App Store Optimization: App Store vs Google Play Differences

[00:00:03]hi welcome to the latest business of apps tutorial which is all about comparing App Store and Google Play App Store optimization to help your company or your business to really quickly find the differences between these two different stores ASO efforts just to introduce you quickly to the a of this tutorial we're going to be outlining the differences between app optimization on Google Play and the App Store so that you can rapidly discern the differences in the two to help your apps perform better on each store and also just to give you a quick understanding of the differences in the keyword theory on each store and how that might affect your promotional efforts so anyway just to introduce myself I'm George Osborne I'm the chief content officer of the business of apps I've also worked as head of editorial concept for magic solver.com for two years helping the company launch dozens of apps on a global stage and I also work as a vents editor for Pocket Gamer Biz and speak and write at mobile m.u so that's me but this is about abst optimization it's about how the two stores have similar but slightly different ABS optimization e efforts now the important thing to remember is that for both stores the end goal is the same it's basically about trying to help surface your app a bit more but I think there's a little bit of difference between each of the stores and I mean there's these two quotes here from Johan Bart and Megan Fitzgerald who both discuss ABS optimization as you can see there's kind of similarities but as we'll go through the presentation you'll realize there's differences so Yan says abst optimization means everything that helps you app being more visible in stores and Megan talks about a fair amount has been written about appst optimization and basically describing it as the practice of getting your app to rank higher for certain Search terms when someone is browsing the App Store and that's basically it it's all about helping people find your app through search it is the SEO um equivalent I guess of trying to drive search within the app stores but as I think I'm going to show here there's going to be some minor differences that you need to be looking out for to make sure that when you're list in your app on each of these stores that you're actually getting the most out of it so you know again the first thing to realize is that there's some very similar problems on each of the store so there are clear Discovery problems on both channels so what iOS search is kind of driven by the consumer in two ways it's driven by curation which is basically the recommendation of sort of certain packages of say the best new apps the best new games driving apps as as outlined here or they're driven through the charts and the charts tend to be what's driven through user acquisition so you've got those two main weaps for people to sort of browse for things and then beyond that they have app search and on the Google Play Store it's very similar so as you can see you can have this curation driven element where basically you've got these new and updated games fun games other kind of categories but also you have those user acquisition driven charts and so the same issues present themselves on each store which is well I guess they're twofold the first one is that curation is kind of decided in the house it's decided by an editorial team so it can be somewhat tricky to actually get your app in front of those people and prove that it is the quality it is I mean after all these people are only going to be refu your app for a couple of minutes so without the necessary media and marketing traction it can be difficult to make that important first impression on the other hand like when you're looking at the charts like user acquisition it's the case that certain companies are going to be able to outgun you they're going to have that marketing budget to go out and get themselves into those important chart positions that will help people get visible and while both stores have tried hard to go and basically cut down on that and make that less of an issue and make the charts less of a precondition for success I think it's fair to say that what ends up happening is that on both stores when you're starting out and perhaps you don't have either the reputation of your rivals or you need to basically find a way of eating the most value you can out the ecosystem the App Store search becomes this really important way of basically helping people to find your app when they can't find it through these kind of more traditional means and now I mean there's different ways that stores are helping each other and I think it's fair to say that the Google Play Store is perhaps a little bit easier to to find apps within due to the fact that it mobilized this social option so although Google+ has been admittedly a little bit of a flop there are other ways that basically you know you're going to find these apps that are recommended for you you're going to find apps that are trending you're going to find apps that your friends are interested in while it may be as you can see in the last screenshot a little bit difficult for apps alone to be surfaced due to the fact that books and music and movies and TV are the kind of things that they're going to be competing alongside at the same time there's more of this idea of sort of location based personal recommendations and it's something thing that the App Store doesn't necessarily do as well it may be the case that the App Store is marginally better basically providing those kind of curated options so okay so Google Play is marginally easier but what you've got to think about is that when you're thinking about trying to how you're going to construct app optimization to make sure that your app appears best in search within both of these platforms you need to think about what's similar and what's different between the two stores so