Steve Young

Steve P. Young is the founder of App Mastershas. He has helped 16 clients get featured by Apple and helped doubled downloads for his many clients using app store optimization (SEO for the App Store). He also hosts the App Masters podcast
which has over 600 episodes with the founders of Shazam, Mafia Wars, Crossy Road and more!

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Steve’s success

Keyword research

Result if you follow the steps in Steve’s session

20-100% increase in downloads

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Yeah, sure. It’s gonna make an ass joke. Alright, so here we go. Tools that we, first and foremost, what you want to do is do keyword research.

So, what I typically do Liam is build a long list of keywords for a particular app, give you a tool that’s very popular. It’s called App Any.

Within App Any if your app is not launch, you can go in and put a competitor’s app in there, it’s completely free, and then go into the little keyword tab, under App Any, and you can see what your competitors are ranking well for. It’s the only tool that will actually give you the data.

Most of these tools, you have to input the keywords. But here, I don’t know what keywords I want to build, right. So I want to look at what my competitors are ranking well for with app and you can do that.

And then within this app search store, so if I was looking at meditation, Liam, I would just put in meditation into the app stores, either Google Play or iOS. And I would see what is auto populated, kind of like the old google trick of what we used to do back in the day, put in a keyword and see what Google auto populated.

You’re doing the same thing with Apple, because those keywords tend to have more traffic volume, right? Apple has algorithms to show you those keywords, because they want you to click on them. Right.

And so these come a long, so I start to build anywhere from 100 to 200 to 300 keywords for a particular app to see just a half, right? All I’m doing is just building. It’s like a blank canvas. And I’m just building this long keyword list.

Because my next step, what I want to do is then pull the data using to my favorite ASO tools, I actually use two tools, Liam, because I like to get a sense of what it really means because if both tools tell me it’s low competition, I know I’m gonna rank really high for that keyword.

So I’ll use mobile action, it’s mobileaction.co, and then sensortower.com and I’ll just put all those keywords into those tools, get all that data back. So I have the search volume and I have a difficulty from two different tools.

Alright, so search volume and difficulty. By that, you mean like competition?

Yes.

Okay, cool. And what kind of information, how granular does it get with each of those two data sets?

Yes. So it gives you a score right? If you think Facebook, Snapchat, they’re probably around nine or 10. So they give you score from anywhere from one to 10 or 10 to 100.

That’s basically the same thing. A 10 is what Apple uses. And so you’ll find that, you know, the Facebook’s of the world have like a nine or 10, 90 or 100.

So you can make it in quarter correlation. So, like guided meditation might have a 50. Right? Now, it’s not exact, like, unlike SEO, where it’s like, you know, like 3000 searches a month, right? It’s not that exact, it’s just a score in relation to other keywords.

So you want to try to find ones that have at least a 30 and above, in my opinion, at least a 20 bare minimum 20 above, and then a difficulty or competition score of anything that is less than three if you’re using Sensor Tower and then above a 70 through using mobile action.