In this post, we will cover the factors that are specific to pricing apps and what you need to do to price your app correctly. It will take some work, but luckily it is probably easier than you think, especially because you can always test your pricing.

Know Your Customer

Having a profile of your ideal customer is the key to any successful business. This knowledge will not only help with pricing your app, but with your marketing and app design.

Don’t know who your customers are? Ask them. You can put a survey link into your app or ask your users to register for your app with an email address and email them a survey created with SurveyMonkey or Google Docs.

Remember to keep the survey short, limit it to 3-5 of the most important questions that you want to find out about them. The fewer number of questions you have, the more likely they will fill it out. You want to find out things like: age group, income (ideally asked indirectly by asking about profession), app buying habits and country of residence.

Hopefully you also have a Facebook Page for your app. You can view the demographic information of the people who like your Page in the Insights section. Although you cannot get this information about other Facebook Pages, you can also check out the Pages of the successful apps in your space and get a feel for the type of people who use those apps.

What does this have to do with pricing? Having this knowledge can help you figure out how much your target customer can afford to pay and which pricing model might be most effective. Pricing game apps should be different from pricing social network apps, and both are different from pricing medical apps.

Know Your Competition

Now you want to check out what successful app developers in your space are doing. This will give you more clues as to how to price your apps. Download their apps and review the overall quality, how easy they are to use, what is wrong with them and figure out their additional revenue sources, such as in-app purchases or advertising revenue. What is working best for them? Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors will help you build a better app and price it competitively for success.

However, don’t be afraid to be different either. Using a different pricing model might also help you stand out from the crowd and make more sales.

What Is Your Business Model?

The up front cost of your app is only part of the picture. There are different ways to price your app depending if it is more profitable to make your money up front, with in-app purchases, with ads or with and outside revenue source.

In general, free apps with in-app purchases usually gross more than paid apps over the lifetime of their users. But you will have to test to see how different pricing models work for you. The common models are:

• Free with ads
• Free with ads, paid upgrade with no ads
• Free with in-app purchases (freemium)
• Paid with no ads or in-app purchases

Another thing to consider is if you are using the app to generate leads for an existing business or if it will be a standalone revenue source. If it is part of a larger marketing plan, you may want to make it totally free with no ads or in-app purchases if it will improve the user experience and generate more revenue outside the app. Bank apps are a good example – if chase charged for their mobile app or put in ads in their app users would be very unhappy.

Also, consider if you can get some investor money to pay for Your expenses while you build your user base. This can be a great way to focus on building a killer app without worrying about generating immediate revenue when you first start out.

iPhone vs iPad

Take a look at how the successful app developers in your space price iPhone and iPad apps. Are they able to charge a premium for iPad apps or are they generally priced the same? This might give you a clue as to what your target market is willing to pay.

Another question that you want to ask is: Does your iPad app require significantly more development, maintenance and support costs than your iPhone app? If so, you probably want to price it higher to cover that cost.

Remember To Factor In All Of Your Costs

This might be obvious to you, but some people can overlook the true costs involved in maintaining and selling their app. As you know, the App Store takes 30% of your revenue off the top. But are there other costs that you may have missed?

Are you paying an employee to manage and track payments? Is there a lot of programming maintenance? After you factor in all of the costs, does the revenue from your app create enough income for the project to be worthwhile? If not, you should think about experimenting with your pricing to create the income you are looking for.

Pricing Is Not Permanent

You might think that once you set a price, you are stuck with it forever. Not true. You can be strategic about how you change your pricing.

You can always change the price of your app but it is usually easier to start at a higher price and discount it, than to start low and raise it. However, if your testing shows that your app is under priced, do not be afraid to start charging more.

Holding a sale for a fixed period of time can also be a great way to test lower pricing. The sale price might even be free, to generate some buzz for your app and to test if you would do better with one of the free pricing models.

Regardless of what you do, be sure to test your pricing for a long enough period of time for your results to be significant. There may be a spike in sales right after the change, but the baseline numbers after that may be worse than before. Let the sales numbers settle down before coming to any conclusions about a price change.

