App Store Audit Example: ASO Score and Listing Quality
This example shows the aiwebpageseo App Store Audit for a productivity app on the iOS App Store. The audit scored the listing 61/100, identifying a weak title keyword, missing subtitle keywords and review sentiment issues.
| Element | Status | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| App title | ⚠ Weak | Title only 18 chars — room for 30 more. Missing "timer" and "focus" keywords |
| Subtitle | ✗ Missing | No subtitle set — 30 characters of keyword space wasted |
| Description | ✓ Good | 895 characters, keyword-rich, clear value proposition |
| Screenshots | ⚠ Weak | 5 screenshots but no text overlays — competitors use feature callouts |
| Preview video | ✗ Missing | No app preview video — no reliable public figure exists for the uplift; test it with a product page experiment in App Store Connect |
| Keywords field | ✓ Good | 97/100 characters used, no duplicates with title |
App Store Optimisation looks like a long list of things to improve, and it is not. On the iOS App Store the fields that feed keyword matching are the app name, the subtitle and the hidden keywords field. Everything else on the listing exists to convert somebody who has already arrived. Sorting the report by that distinction changes what you do first.
| Field | Indexed for search? | What it is really for |
|---|---|---|
| App name (30 chars) | Yes | Highest-weight matching field and the first thing a human reads. Both jobs at once, which is why it is the hardest field to write. |
| Subtitle (30 chars) | Yes | Indexed, visible under the name, and currently empty on this listing. The single largest unused asset on the report. |
| Keywords field (100 chars) | Yes | Hidden from users, indexed by the store. Already at 97 of 100 characters with no duplication — correctly used. |
| Description (4,000 chars) | No | Not indexed for keyword search on iOS. It persuades a human who has already found you. Being "keyword-rich" here achieves nothing for discovery. |
| Screenshots & preview video | No | Pure conversion. They decide whether a visitor taps Get, and for most listings they matter more than anything else on this page. |
| Ratings & reviews | Indirectly | The one element you cannot write. Plausibly affects both ranking and conversion, and it reflects the product rather than the listing. |
One important caveat: this table is iOS. Google Play indexes the long description, which means a listing cannot be copied between the two stores without throwing away the thing that matters on each. If you ship both, write both.
Of the five issues flagged, one is disproportionately consequential and it is the least glamorous. The subtitle is indexed, it is displayed directly beneath the app name in search results and on the product page, and it is blank.
An empty subtitle is not a neutral state. It is a matching field the store expects to use, left unused, in a listing whose title is only 18 of its available 30 characters. Between them, those two gaps mean the listing is competing on roughly half the keyword surface available to it, against competitors who are using all of it.
Write it as a phrase a person would read, not as a comma-separated keyword list. It sits under the app name where a human sees it, so it has to do the conversion job as well: say what the app does and for whom, using the terms people actually search. Do not repeat words already in the title — the store deduplicates across fields, so repetition costs you characters and buys nothing.
Then leave it alone long enough to learn something. Metadata changes take effect at the next release or metadata update, and re-ranking is not instant. Changing the subtitle three times in a fortnight guarantees you will never know which version worked.
In web SEO, keyword density is a myth: it is not a ranking factor, and worrying about a percentage is worrying about a ratio that rises when you delete content. App Store metadata is genuinely different, and the difference is enforcement rather than algorithms.
Apple's review guidelines prohibit metadata that misleads, that stuffs irrelevant or competitor terms, or that misrepresents what the app does. Breaching them does not quietly lower your ranking — it gets the release rejected, and repeated abuse can get the app removed. This is a human review process with a written policy, so the risk is concrete in a way that no web-search "penalty" for keyword density ever was.
The practical rule is the same one that governs good metadata anywhere: describe what the thing actually is, using the words people use for it. The title is missing the product noun, and adding it is correct not because it is a keyword but because it is the truth about the app — a browsing user should be able to tell what this is without tapping.
Five screenshots with no text overlays, and no preview video. Both are conversion problems rather than discovery problems, which puts them behind the subtitle in priority and ahead of almost everything else.
The first two or three screenshots are what a browsing user sees without scrolling, and a bare screenshot of an interface asks that user to work out the benefit for themselves. A short caption over each one does the work for them: the caption says what the screen achieves, the image proves it exists. This is copywriting, and it is usually the highest-leverage hour anyone spends on a listing.
On the preview video, be sceptical of the uplift percentages that circulate in ASO articles. They come from vendor case studies with unstated samples and unstated methodology, and none of them is about your app, your category or your audience. The number that is about your app comes from a product page optimisation test in App Store Connect, which will show you the difference a video makes on your own traffic. Run the test rather than quoting somebody else's.
A useful discipline while you build the assets: watch the listing on a phone, not a monitor. The decision to install is made in a few seconds on a small screen, and captions that are legible in a design tool are frequently illegible in the place they will actually be read.