when you look at on page facts on iOS you can kind of see that a lot of these will end up being transmitted over to Google Play so you can see that there's the app name there's the developer name the app icon which is basically the icon which people come to associate your app with you've got those screenshots which are important for capturing the attention and you've also got the description which is there to capture people's interest if they not get it and on the other hand you've got some other important information so you've got information like the app price you've got the category and you've also got at the same time reviews and a certain number of related apps you have inapp purchase names but you don't have keywords they're not VIs ible to the users they're not visible on iOS and they're not visible on Google Play so you end up having this case that these are the on page factors you need to consider when you're looking at iOS and there are lots of similarities on Google Play it's the same kind of things that you're going to be needing to work on and optimizing to make sure that you're succeeding so you've got the app name of course developer name icon again and screenshots though it's important to note that you're also going to get video in there and there's also description with more below the line but on our next page there's those small differences and these are the kind of things that I'm talking about so you've got the price label which is going to be a very interesting thing in the coming months so that for example on the App Store a free app is going to remain listed as free whereas Google Play are currently considering a different term for the operation of their store in the EU to make sure that it fits them with regulations so that could be quite different at the same time Google Play has got a margin has got video already integrated into it and while this is coming soon to ios8 there's going to be a slight difference in the way they do it and I'll come back to that in a moment at the same time downloads and review scores are kind of given a bit more prominence they're not hidden away in a tab I mean first of all download score download numbers aren't actually listed on the App Store at all whereas this gives you at least a rough idea of how many they've got and the review scores as I said it's much more prominent you've even got something else that I think is very interesting on the on Google Play which is this top developer which is this kind of form of official approval and I think that's a kind of interesting difference between the two stores that you need to be thinking about because whereas iOS has got a strong reputation amongst Developers amongst consumers Google Play has always had a little bit of a reputation problem that it struggled a bit with this idea that it's perhaps pirate it's pirate Haven or that it's an area where people can put up untrustworthy apps and so you've got those kind of things and you've also got as I can say the Google Plus so you know you've got 240,000 of people who've plus one this showing it social spread and as with the App Store there's nowhere that there keywords are directly listed but the keywords are going to be sprinkled throughout the listing because it by doing that essentially it's going to end up it helps the ABS optimization and that's something that we'll be coming back to really really shortly so I think ultimately this is kind of like the main frust of what we're looking at we're really looking about how the app storees differ differ and what kind of things you're going to be looking at to make sure you optimize your app store optimization as best you can now when it comes to getting into the nitty-gritty and making sure that you can make sure you design the best keywords or screenshots or description we've got separate videos about that and I'd recommend that you go and check our YouTube channel out to go and see that but in this case this is just an opportunity to basically look down and compare the differences between the two so we're going to first look at the app name so on the on iOS it's unlimited length but Apple do enforce restrictions on people who abuse it so for example if you want to have your app name and you want to put some sort of keyword heavy tagline in because keywords are weighted inside the app name a little bit more heavily on the app store then that's absolutely fine and apple are okay with you doing that and you can take as much time as you need to do that but at the same time if you're taking if you're taking the Mickey a bit if you end up actually sort of putting this huge long tagline to try and cram in as many keywords as possible and you sort of change an out name from being a clean say five or six maybe seven word tagline into being this massive long epic to try and make sure that you're actually cramming in as many keywords as you can then you can find that Apple are essentially going to stop letting you on the store whereas on the other hand Google play it has got a 30 character maximum limit so it does force you to be a lot more considered and a lot more composed with your app name and it do does also unfortunately it does present some of somewhat of a problem in different languages as well so for example the German I always found that when I was working magic Sol and looking at languages German translations of an English na name conceivably end up being quite a lot longer so while as Google Play kind of stops you from overly spamming keywords and gives you that handy limit to work with it also can cause problems because you need to plan around it a bit more and then when we look at the keywords when you look at how it works on iOS this is kind of an important area to really consider there are a few areas that it's drawn from so you've got this 100 characters keyword field which you fill in when you're uploading your app you've got other keywords that are drawn from your app name your developer name