The Clone Test

This will not work for everyone, but if you are able to easily create a very similar app, you can use the clone as a way to test different pricing and revenue models. For example, let’s say that you have a game similar to Doodle Jump called SuperRocket.

Maybe you could change the main character, the name of the game and the start screen but keep the rest of the game almost the same. You might call it RocketQuest. Or you could create a different version of SuperRocket called SuperRocket - Mars Edition. Then instead of charging $0.99 for it, give it away for free without ads and have in-app purchases to unlock higher levels.

This will allow you to test the two different pricing models side-by-side to see which one generates more revenue. Then you can always switch both games to the better pricing model or continue to test different models with RocketQuest and only use the best performing model on SuperRocket.

Conclusion

We hope that this post has given you the tools you need to take some of the stress out of pricing your apps. Ultimately, it comes down to research and testing.

You need to have demographic information about your market, but that will only take you so far. After that, do not be afraid to test different pricing models. If you are starting out, pick a price that you think would be best and just get your app published. Having hard data from live testing is always worth more than just speculation.

What are some lessons that you have learned about app pricing? Leave a comment below and let us know if there is anything that we missed.

Hugh Kimura

Blogger & Entrepreneur

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

In this post, we will go over how to create screenshots that appeal to the emotion and logic of a potential user, can give you the advantage over other apps in your space, and help you get more downloads. We will also give you examples of screenshots that are well done, as well as examples of what you should avoid.

How Do People Decide To Buy An App?

The average person goes through a very typical process when they look for an app to install. As an app creator, your decision making process may be different, so let’s make a minute to see how most people figure out which app to buy.

Typically, a user will search the App Store for a keyword for the type of app they are looking for. Then they will see the search results, one at a time, starting with the app that ranks first and going on to the next one. From there, users will primarily look at the icon, screenshot and the ratings. If the app is highly rated, is the screenshot visually appealing? Does it look and feel like a quality app? Will the app solve the problem they want solved?

Then they will generally compare two or three options and view the full descriptions.

When a user taps on the first app, what is the first thing they see in the full description? More screenshots! This is why optimizing your screenshots is so important.

Make A Great First Impression

You might only have a split second to influence a person to download your app. Once they pass, they are not likely to come back. Therefore, you want your cover screenshot (the one that comes up in search) to convey they core benefit of your app.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What is the primary outcome that someone will achieve by using your app?
• Is there something that sets your app apart from the rest of the apps in your space?
• If you have a game, why is your game so fun?
• How will your app make the user look smarter to their friends?

Then figure out the fastest way to convey that benefit in the first screenshot you upload. Depending on their personality, a user may install it from the search screen and not even choose to drill down to the description, so you need to catch their attention as soon as possible.

Use All Of The Available Screenshot Slots

The App Store allows you to upload five screenshots of your app. Be sure to use every single one!

Each screenshot is an opportunity to influence a potential user to download your app. Even if your app does something that all the other apps do, that function may get lost in the app description.

If someone can quickly see a visual representation of that benefit, it may be all the reason they need to tap the install button. Take advantage of this opportunity. Also keep in mind that you can add some simple text or additional graphics to your screenshots to drive home the benefits of your app.

3 Examples Of Great Screenshots

Clash of Clans - It showcases the beautiful graphics of the game and we can assume that people who want to play a war game are looking to wage epic battles.

iHeartRadio - The first screenshot clearly shows that this is an app for listening to radio stations and that you can customize your radio stations to the music you like.

Documents To Go - This is a great example of how to add text to a screenshot to communicate the primary benefit of the app.

3 Examples Of What To Avoid

Large Desktop Wallpapers - They only have one screenshot - a major mistake. It’s also hard to understand what this app does by looking at the screenshot. What is the parrot representing?

Kingdom Builder - This one isn’t terrible, but it isn’t as good as it could be. You may be tempted to just put up the start screen of your app, but you can do better! Think about the reasons why someone may want to install your app and how you can illustrate that with a picture. Compare it with what Clash of Clans was doing well.

Wake and Shake Alarm Clock - Unlike the previous two apps, this one is actually highly rated. However, it is really hard to understand what their app does just by looking at the first screenshot, especially on an iPhone. If they made the text much bigger and in a contrasting color, it would go a long way to showing people what it does, at a glance.

