App Store Optimization (ASO) has always been looked at somewhat late with the impending growth of Machine Learning(ML) and AI, Google Mobile’s first indexing progression and many other industry changes that are noticeable and commanding to every marketer’s attention.

Even if you are new to ASO, or are looking to refine your approach to ASO, this article is going to shed some light and give practical insights which can be proven to maximize app store success.

What is App Store Optimization?

App store optimization is also known by a few other names that include App store marketing and Mobile app SEO.

The focus of ASO is to improve the ranking of mobile applications (Apps) directly within the app stores (such as the apple app store, Google Play, and the windows store). The main mobile phones for which apps are created are the iPhone/iPad, Android and the Windows Phone.

The primary goal of ASO is to increase app downloads and uses, but the supplemental goals can also include the following:

• Increase in brand exposure
• Positive app ratings and reviews
• App Engagement from audiences
• Diversification for additional marketing channels

Lets us present to you some statistics that prove that ASO is the next best thing that you can do for your app if your company has some apps in the stores.

According to Statista.com 270 billion apps were downloaded in 2017, and there has been a substantial increase compared to 224 billion app downloads in 2016.

When you compare it to the decline of social media growth over the past few months plus the increase in mobile devices used globally. ASO can be the tactic that you can use.

Understanding ASO

If you are new or a beginner in ASO, it is actually likely to be a much more familiar approach that you can use for your business in terms of online marketing that you can think of.

There are quite a few subtle differences between ASO and search engine optimization or SEO

App stores are in effect a closed site search engine, that in turn relies on the following

• Easy Content (App content ) discovery
• Indexation
• Plus, app ranking algorithms that are tied to the following
  • Perceived app quality
  • Freshness
  • Brand scale
  • User value signals(reviews, engagement, ratings)

Does this sound familiar? It should. All these factors are important to search ranking signals too.

Marketing experts that focus on generating increased ROI from different app stores are known to primary target key performance indicators that are tied to increasing app visibility:

• Rankings
• Impressions
• Shares
• Engagement(views, ratings)
• Downloads

Just similar to SEO, optimizing for your app’s visibility is nothing but a constant effort that is evolving and an ongoing process. When you build an app, your primary goal is to drive traffic. With a commitment to ASO, you need to consistently track as well as to measure performance and results, you can easily stand out in the App Store and Play Store, where you reach is unlimited.

Organic Optimization, Your ASO foundation

The key ingredient that is very much missing from many ASO marketing delivery approaches is organic search optimization as well as the integration of app stores within the broader marketing mix.

There have been more overlapped between ASO and SEO than there is direct competition between the two

There are lots of SEO tactics that can also be applied to traditional ASO for getting SEO gains

These are:

• App Name, title and URL optimization
• Keyword Research for ASO
• App rating as well as reviews generation and its handling
• Deep linking within mobile apps
• Integration of apps within Google SERPs (search engine result pages)
• Click through rate (CTR ) optimization
• And many more

The major marketing mistake that can be done, however when it comes to integrating SEO and ASO is to overlook the role of the website for driving volumes of referral traffic visits for your app directly to your store page and app downloads section.

Your website needs to be the driving force behind leading people through the information seeking as well as buying funnel from your main online entity(your website) through an engaged ready to buy/ download audience(your app store).

As the content levels that are provided in the app stores are limited, the more you can leverage your website content to increase app awareness and discovery to build the app authority and visibility, the greater value you will get for driving traffic as well as app downloads

Also Read: Best SEO tools you must use in 2020

In-App store tactics

There can be a number of optimization areas within the app stores, including Google Play and other app promotion platforms that can be targeted for updates and perform ongoing optimization.

 As 63% of all app downloads are directly valued and attributed to app stores, you should not overestimate the value of in-app store maximization.

While the app store features and the fields that are available will vary, the following are the core optimization areas that you need to focus and improve upon:

• App name, URL as well as a subtitle: You need to ensure that they reflect the core keywords describing your app and reinforce value, differentiation as well as other perceived value signals. It is highly important that these reflect the highest value keywords and user search behavior.
• App keyword fields: These are essential to get right and to update in order to show the latest and changing user search queries. Traditional keyword research is needed for optimizing this parameter
• App ratings and reviews: A core trust area for users as well as a major ranking signal for app stores. Volume freshness, as well as ratings, does matter. You need to have a core framework in place to generate regular reviews and replying to and engaging with reviews.
• App Downloads: As you can expect more downloads for your app, the higher the perceived buzz and demand for the user value associated with the app. Increasing the volume of downloads will easily support the increased prominence within the app store’s organic rankings.

App Updates: Downloads deserve freshness

The top-performing app in the apps store is those that are ever-evolving and are constantly being updated with newer features, technology changes, user feedback, feature additions, and improvements.

Apps that tend to get updated frequently tend to deserve more positive and frequent reviews.

Updating your app at regular intervals can bring an added relevance to your product for your audience and enable your brand to react to changing audience needs and competition changes with both app refinement and improvement.

Both the Apple app store and the Google Play store are taking into consideration the regularity of app updates as a part of their ranking factor for apps.

This means that your brand is dedicated to progressing your app offerings, the greater your likely app rankings and your instore performance will be.