and even your inapp purchase name but it's not drawn from save the app description that there's only a handful of places where it's actually drawn from whereas in Google Play It's scattered throughout in the manner of traditional SEO or ASO so it's kind of like you've got it throughout the app name the developer name Etc but the App Store description as well can be keyword Le and you can have multiple keywords in there to kind of season it with that extra bit of searchability and then you've also got screenshots so basically on iOS you've got five screenshots um but if you want to so for example if you look on the store you can have your five screenshots of your listing but if you get featured in the editorial section Apple will then contact you for feature Graphics at a later date they won't get in touch with you straight away whereas on the other hand on Google Play you've got five screenshots including the option to upload potential feature graphics and potential promotional graphics for your banners so what that ends up meaning is that whereas on W you've got to just do your screenshots and perhaps if Apple have contacted you about a feature you would provide them with the graphics or if they ask you afterwards if they' like to do it then you provide them the graphics whereas on Google Play You're basically looking to include that option of feature Graphics early because when you go into submission process is much easier for them to pick it up and I think it's a it's a good tick in the in the Google Play box I guess whereas in terms of the app description when you think about iOS there's unlimited length for the app description but it has no impact on App Store optimization so there's no point in doing this very long and extensive keyword heavy description you just need to describe your app in a clear way that helps explain what it's all about and make sure that people can find some information about you and look at those kind of things um whereas on the other hand Google Play you you're limited to 4,000 characters which I would say is still plenty for an app store description but terms also apply to App Store optimization so for example keywords matter inside the apps or description so if you're a football app and you mention the word footb throughout that description in a sort of a sensible amount of times then that's going to help you in the long run and at the same time there's some other ways that you can sort of bolster your search ability so for example if you add a full https link into your Google Play description such as for your Twitter or your social media it acts as a backlink so it appears higher in web search and within the store itself so it's worth bearing that in mind and then when it comes to video that's something I briefly mentioned Short Vine style Clips are coming to iosa in September 2014 and essentially I mean if you've not used Vine it's about 6 seconds long and I think the idea for apple is that essentially your app trailers are going to be very short maybe about 15 seconds long at most whereas on Google Play you can have YouTube trailers and and you can basically have them for as long as they want so angry birds for example he uses an angry birs go a couple of minute long trailer but because they've got the budget for cinematics and they've got this their own cartoon Studio they can create this really compulsive trailer whereas I'd recommend for most companies to have a very sort of short sharp 30 long Trader that really sort of tramples through the major points of your app to make sure that when someone watches it it helps them out cuz video is dynamic and could' be really helpful and then when it comes to categories you can choose two categories per app and fre per game on iOS whereas on Google Play You're just kind of restricted to that single category per out so as you can see just in total there's some clear similarities and they've got very similar kind of things going on but you've just got to learn that the rules of the game are marginally different on each store and I think that's most notably seen when you look at these App Store keywords and this is the last section of this tutorial we're just going to run through a quick bit of keyword Theory just to help you basically understand what you're looking for so when you're looking at these keywords on the App Store you need to remember that keywords can't move your position in the search ranking so whereas in traditional SEO if you've got the right keywords in there you've got the right backlinks contents of the high enough quality and people start reading it Google start moving you up the algorithm whereas actually on the App Store even if you're playing around and manipulating keywords just by itself whereas on the say on the web you can use that to bump yourself up a few positions here it's the case that ranking is solely determined pretty much by how well reviewed you are how many installs you've got and other unknown factors that Apple basically keep close to their chest so when you're thinking about keywords you need to be remembering that they help you rank for certain searches but that your position within those sort of list within potentially those hundreds of searches May well be determined by how you're performing elsewhere beyond that the App Store engine it's driven by phrases and not by semantics so if you're asking it posing it questions you're not going to get very far whereas short sharp phrases will help basically find an app so instead of looking asking for say where is this type of app you can ask instead sort of this type of app and be very specific and that's how it works better and ultimately it comes down to this point that the main value is in the longtail and not necessarily in the competitive terms for people looking to start off on abstra optimization so when your app is new or it's been recently released or you're relying on the fact that it's not got this major brand to trade on