How to Improve the Quality of Android App to Rank Better on Google Play Store
Mobile app development is now seen as a worthwhile business, with thousands of apps launching daily. According to the statistics report of Business of Apps, 132,000 to 142,000 apps were added to the Play Store from March to May in 2019. There were approximately 2.6 million apps in the Google Play Store in May 2019.
With this increasing rate of mobile apps, making user-friendly apps has become very challenging for most app developers. App discoverability is crucial, especially when you are in the cutthroat competition of mobile app development.
If you are also in the same boat, you need to understand the different strategies required to boost the visibility of your app so that you can win the jackpot with tons of app hunters waiting for your newest app offering.
Make sure that you are deploying the best app store optimization practices that win Google algorithms and rank your app high in the Google Play store. Everything from your app’s name, description, title, keyword research, and screenshots can be flawlessly optimized to rank you high.
Understanding App Store Optimization
App store optimization is the process of optimizing a mobile app to maximize its visibility in the Google Play Store and increase traffic to generate the volume of organic downloads in bulk. Serving as the base for the growth strategy of any mobile app, ASO will help you in getting top-notch users for Android and in reducing user acquisition costs.
Strategies to Rank Your Mobile App High on Google Play Store
Google is stringent when it comes to app store optimization. Meaning not nailing the app store optimization process and not using the appropriate optimization strategies will lead your app towards failure. However, there are some proven strategies to boost your app ranking on Google Play Store.
1. Know your Customers and Market Competition
Doing research on the market and analyzing the customers is the first step for implementing an ASO strategy for your app. To do so, identify your customers, their needs, and know your place in the market. To get a clear understanding, ask yourself the following questions;
- What language do your users speak?
- Why would users download your app?
- What is the unique selling point of your app?
- Which keywords are you going to use to target your customers?
- What keywords are the best to highlight the USP of your app?
- How will these keywords give you a competitive edge over your competitors?
2. Keyword Research
Using the right tool for keyword research is the key to finding the most effective keywords for your ASO strategy. There are three core aspects of choosing the right keywords for your app: Relevancy, difficulty, and traffic.
You must target highly relevant keywords for your app. This will increase the chances of app downloads by potential users. For example, if you are offering a music player or video app for android devices, then using relevant keywords, like media player, will make it easy for people to find the purpose of your app.
3. Choose a Suitable App Name
Having a unique but attractive name of your app is not only necessary for branding purposes but also helps in getting better results with the app store optimization process. Make sure that you have an interesting app name that creates a buzz because it’s the name that hugely affects the search results of your app store.
4. Learn from Your App Ratings
Ratings play a crucial role in making your app successful. Higher the ratings of your app, the more chances for ranking high on play store. To get a better ranking, the quality of your app must be par excellence. Implement the following to avoid bad reviews on your app;
- Provide an email address where your app users can reach you out for their queries
- Own a website for support
- Provide frequent upgradations to your app
- Identify and fix the bugs in your app
- Always ask your users for the second review after solving their issues.
Use Keywords in the App’s Description
Who can deny the importance of placing the keywords in your description? It’s a great way to increase the chances of an app to rank high on the Google Play store. It will increase the chances of Android apps to rank better for their targeted keywords. A long app description may get confusing, so placing the keyword at the start of the app description assists in increasing its visibility.
Two types of descriptions are required for improving the quality of an app: long and a short description. As far as the long description is concerned, you have to include the keywords within the limit of the maximum of 4000 characters. Avoid using any keyword more than five times. Next is the short description having a limit of 80 characters. Putting only the core functionalities of your app is the best idea to go.
Use these few tips for writing a perfect description:
- Highlight the main features of your app.
- Keep the description clear and precise.
- Talk in the tone of your brand to communicate with your target audience.
- Localize the description and don’t do keyword stuffing.
6. Provide Screenshots
Visual elements such as videos and screenshots don’t directly increase the app search ranking, but hugely impact on the conversion rate to download, which eventually ranks your app high on Google Play Store.
Make sure your screenshots are highlighting the best features of your app and must compliment the description. This will help you to engage the downloaders who don’t like to read texts.
In the Google Play Store, you can add a maximum of 8 screenshots while the minimum requirement is two screenshots. All screenshots must have the following specifics:
- dimension- 3840px
- 24-bit PNG or JPEG
- dimension- 320px
You can use creative and attractive images to define the best features of your app.
7. Localize Your App
App publishers must modify the title, description, and screenshots of their app into local languages. This will make sure your app is user-oriented and helping the users to connect with it easily.
Rank Better on Google Play Store!
Improving the quality of the app is a never-ending process, and requires a lot of time and effort. There are a lot of approaches that can enhance the quality of your app and deeply penetrate the market. However, the most important of these are mentioned in this blog. Implementing the above-listed tips will increase the chances of downloading your app 95%.
Do you also want to increase the visibility of your app and improve its ranking on Google Play Store? Don’t be disappointed if you struggle with any of these approaches. You can hire an experienced app and web development agency to help you with the journey.
Tabish Khalid is a Senior Digital Marketing Executive for ApplifyLabs, a web and mobile app development company headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida. He enjoys years-long expertise in digital marketing, social media management, search engine optimization, and more. He loves writing about technologies.