them in the key places:

In the title
In the short description
In the long description

7. Not taking care of the visual appearance of your presentation

ASO isn’t only “traffic + conversion”, since it will be useless to have a lot of traffic if it doesn’t translate into downloads.

How do you convince users to download your app?

You must take care of any visual resources that make up the presentation of your offer as much as possible, including:

Icons
Screenshots
Cover images
Featured videos
Colors in general

Remember that everything enters through the eyes, therefore the design work is of key importance to achieve an impact on users.

8. Not doing enough tests

你应该测试你的视觉资产和textual fields to find what works best to engage users. The usual is to carry out A/B tests: testing two versions of any item in the list and measure its success in terms of conversions.

You must perform these tests as necessary and with all the elements that make up your presentation.

9. Excessive use of wrong keywords

ASO optimization is made up of three fundamental aspects:

Keyword research
Tab optimization
Monitoring

Detecting the most suitable keywords for your app is of enormous importance to better define the spirit of your offer; what your potential users are looking for. In this sense, the best practice is to focus on long and mid-tail keywords, since these are usually the most useful and lead to more downloads. Subsequently, you’ll have to perform your optimization tasks on your tab gradually.

To help you in this process, you can make use of some monitoring and optimization tools: Asomobile, TheTool, App Annie, and Sensor Tower, are some of thebest ASO toolsfor this.