Some additional tips:

1. App stores use keyword triggers in your app name, description as well as title and other associated fields, so you need to ensure that you spend time researching the best keywords you can use and that you regularly visit them at regular intervals for optimization opportunities
2. How you present your app on your app store page will have a big impact on your conversion rate value(downloads) that you get from the page. Product page CROs need to be the ongoing focus area for generating downloads
3. Thumbnail and screenshots used to promote your apps in stores will directly impact the Click through rates of impressions to click extra app pages
4. A/B tests each of your app store fields for continuously improving the key metrics associated with each field. This type of experimentation and hypothesis testing is critical for extracting every ounce of value from available optimization areas within the app stores.
5. You need to consider Apple’s spotlight search. By using this app store feature, users can search the apps that they have installed on their mobile phones. When you enable Apple’s spotlight search, you can impact app usage and their engagement levels as people are going to be exposed to your app more frequently.

Also Read: Difference Between SEO and SEM(SEO vs SEM)

Conclusion:

We have discussed some well known techniques that you can use for your App store optimization and Google Play store optimization.

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Since we are living in a digital age where each of us is surrounded by competing technologies you must have heard about Android. Android is a mobile operating system primarily designed for touchscreen mobile devices like smartphones. Developed by Google, it is a modified version of  Linux kernel and other open-source software. 

Why is Mobile Security Important

Today nearly every task we perform is carried out by our mobile devices. Not only our personal but even work-related professional tasks are being done using mobile devices. Therefore, protecting our smartphones are the most important things for each of the users. Since it carries all our important codes and documents today there are hundreds of malware activities are being performed. With the increasing trends and technologies cybercrime too has increased steadily. 

Android is the most used and available platform used by the majority of the public. Due to its widespread usage and open-source properties, it is the most targeted platform to hack or destroy. Therefore, the need to secure the Android app development is highly large and required, not only for large enterprises but for small and medium as well. 

Let’s take a look at some security issues developer’s face to develop completely secured Android Apps – 

Data Store 

Android having many security concerns face the common issue about storage, whether the data saved on the device is accessible to other apps or not. It has three common fundamental ways of storing data – Internal storage, External storage, and Content providers. 

Internal Storage

In Android, the files you create on internal storage are accessible only to your app. Generally, developers avoid readability and writ ability mode for IPC files because neither do they provide the ability to limit its data access nor do they provide any control of the data format. Therefore, if you want to share your data with other app processes consider using a content provider. It offers you both reading and the writing permissions to other apps. 

However, to provide additional protection for sensitive data you can encrypt local files using the key which is not accessible to the application. 

Use External Storage

Files created on external storage like SD cards are globally readable and writeable. Since external storage can be removed by the user and can also be modified by application therefore never use sensitive information using external storage. 

You should perform input validation while handling the data from external storage. Also, you should not store executables or class files on external storage prior to the dynamic loading. And if your app retrieves executable files from external storage it should be first signed and cryptographically verified before dynamic loading.

Read More: How Profitable are Android Apps to the Developer and Your Business?

Content Providers

Content providers offer a structured storage mechanism which can be limited to your application or can also be exported to allow access by other applications. However, if you do not want to provide other applications access, being a developer you can make the changes. 

You can also create single permissions specifying particular permissions for reading and writing. You should limit your permissions to those who are required to accomplish the task. It is also easier to add permissions later than to expose new functionality rather than taking it away and impacting users. Android app development provides its developers with various options to design their applications. 

Data Encryption

Encryption is a process by which the developer can convert the data transmitting into a form by which it cannot be read by anyone else without decryption. Therefore, in this case, if the data gets stolen the hackers would not be able to use it for their purposes. This is an efficient and important way to save the data even after getting stolen. Using this the hackers would not be able to use your data in malicious ways.

Therefore, if you’re building an app, make sure the data you are including in the app is very well encrypted. 

Unintended Data Leakage

Unintended Data Leakage refers to the storage of critical app data on the insecure locations of the mobile phone. Since this data is stored on the unsecured location it can be accessible by other apps or users anytime. This leads to the breach of user privacy leading to the unauthorized use of data. 

It is caused due to issues like bugs and negligence of security in the framework which is not in the control of the developer. However, you can prevent unintended data leakages by monitoring the common points like charging, logging, app backgrounding, cookie objects, etc. 

Libraries

While designing the app developers need the requirement of third-party libraries for code building. Therefore, make sure you use a secured third party library and not just trust any library for your app-building. Try to find the best library to test your code. Otherwise, the hackers can easily attack and crash your system using malicious code. 

Know More:  How Android app development has revolutionized the world?

Authorization and Authentication

While building the code of your app make sure you use authorized APIs. Poor or missing authentication allows hackers to anonymously operate the mobile app or backend server of mobile apps. Mobile internet connections are not as reliable as traditional web connections. Therefore, to keep your data secure and application-optimized you need to maintain offline optimization. This offline requirement of authentication helps you create the security loopholes which developers must consider while implementing mobile authentication. 

In offline mode apps are mostly unable to distinguish between users and therefore allows users with low permissions to execute the actions which are only allowed to the admins or super admins. To prevent sensitive information it is best to limit login in the online mode. However, if there comes a specific requirement for offline authentication you can encrypt the app data which can be opened only with specific operations. 

Conclusions

These are some best practices a mobile app developer can follow to have a fully secure application. Ensuring security importance a developer can easily control cyber crimes to a lot of extents. 

If you’re looking for an Android developer to design Android mobile application for your business, contact us. We at Nimap Infotech have all kinds of developers present to handle your queries. Hire Android developers to design the best-secured app for your company. Our developers also provide lessons for those who are keen to learn the coding and seeing their future in development. Therefore, if you want to begin your career into development join the best android development course in Mumbai.