We hope that this post has given you some actionable ways to increase the downloads of your app by optimizing your screenshots. Remember to appeal to both the emotional and logical reasons to install your app. Now get out there and get more users!

How did your screenshots turn out? Leave a comment below and show off your work.

Hugh Kimura

Blogger & Entrepreneur

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

Clipboard history and copy-paste search with Clyppan is a breeze. Someday, someone is going to elegantly solve managing multiple copy paste buffers at once. In the meantime by using Clyppan you can have a history of your previous copy buffers in a lightweight and simple to use interface. With search functionality and customization features that allow you to exclude applications, this text oriented copy-paste utility helps with keeping track of your copy buffer.

I’ve got a nice mouse with two convenient thumb buttons that I use to navigate back through web pages and windows. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to bind buttons to the mouse in OSX as the bindings tend to reset any time I unplug the mouse. A utility called Steermouse lets me customize my mouse via a lightweight but powerful interface – this much better than the horrible customization software that comes with the mouse I’ve got. It lets me bind my mouse’s thumb buttons to go back and forward in browsers, something that makes managing browsing a lot simpler.

If you’re using a modern text editor like Sublime Text, you’re familiar with cutting and pasting via Command+X. Unfortunately, OSX’s Finder app is incapable of the cut paste operation except via the Command+Option+V shortcut. I believe in keeping shortcuts and UI/UX workflow as similar as possible across different enviroments, and so I’ve found an app called iCanCut that simply adds the Command+X shortcut to finder. iCanCut sends the commands to Finder, so undo via Command+Z works too.

Another gripe with Finder: the default action for the Return key when selecting a file or folder is to enter the “edit name” mode. This is contrary to browsers and every other application out there for which hitting the Return key while highlighting something performs an action like visiting a link or using a button. The somewhat unfortunately named KeyRemap4MacBook (it actually works for all OSX based computers) allows you to set the Return key to perform consistently in Finder by opening files or folders. There are a bunch of other configuration options, too. It’s one of the best $10 I’ve ever donated for an app.

OSX’s window management is a bit shaky (why does the mac’s zoom (+) button often only maximize in the vertical direction?), and so there are a lot of window management tools and helpers out there. My favorite is BetterSnapTool, simply because not only does it allow me to quickly manage my windows easily, but it adds the ability to stretch apps to full screen mode via both a shortcut and by double clicking the title bar. There are lot of other improvements too, so the flexibility offered by this window management tool is a great time saver.

Finally, since I’ve got a retina Macbook Pro with an SSD hard drive, between multiple databases and software the hard drive can start filling up and space can become an issue. Grandperspective lets you view your hard drives’ folders and folder hierarchy in a snazzy visual form where the area of each file represents the size it takes up. This makes figuring out and removing files that take too much space a breeze.

These are some of the hidden gems that I’ve found greatly reduced the frustration I have while working. There are other things I use that help, such as LastPass, Dropbox, Skype, Evernote and Sublime Text, but many people have covered these tools before and they’re quite popular besides. Command line tools and unix wonders such as awk, grep, sed, sort, tail etc. are also extremely important, but they’ve also been written about endlessly. Often times, a small thing like being able to save a second off going back on a web page or being able to open files with the enter key can add up and make your experience much more smooth.

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

In the simplest terms, your app’s downloads come from all the possible locations where your app is seen. The more people that see your app, whether via search or via featured or category lists, the more users your app is going to potentially get. Putting your app in front of as many eyeballs as possible is a great way to build a successful app that has a lot of users. The opposite of that are apps that never get shown to potential customers and don’t get any downloads – they are simply not seen and never downloaded.

