Happy New Year, Mailtimers! We believe that the best gift is to share what we learned. Starting from this month, we are going to interview a group of startup founders with 5 very simple questions. They might come from all kinds of fields and work on very different products. We hope these sharing blogs can help our readers and community learn more interesting facts or products about the startup world.
Today we have KL from 100 Characters, an ASO(app store optimization) startup focusing specially on the 100 keywords that developers use to grow visibility on the App Store. If you are a developer, you can’t miss this.
1. What is 100 Characters
100 Characters is a service to help iOS apps optimise keywords in 28 languages to get more downloads from iTunes Store, globally.
2. How 100 characters influence an app?
There is a big portion of traffic comes from organic search on iTunes App Store for most of the apps. It is important to show up in the keywords searched by the target users. Those apps do better in keyword optimization gain a lot more traffic comparing to those who don’t because of more presence in search results. Why skipping ASO when SEO is considered important?
3. What are the most common mistakes(or misunderstanding) on ASO among developers?
There are 2 major misunderstandings among developers optimizing keywords on iTunes Store.
ONE: All English languages are the same.
English users in different English regions use different words in some use cases. The search rankings could be improved with more targeted keywords for different English languages. A very simple example is different words in British English and American English.
TWO :All keywords should be translated in non-English languages.
Some English words are even more popular than non-English words in terms of searching in some countries. It is not necessary to translate all keywords into non-English. For example, users in Germany and Netherlands are usually fluent in English and search in English frequently as well. There are more tricks and hidden rules that iTunes Store hasn’t told.
4. How many languages should most developers consider localizing in keywords?
All 28 languages. Even if developers are not translating the app store descriptions, it is important to optimize the keywords so that the app could show up in more search results with better rankings. There is not negative side effect to support 1 more language in terms of keywords.
5. What’s the most important step in keyword optimization?
A lot of experiments. Apple wouldn’t tell you how it works in app store search. It is a blackbox. It is very important to iterate the keywords by monitoring the performance change of each update in order to figure out the rules behind. Same keyword also works differently for different apps. There’s no easy 1-shot way to come up with the best-fit 100-character keyword.
Stay tuned with MailTime Blog for more interesting startup stories.