A 4.6 average across 2,847 reviews is a strong asset and it is the part of this listing you cannot rewrite. Rating and review volume are among the very few listing attributes with a plausible direct effect on both ranking and conversion, and unlike a subtitle they are earned rather than written.
Three things follow. Ask for ratings at the right moment — immediately after the user has completed something successfully, not while they are trying to do it. Reply to reviews, particularly the critical ones, because every future reader sees the reply and a considered response is more persuasive than a five-star rave. And treat the content of negative reviews as a product backlog rather than a sentiment score: recurring complaints about a specific behaviour are bug reports arriving through the wrong channel.
This is also the ceiling on everything else in the report. A perfectly optimised listing for an app people dislike converts worse than a mediocre listing for an app people love, and no amount of keyword work changes that ordering.
| # | Action | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Write the subtitle | An indexed, visible, empty field. Cheapest and largest gain available. |
| 2 | Extend the title with the product term | 12 unused characters on the highest-weight field, and the app currently does not say what it is. |
| 3 | Add captions to the first three screenshots | Pure conversion, one afternoon of copywriting, seen by everyone who reaches the page. |
| 4 | Test a preview video with a product page experiment | Measure it on your own listing rather than trusting a vendor statistic. |
| 5 | Work the reviews | Prompt at the right moment, reply to critics, and fix what the recurring complaints describe. |
| 6 | Leave the description and keywords field alone | The description is not indexed on iOS and the keywords field is already used correctly. Effort here has no return. |
Change one thing at a time and give it a full release cycle. Metadata takes effect at the next update and re-ranking is not immediate, so a listing that is edited weekly is a listing whose owner will never learn anything from any of the edits.
What does an ASO score of 61 actually measure?
It measures how completely the listing uses the fields Apple gives you and how well those fields match what people search for. It is a completeness and relevance check, not a prediction of downloads. Apple does not publish its ranking algorithm and nobody outside Apple can compute your position from your metadata, so treat the number the way you would treat a checklist result: a low score reliably means something is unused or misused, a high score means nothing is obviously wrong. Downloads come from whether the app is worth having and whether the listing convinces someone of that in about six seconds.
Why does the title matter more than the description on the App Store?
Because they are indexed differently. On the iOS App Store, the app name, the subtitle and the hidden keywords field are the fields that feed keyword matching. The description is not indexed for keyword search — it exists to convince a human who has already arrived. That single fact reorders the whole work list: a listing with a strong description and no subtitle, like this one, is spending its effort on the field that cannot win the search and leaving 30 characters of the field that can entirely empty. Note this differs on Google Play, where the description does contribute to indexing, so a listing cannot simply be copied between the two stores.
Is the missing subtitle really worth 30 characters of anything?
It is worth more than any other single change on this report. The subtitle is indexed, it appears directly under the app name in search results and on the product page, and it is the one place you can add a distinct keyword phrase without repeating the title. An empty subtitle is not neutral — it is a field the store expects to use for matching and ranking, left blank. Fill it with terms that are genuinely relevant and not already in the title, because duplicating a keyword across fields buys nothing: the store deduplicates.
Should I stuff keywords into the title to rank for more terms?
No, for two reasons. Apple's review guidelines prohibit metadata that is misleading or stuffed with irrelevant terms, and listings that breach them get rejected or removed — this is a real enforcement risk, unlike the imagined keyword-density penalties people worry about in web search. Second, the title is the single most important conversion element on the page: it is what a browsing user reads first, and a title crammed with search terms reads like spam to a human even when it survives review. Add the missing product term because it is what the app is, not because it is a keyword.
Do screenshots and preview videos affect rankings or conversions?
Conversions, primarily — they are what persuade someone to tap Get once they have already found you. That makes them a tap-through-rate lever rather than a discovery lever, though the two interact, since a listing nobody installs eventually stops being surfaced. Be sceptical of the widely quoted uplift percentages for adding a preview video: they come from vendor case studies with unstated methodology and they do not transfer to your app. The honest way to find out what a video is worth to you is a product page optimisation test in App Store Connect, which will give you a number that is actually about your listing.
What do I do about negative review sentiment?
Read the reviews and fix what they describe, in that order. Star rating and review volume are among the few listing signals with a plausible, direct effect on both ranking and conversion, and they are the one part of a listing you cannot write your way out of. Respond to reviews — Apple lets you, and a considered reply is visible to every future reader. Prompt for ratings at a moment when the user has just succeeded at something, not when they have just been interrupted. And take the recurring complaint seriously: if forty people say the timer resets in the background, that is not a sentiment problem, it is a bug report with a marketing consequence.
Does any of this affect how the app appears in Google Search or in AI assistants?
Partly, and it is worth keeping the surfaces separate. App Store search is Apple's, App Store Optimisation is metadata inside Apple's system, and Apple does not expose it to the open web the way a website is exposed. What is visible to Google and to retrieval systems is your own marketing site: a real product page, written in plain prose, that explains what the app does and links to the store listing. If you want the app to be findable outside the store, the work is a web page — not a heavier keywords field.
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