You can’t arbitrarily place an app on the featured list – that often takes getting your app noticed or good contacts with the Apple featured team. Category rankings aren’t as big driver of traffic as they use to be before iOS 6, but it is something that a smart app developer can influence – if you gain downloads via the App Store Optimization, incentivized downloads or ads, that growth will have a positive influence on your rankings (and on your search positions) over a long term. Howver, the number of downloads that an app is getting from organic search results within an app store is something somewhat in the developer’s control. There are many potential symptoms and mistakes that an app can have that prevents it from appearing on as many search results that we’ve covered before in the most common iTunes keyword mistakes article, but the three main ones are:

Step 1: Identify Bad Keywords to free up space

Some signs of bad keywors to look for are:

Not having enough keywords
Keywords that you don’t rank in the top 10
Keywords that no one searches

The idea behind removing bad keywords is to free up space for new keywords that you will later research and add to your app on your next update. What makes a bad keyword? Make sure to read the article above, but generally a bad keyword is either one your app does not rank in the top 10 for, or a keyword that is so rare and esoteric that no one searches for it. There are very few cases when you should include keywords that you don’t rank well for: only if that keyword forms an essential two or three word phrase with your other keywords that you rank highly on.

To do this with App Store Rankings is quite simple: After adding your app, add the keywords you want to check your rankings for on the dashboard:

This will let you quickly look over the keywords you have and check the rankings for them. Keep in mind that you can not rank for keywords you don’t include in your keyword meta-data or that aren’t in your app name or company name You could have the greatest cat video app in the world, but no one will find it if you don’t let the App Store know your app is about cat videos.

Once you’ve identified the bad keywords, it’s time to research new keywords to replace the previously bad ones.

Step 2: Come up with new keywords via Keyword Spy

Using our Keyword Spy feature, you can start looking at your competitors’ keywords to get some ideas for new juicy keywords. The Keyword Spy feature lets you look at the keywords your competitors are using to drive their own downloads.

Finding which competitors to look at for keyword ideas is an easy task with the Competitors and Keyword Research tools. The Competitors tab lets you view all your current competitors that we find for you (and even lets you add custom competitors) from which you can click on the Keyword Spy button to look up their keywords. The Keyword Research provides a detailed and comprehensive look at the apps that are ranking well for the searches you specify. Select some apps from these two sources and use the Keyword Spy on them, writing down relevant keywords that you might use in the future.

Step 3: Generate new keywords with Intelligent Keyword Suggestions

The Intelligent Keyword Suggestions tool is an easy way to quickly generate relevant keywords. It depends on having a reasonable set of seed keywords, but can quickly provide a lot of good suggestions for any app. Use it in conjunction with the Keyword Spy and Keyword Research tool to generate a strong set of relevant keywords that you can potentially use with your app.

The Intelligent Suggestions Tool displays data about the keywords, such as the Traffic Score, Difficulty or number of competing apps. Keep these stats in mind when selecting keywords, as trying to compete for difficult keywords is one of the basic mistakes an app developer can make.

Step 4: Optimize Keywords

Once you’ve compiled a list of new potential keywords, it is time to put them through the Optimize Keywords tool to figure out the best possible set of keywords for your app. Make sure to put the most relevant keywords that your app has a chance to rank for – look at the iPhone/iPad difficulty score and the number of apps competing for that keyword in the table while tweaking your keyword list. The Optimize Keywords tool will correct most of the mistakes you can make, but as a rule of thumb make sure your keywords aren’t too long, have a high enough traffic and aren’t too difficult to rank highly on.

The Optimize Keywords tool will also tell you all the relevant stats about each keyword you’re optimizing – such as the Traffic Score, Difficulty Score, and the total number of apps that use that keyword. Use those numbers as a guideline to select keywords that you can actually rank for. Short keywords are generally better as they take less space. Don’t put generic keywords like “fun” or “kids” in your app’s keywords – unless you have millions of downloads already!

Follow the instructions of the Optimize Keywords tool until you arrive at a 100 character list of keywords that makes the most sense for your app.

Step 5: Submit an app update

Submit your app with the new meta-data for an update. If you aren’t too familiar with how to add or edit your keywords in iTunes Connect, take a look at this tutorial which covers most aspects of submitting an app: (Skip to the “Submitting an App” section).

After your app update gets approved to the app store you can track the search positions of the keywords. Use the keyword tracking dashboard to see how your app does on the different searches that you were looking to target with the update, and repeat this whole process again if you identify any bad or ineffective keywords.