that people are searching for you need to be taking opportunities to make sure that you're ranking in areas where there's a decent number of people searching for an app there's enough volume searching for a term so say looking for a more obscure version of another search term but at the same time that it doesn't mean that it rules you out completely from being in the competitive terms in case you have an upturn in fortune and so what do I mean by that well so for example the app search you know driven by phrases and how exactly it works and even a bit about the long tale a company are making this wizard Fe match free game and they're looking to sish their tar from the crowd so when they do some onstore research it produces the following results so puzzle game produces 2,191 hits which is basically the limit on the App Store match free produces 2,188 so it's just under the limit but it's still got a ridiculous amount whereas when we're looking at this idea of this long-term search phrase in which people still look for a game but don't look for it in such a level that it ends up actually basically dwarfing your opportunity to get into there when they put in the term match through magic to reflect what their app was about there are only 82 hits and of course 82 hits are still quite a lot in the context of say the mobile environment is that it can be quite difficult and in fact it can be very difficult even if you don't end up in the top 10 of that 82 results but if you're thinking about crafting your keywords on the App Store you're thinking about building these phrases that produce fewer results than say the big top phrases but at the same time they still have this impact that people could search for them likely find what they're looking for and for to be a likely set of terms for them to actually check out whereas on the other hand when we're looking at Google Play I think it's fair to say that I think most people would say that Google plays App Store optimization perhaps Works somewhat better than the Apple One the reason is is just their experience within search and all of those kind of things so when you're thinking about it keywords are working in a way more similar to SEO so you're not just thinking about trying to make sure that you've got the right keyword and getting long tail you're thinking about keyword density you're thinking about making sure you've got the keyword the title how close it is to the front of the description and other things like that and beyond that it's driven by phrases and semantics so you know you can search for those little clustered terms as you do but in the same way on Google that actually particularly in recent search updates on Google that if you search by question such as you know where is the nearest restaurant if you search the equivalent on the Google Play Store you know where is where is a great restaurant app or something along those lines or what is the best restaurant app then you'll end up finding results along those lines but also so it's just again it's only the top 250 results ranked for each search result so whereas with iOS when we saw it you could get up to 2,900 potential puzzle game apps on Google Play only 250 results are actually going to rank so you need to be making sure you're really aiming for that long taale of phrases to really make sure that you're actually appearing because if you're above 250 in puzzle game you're never even going to get seen and so I think the way that this can basically be best summarized is that Google Play is kind of driven by you know semantics rather than just those phrases alone so a company producing a hill walking navigation app and they're looking to release it on the market and they can see that if they put in navigation app they get 250 and more which is basically a number that no one's really sure sure of whereas actually when they go for which is the best Hill walking app they mans to produce 191 results and so by cleverly filtering down and by cleverly looking for keywords they can end up finding this long tail on the Google Play store and they can do it by taking advantage of the fact that questions are still going to work within the context of this and so that's it and just to really as a quick summary of this when you're kind of thinking about the two stores it's worth remembering that you can have a lot of very similar assets between the two so when you're writing your Google Play description you're making sure that it's SEO Rich there's no reason not to transfer that straight across to the App Store description and there's no reason to think like well if the App Store description screenshots look great if the App Store screenshots are looking great why not use those same ideas in the Google Play Store there's a lot of similar elements that basically appst optimization theory that works on the two stores but it's just worth remembering those two differences so Google have managed to get Garner their reputation as much more of a search expert and I think their results tend to be a bit clearer as a result of that and they help you provide you with a bit more information whereas the App Store it's more of a lucrative opportunity but perhaps it's not quite as clearly welldeveloped as as the Google Play opportunity and that you have to rely a little bit more on the idiosyncrasies that people have uned about the store instead succeed and so that's it for this little tutorial which is just examining the differences between the Google Play and the App Store ASO differences but if you want to check out some other videos we've got more on the Business appap site which will help you guide through some of the more basic theoretical points about how to create great screenshots and icons and we're also going to be looking more in depth about Google Play ASO and iOS ASO on the website in our courses which are available at the busf apps.com but that's it for this tutorial right now thank you very much for watching