Importance of the App’s Name Length

Even the most successfull game studios commit rookie mistakes…

Remember, users only see the first 19 characters of your app’s name!

App Store Optimization (ASO): App Name And Keywords

Up to today, as far as Apple’s App Store SEO is concerned, only your app name and keywords count. Of course the rest will matter a lot to convince people, but these are the only things that will make your app appear in search results. Try making the good choices straight away: you can always make changes later, but only when updating your app (don’t update just for that, Apple might not like it).

Be descriptive in your app name

After your icon (we’ll talk about that), the first thing your potential users will see is your app name. If they are on the App Store using their iPhone, they will only see the first 19 characters of your app name when browsing (i.e., without being on your app page). For non-games apps, it means that your app name needs to be as explicit as possible from the very beginning: you don’t want people to see a non-relevant name when they are looking for something. You also need to state what your app does in the name. The second important thing to know about your app name is that the words you put in there also act like keywords. These keywords used to have more importance for search results than the actual keywords, but this seems to have changed recently. Don’t make it just a list, and try to come up with short phrases (2/3 words) that people are most likely to use.

The app name is used by Apple to create your app URL. Do not include any special characters in your app name, because your iTunes app page will then only use your id. You can read more on that here.

Another thing you might want to be careful of : try not to repeat an already taken app name (or parts of it), as Apple manually flags (and disables) the concerned keywords.

Choose your keywords wisely

Apple gives you 99 characters to define your keywords, so try making the best out of it. Everyone used to agree that there was no use in having the same keywords in the app name and actual keywords, but that seem to be changing so it’s hard to say. Separate every word by a coma. Apple seems to be handling plurals better now, so you can save keywords that way.
Just like for regular SEO, if a keyword (or combination of keywords for your app name) is overused then try to come up with something different like synonyms or other ways to say it that people might use. Better to be in the top 5 results for an average-searched keyword than in the top 100 for a highly-searched keyword. Oh, and don’t use somebody else’s trademark.

AppCod.es is a great tool to test your keywords and see some of the supposed keywords your competitors are using. It’s not free but you can play with the demo account, and they have a nice slideshare tutorial. Another tool has been developped by the MobileDevHQ team.

When you are not featured and don’t want to rely on the Google Play’s ‘most recent’ section, keywords are all you have.

Some keywords are bad because no one is querying for them. So how can you find out which keywords to optimize for?

The first step should be: Take a look at Google Play. Type in some Keywords and see what happens. When looking at the first apps you will see whether they are found by ‘accident’ and don’t really fit the keywords, or if they are in a real correlation to them. When there is no app whose content matches to your search terms, your keywords are either weak, or your idea is unique.

If there are lots of apps that fit your keywords, you should take a look on the download and rating rates to determine whether the apps found with your keywords are successfull. This again is an indicator on whether your keywords are queried often or not.

Keywords: How?

Now that you know which keywords you want to optimize for (it can be an array of keywords, e.g. not only ‘voice’ and ‘recorder’ but also ‘recordings’, ‘speech recorder’, ‘sound’, ‘media player’ and so on), you need to put them into your text. Your description should include your keywords repeatedly. You should make sure your text is human readable, putting the same keyword as every second word will definitely destroy your description and scare users. You should make sentences that are usefull and don’t make it too obvious that you are using keywords. A bad example:

Keywords: angry birds, birds are angry, rio, bird, …

A good example (out of the Farm Tower‘s app description):

… will love the cute animals (pig, cow, chick, chicken, sheep, horse, bull, cat, no angry birds though ;) ) and the funny sounds …

To benefit from other well known brands like Angry Birds is a way to go, as long at is not too obvious.

Keywords: Where?

It seems as if the title of an app had a higher relevance than it’s description. If it’s possible, you should also place the most relevant keywords of your app in the app’s name. For example AL Voice Recorder for ‘voice’ and ‘recorder’ or 3D Invaders – 3D Game for ’3D’ and ’3D game’.

Be Careful with Keyword spamming

When you do this too obviously, what will happen some day is: Your app will be kicked out of Android Market and that’s not what you want.

Publisher name

It’s still unconfirmed but the pubisher’s name might actually have some relevance now. We are starting to see developers using names like “Top Free Games” or “Best Free Addictive Games”.