5 Definitive Tips to Make Your App Dominate Google Play Store

Do you believe that your job gets done when you get your mobile app developed and get it placed on the Google Play Store? If yes, then you surely need to revisit your strategy.

As of December 2019, there are 2.9 million apps in the Google Play Store making it an extremely cluttered space. There are hundreds, if not thousands of apps competing in every single category so if you don’t conduct app store optimization, your app will not be easily discoverable among all of them.

Ending up in such a scenario will make your efforts go to waste, so it’s better that you know how best can you optimize your app for the Google play store.

Here are 5 definitive tips to guide you through with this:

Optimizing For Metadata:

The app page has to be highly optimized first of all before moving on to any other aspect of app store optimization. This page is where the Play Store algorithm will first check whether this app is of any relevance to the queries and keywords being searched for by the user.

There are three core elements in your app’s on-page metadata. First up is your app’s title, which can also be called the app’s name. So firstly, you need to pick a name for your app that matches with the search queries being generated in your app niche. Don’t go for fancy names that don’t specify the purpose of your app easily unless you have other brand engagement channels through which you intend to generate traffic for your app.

Secondly, you need to optimize your short bio, which is a small description for your app that is written just below your app’s name on the app page. This description should succinctly describe what your app does in the best manner possible. This should also contain targeted keywords for your niche that have the highest search volume.

Thirdly comes the long description, which can be viewed by the user through clicking on “Read More” just after the short bio. This is basically an extension of your short bio and can be used to target relevant keywords other than the main target keyword to ensure that you are ranking not just for the exact query but also for similar queries.

Aim For Localization:

Targeting keywords in just one language like English is not apt for the Google Play Store as this app store has multiple localized search results for different locations where you might not get featured in if you are not optimizing for local keywords. This can result in you losing out on a lot of search potential that could have come to your app, but since users in other regions cannot find your app, they will never be able to download it.

For this, you need to know what users are searching for in your niche in different regions and then work on custom store listings for as many of them as possible. Regions with the highest amount of user interest in your app niche are the perfect starting point in this regard and from then on, you can move on towards targeting regions where volume is lower but substantial enough to notice, in order to boost your app downloads.

Violating Google Play Store Policies:

Google Play Store can seriously penalize your app and make it reach to a point where any efforts to optimize it for traffic can amount to nothing, if you are not careful with its policies.

Some of these serious policies include plagiarizing content from other sources or trying to rank for brand name of another app that’s already popular. Google Play store’s policies deride any activity that’s done unethically so you will need to be careful during your mobile app development to not violate any of them or you can end up getting banned even if the problem is quite serious.

Incorporating In-App Play Screenshots:

Just like the Google search crawler gives importance to content that’s relevant, the bot on Google Play Store also works on the same line. And one way in which many apps miss creating relevance as per the crawl bot is by not incorporating in-app play screenshots on their app page.

These screenshots signify how exactly a user would experience your app once it downloads it, making it a hallmark of your app’s credibility. Disappointingly though, most app developers try and create fake images for this area, making them lose credibility on the Play Store.

Don’t ever go down that route and ensure that your app page has the most important in-app play screenshots that signify the experiences a user can expect to have inside your app. Apps with the most comprehensive repositories of such screenshots have a much higher chance of securing higher discoverability on the Play Store rankings.

Explore And Search Are Different, So Optimize For Each One Of Them:

In the Google Play Store development section, there is a section for Acquisition Reports in which you can find data for Search and Explore options differently. For Search, there is data on what exact terms users are deploying to find apps and in Explore, there is data on how users are trying to find apps through browsing popular niche-based listings.

Most app developers target just the Search Console while leaving a significant chunk of data from the Explore section untapped. This can be a huge missed opportunity for any app, so don’t do this and find data on the Explore section and ensure that your app is optimized for that portion also.

Wrapping Things Up:

These strategies, if followed in the right manner, will certainly allow you to make your app highly discoverable, thereby driving higher downloads and user engagement that would otherwise have been the case.

There are even more strategies for making your app even more optimized for the Google Play Store like including an app video, localizing the app in different languages, getting highly positive reviews among others, so don’t forget to learn more about them also after you are done with these five.