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

The visualization is built using a technique called Parallel Coordinates, and the Reviews and Downloads axis are plotted logarithmically to help visualize things better. You can click on any axis to start filtering the output to those apps that only fall within the specified range. There are about 37k apps that we’ve included: every app over 10 reviews that we have data on and that is an english-language app. The downloads estimate, reviews, ratings and price are all for the US App Store.

You can ask questions such as “what is the correlation between number of reviews and total downloads?”, and simply by sliding up and down the axis figure the answers out (on average across all apps, developers get roughly one review per 62 downloads). Your numbers might vary a bit, as they depend on if you’re using something like Appirater to ask for reviews, but that is the ratio to look for.

How about the correlation between number of keywords and number of downloads? This one isn’t as obvious as the reviews-downloads relationship, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense: Apps with more keywords will on average show up for more searches and get more downloads. What do the numbers say? Apps that have under 5 keywords get on average a total of 53k downloads. Apps that have between 15 and 20 keywords get 143k downloads, almost 3x the amount of apps that have under 5 keywords. And what if you don’t input any keywords at all? Apps with only an App Title and no keywords get 10.7k downloads on average.

The download data estimates might be a bit off – they aren’t always accurate, especially for apps that have been released recently. However, in aggregate when looking at many apps together the download estimates should be accurate.

Without a doubt, the Games category dominates – both in amount of apps overall, and in terms of presence in the higher strata with regards to Downloads and Reviews.

A very useful feature is the ability to slide up and down the selection and see how the limits on one axis affect the other ones – the green line is the average of all apps shown, and you can see it move as you place restrictions and change them. You can also filter by category, search for individual apps and even change the color scheme to an inverted dark theme.

So go ahead and check out Visualizing the iOS App Store and delve into the wealth of data we’ve collected for you.

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

Before we talk about how exactly it works or how it can be customized to produce even better results, let’s see an example of it in action. We’ve taken an App with good related keywords: iWhiskey - 600 reviews of the world’s whiskey, and whisky by F. Paul Pacult and put it through the Intelligent Suggestions tool, tweaking the weight values of the keywords a bit. According to our Keyword Spy, iWhiskey has these keywords:

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alcohol, whisky, world, cocktail, review, flip, bourbon, scotch, drink,
600, jack, daniels, iwhiskey, reviews, whiskey, paul, pacult

What kind of keyword suggestions can the Intelligent Keyword Suggestion tool give based on the keywords above?

Pretty good! The Intelligent Keyword Suggestions is giving high quality related keyword suggestions (spirit, liquor, gin, martini, etc. ). This is because we went to the advanced settings and configured the weight values of the most important words to be high.

How does it work? By combining the data we have on keywords used by Apps in the App Store along with an n-gram based database of word relations derived from Common Crawl and Project Gutenberg data along with other sources, we’ve build a collection of word relations designed specifically for generating related keywords. With a bit of tweaking on top of the n-gram database that makes the results more useful by removing common words and non-information carrying parts of speech such as prepositions, we’ve built a tool capable of producing highly relevant and useful keywords given a set of seed keywords.

The Intelligent Keyword Suggestions relies on a set of relevant and inter-related seed keywords to generate new keyword suggestions. These seed keywords are used to generate the single n-gram sets and the multiply-related n-gram sets. An ideal situation is a medium sized set of seed keywords (about 15-20) that are highly related. By default, we place our best estimate of your current keywords and the words in your App title as your seed keywords. This basic setting usually produces highly relevant results, though by enabling Advanced Settings and adding extra seed keywords and/or disabling less relevant ones further increases the power and flexibility of the tool. Disabling less relevant keywords and keywords that you intend to replace usually yields better results as well. If your keywords are highly specialized, you will generally see really good suggestions, while Apps with very generic keywords will need to further tweak their seed keywords to see relevant suggestions.

Advanced Settings opens up the possibility of tweaking the seed keywords used to generate the new keywords, but it also gives the possibility of assigning weight values to individual keywords. For example, we can give the words “alcohol” and whisky higher seed weight by sliding the slider to the right.

The general filter strength controls the relevancy of generated keywords. A higher filter strength will result in less generated keywords, but the keywords will be more closely correlated with the seed keywords.

Finally, an experimental phrase based feature based on two word seed keyword combinations is available to generate even more keywords. We pre-generate the two word seed phrases based on your current keywords, but make sure to look over them and tweak them for good and relevant results.

The phrase based keyword generation, due to the nature of being seeded with two word combinations, tends to generate results that will fill in the long-tail searches for phrases based on your current keywords. It can throw up some gems, just there is a bit more work involved with tweaking the seed phrases.

We’ve been testing the Intelligent Keyword Suggestion tool internally for a while now, and with some human oversight it is capable of greatly simplifying the keyword research and generation process. For a lot of Apps, it will generate a couple of very good keywords without any intervention, and for Apps in more specific niches it is capable of producing really good results after tweaking the seed keywords and weight values. The Intelligent Keyword Suggestion tool is capable of improving keywords for almost any App – sign up for App Store Rankings and try it out.

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

We were doing some data analysis using App Store Rankings data on the iPhone App search keywords, trying to figure out what keywords have the most amount of Apps show up when users search for them on the iPhone (the top 3 are “games”, “iPad” and “kids”).

Strangely, some things popped up that should not have been there. We’re talking about offensive and taboo words. Apparently, Apple’s search algorithm thinks that there are 6,917 relevant Apps for the keyword “incest”. And the third result is the official WATCH Disney Channel App:

And no, it’s not auto-correction. The closest spelling legitimate word “invest” only returns 346 possible results. Try it yourself. Intrigued, we went further and looked for other explicit words that show up a lot of searches.

“Beastiality” returns 8,866 results on the iPhone, with popular Apps like Racing Penguin, Flying Free and Movies by Flixster showing on top of the results. Surely none of these developers actually put these keywords in their keyword field, much less have gotten past Apple’s somewhat stringent review process. Yet show up they do:

These two words were some of the less offensive ones that we’ve found. There are other more offensive words that return a lot of search results, and we’re willing to bet that the vast majority of those App Developers did not put those words in their keywords.

Why could this be? There is no intelligent word correction going on that’s auto-correcting these bad words into innocent but popular words. All the close and plausible corrections substantially less keywords show up in the search results. In fact, these two keywords beat out other extremely popular keywords such as “facebook”, “shopping”, “adventure”, “tv” and “racing” in the number of results. According to our data, they are in the top .1 percentile in the number of Apps that show up. Is this some sort of twisted joke by a long gone Apple engineer?

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

• Keyword Traffic: This metric lets you understand what kind of traffic you can expect to see if you rank highly for this keyword. The rating scale is from 1-10, with keywords in the 7-10 range being the most competitive and popular keywords such as “facebook” or “games”.

• iPhone and iPad Difficulty: This is a measure of how hard it would be for an App to get on the first page of results. The higher the score, the more difficult it would be for an App to rank highly.

• Number of iPad and iPhone Apps for this keyword: The most popular keywords have a lot of people vying for ranking on them. A really high number, along with a high difficulty score might mean that it is pointless to compete on this keyword.

• Competitor’s names, icon, rating and pricing: This allows you to easily glance at the top list to see what competitors are there. Notice if they’re mostly free or paid, as you often want to stand out from the competition. Take a look at their name too, because if their name includes the keywords and yours doesn’t they are more likely to rank higher for them.

• Rating: Are the Apps you’re possibly against rated highly or lowly? Being that 5 star App among low rated Apps will get you more clicks.

• Release Date: Older Apps are more entrenched in the App Store, but often might be outdated or less relevant.

• Last Update: Is the developer keeping up with updates? If you notice a lot of apps that aren’t updated recently, that keyword or phrase might be ripe for the taking, as recently updated Apps typically show up higher in the rankings.

• In-App Purchases: Are developers making money with this App? Or is this App a side project? Keep in mind that some Apps may be free, without in-App purchases but might make some money off ad networks

• Total Reviews: How popular is this App? Reviews are a great way to judge the popularity of an App, as most App developers use Appirater or other similar pop-up prompts to ask for reviews.

• Current Reviews: If an App added a lot of new features or did something well, it is likely to have more reviews for the current version. A lack of recent reviews may mean that it isn’t very popular among users.

• Category Rankings: What’s the best ranking for this App? We show you the Category (Ie, Games, Travel, Lifestyle) and the ranking within that category. An empty field means the App is not in any charts. Compare your App’s rankings with the potential competitors to estimate where you would rank.

You can click on any App’s name to go to their iTunes page in case you want to look at the App in even more detail.

Make sure to sign up for App Store Rankings to try out the Keyword Research Tool.

Coming soon: App Downloads estimate and App Keywords!

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

Take for example a search for “moving” on the iPhone. We’ve compiled the individual screenshots on the iPhone into one giant screen:

We’ve got apps designed to solve the hassle of maintaining moving checklists as the top 4 apps, then an app with moving animations, a local shopping app, an app featuring moving photos and a garage sale mapping app. This seems like a somewhat relevant result. Let’s take a look at what iTunes Search gives us:

Ugh oh! The top two apps have swapped places, there is a completely different moving checklist app in third place, and a game along with a camera and illusion app show up in the later results. Only two apps are in the correct spot. What’s going on? Which search results are actually the important ones?

Without a doubt the search results that show up on actual devices are the ones developers should care about. That is how apps actually get downloaded. It just seems so strange that Apple has two completely different ranking algorithms and pathways for displaying app rankings. It is not a case that iTunes searches are behind the iPhone searches or that they are cached, as we’ve looked at historical data and there really isn’t any correlation. Sometimes completely different apps appear in the iTunes search results. Are there two teams working on this?

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

• Not using the whole 100 characters you’re alloted. There really isn’t a reason not to take up as much space as possible when inputting your keywords. Unlike in web search, Apple puts a lot of trust in you to select your keywords correctly. So make sure to take advantage of that and fill up all your keyword space with relevant keywords.

• Including your app name or company name in your keywords
  In most markets, your app name and company name count as your keywords, and can be combined with your iTunes Connect keywords to form multiple word phrases that you will also rank for. On the other hand, if your app is in the Games/Puzzles category, it will show up for searches that include “games” or “puzzle” but not any combinations of “games” and “puzzle” with your actual keywords, so only apps that are very popular should consider including their category as keywords.

• Using incorrect formatting
  The most common mistakes are spaces in between keywords or multiple phrase keywords. Imagine Rovio is coming out with a new game named Angry Birds: Clay Castle, and their new intern comes up with some new keywords:

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plastic egg, mushy egg, pigs vs eggs, egg slingshot, toy, plushy toy, pig toy

Wait up for a second, intern! You didn’t bother coming out with good keywords, but at least don’t waste space! If only you’d bothered to use our keyword checker tool you’d know that it makes no sense to have spaces or phrases as your keywords. Let’s go ahead and re-factor those keywords:

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plastic,egg,mushy,pigs,vs,slingshot,toy,plushy

We went from 78 characters to 47 characters. Of course, the keywords are still nowhere as optimal as some of them just aren’t common words people would use to search for an Angry Birds game, but at least they don’t take up all the space.

• Using keywords that receive no traffic
  This is a little bit more difficult thing to figure out, but some keywords simply receive a lot more traffic than others. You can easily rank as the # one app for “constitutionality”, but you’ll be the only one! Not a lot of people search for uncommon keywords, so make sure the keywords you’re striving to rank for have a reasonable amount of traffic.

• Using keywords that your app has no chance to rank for
  Sometimes being too ambitious can be a bad thing. Take a look at this example keyword list:

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game,action,racing,car,driving,fast

These are all keywords that receive a lot of traffic, people search for them quite often. But the competition is fierce and brutal, and a new app developer, or even a fairly seasoned one with thousands of downloads has no chance to compete with the really big apps with millions of installs. There is a delicate balance and trade-off between keyword traffic and keyword difficulty, so you must take great care to compete only for keywords that you can actually rank well for.

• Using very long words as your keywords
  This might seem obvious, but long words are both less likely to be searched for, and take up more space. A ten character keyword for which you’d rank first can potentially be replaced by a four and five character keyword pair that might potentially bring you more traffic.

• Including plural and singular versions of your keyword This is a piece of advice we’ve all heard multiple times, but it only makes sense if the plural version of your keyword gets almost as much traffic as the singular version. In most cases there is one common way that users will phrase something, and anyway your app will be ranked for the plural (or singular) versions of your keywords.

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

There are three basic ways a user might find and download an app in the iTunes Store:

• By searching for the exact app name and installing the app, either because they’ve used it before or the app was recommended to them by a friend or review site
• By noticing the app on one of Apple’s featured lists or browsing through category rankings and downloading it
• By searching for keywords to find an app, either because they are interested in some specific category of things or because they have a problem (ie: “starcraft” or “flashlight”)

Unfortunately there really aren’t any easy ways to get ahead on the first two traffic sources, unless you’ve got a marketing budget in the tens of thousands of dollars and are willing to resort to some dubious marketing practices such as buying downloads. On the other hand, because of how the iTunes algorithm works optimizing your app for search traffic is a really powerful tool completely in control of developers. The beautiful thing is that Apple completely trusts you to select your keywords yourself. Because of that, you have complete control over what keywords you’re competing within.

For example, imagine an app developer making a racing game. If they were a web site, they would forever be buried underneath hundreds of other relevant results with higher Pagerank, so to stand out early on they might implement an SEO strategy which would involve competing for easier to rank for and lower search volume keywords, structuring their site around those terms. In the long run, they might be mildly successful but it would be difficult for them to tackle the more difficult and competitive keywords. An app, on the other hand, could choose to select easier yet relevant keywords to put in the iTunes Connect keyword field. Instead of targeting the keyword “Racing” with a difficulty score of 6.8 and other high difficulty general keywords, they could target the keyword “circuit racing”, difficulty score 2.4. Their app would have a much easier time ranking high in the app store for that search term, and as their app gains popularity and weight, they could swap out keywords to target higher traffic keywords.

There is a delicate balance that can be described as “Biting off just as much as you can chew”. When selecting keywords, keep in mind that ranking first on a less searched for keyword (that still gets a reasonable amount of traffic) is a lot better deal than being the app ranked #58 for “bird”.

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog

• Google indexes such a colossal amount of web pages that the potential results can not possibly be human curated. Google has to rely on algorithmically detecting bad results and filtering them out.

• Apple has to deal with only around 700,000 apps, and every app has to undergo a review process in which all the content that the user will ever see will be looked over by a real human.

As such, Apple does not have to worry about ‘bad’ content showing up in searches, unless a developer malicious hides code in a clever way. Even then, the app icons, names, descriptions and pictures are all curated. Google, on the other hand, has to deal with everything the Internet can possibly throw at them, and so relies heavily on a lot of statistical rules and machine learning to filter out malicious content.

• Google has to index pages submitted by people all over the world that it has no business relations with, and can at best rely on looking at information such as whois data, ip addresses and other information to figure out the ownership of websites.

• Apple has the credit card information, billing address, phone number, real names and all other kinds of information about developers that submit apps to them. Developers can be held responsible for their content, and the barrier of entry requires higher technical skills – one must own a OSX device, install xcode, etc.

Once again Google has to rely on much more complicated algorithms to serve relevant results because they simply can not trust the content on the web pages. Google has developed very complicated tools to understand the intent of a web page, analyze the relevancy and category and figure out if a web page is relevant to a result, etc. Apple places a lot of trust in the App developer, it’s up to the developer to figure out what their app is relevant to. This is a reasonable assumption only because apps are reviewed and any underhanded tactics will be caught, and the developer risks losing their $99 fee.

• Google indexes a large amount of pages on an individual site, so a very large site such as cnn.com may have tens of thousands of pages, each indexed and showing up in search results for a net total of an immense amount of search terms.

• Apple only gives apps 100 characters worth of space to select keywords, so even an extremely popular app such as Angry Birds is limited in scope on what keywords it can show up for. Companies can make different versions of their game with slightly different keywords, but nothing will ever come close to the amount of terms a large site can have.

Alex Malafeev

Founder at App Store Rankings

• @appstoreranks
• App Store Rankings Blog