Learn what ASO (App Store Optimisation) is, which elements of your app listing most affect rankings, and how to improve your ASO score to get more organic downloads.
ASO (App Store Optimisation) is the process of improving your app's visibility in the App Store and Google Play search results. It is to app stores what SEO is to Google — optimising your listing so more people find and download your app organically.
| Element | Ranking impact | Conversion impact |
|---|---|---|
| App title | 🔴 Very high | High |
| Subtitle (iOS) | 🟠 High | Medium |
| Keywords field (iOS) | 🟠 High | None |
| Description | Medium (Google Play) | High |
| Screenshots | None | 🔴 Very high |
| Preview video | None | 🔴 Very high |
| Ratings & reviews | 🟠 High | 🔴 Very high |
The table above splits every listing element into ranking impact and conversion impact, and that split is the most useful idea in app store optimisation. Nearly every wasted quarter in ASO comes from confusing the two.
Ranking determines how many people see your listing. Conversion determines how many of them install. They are driven by almost entirely different elements: the title, subtitle and keyword field decide the first; the screenshots, the preview video and the star rating decide the second. Neither substitutes for the other.
So an app ranking tenth and converting at twelve percent will beat an app ranking third and converting at three — and the second team will spend months trying to climb, because rank is the number that looks like the goal. Before you touch a keyword, find out which of the two problems you have. If impressions are healthy and installs are not, no amount of keyword work will help you, and every hour spent on it is an hour not spent on the screenshots.
Treating iOS and Google Play as the same task with different screenshot dimensions is the most common structural mistake in ASO, and it follows from a genuine difference in how each store indexes a listing.
| Field | App Store (iOS) | Google Play |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Indexed, heavily | Indexed, heavily |
| Subtitle / short description | Indexed | Indexed |
| Keywords field | Indexed — 100 characters, never shown to users | Does not exist |
| Long description | Not indexed — write it for humans | Indexed — write it for both |
The consequences are immediate. A team writing a keyword-dense iOS description is writing for an index that does not read it. A team writing a sparse, elegant Play description is leaving indexable surface empty. And the iOS keyword field — a hundred characters no user ever sees — is pure ranking surface with zero conversion cost, which makes it the most under-used asset in most listings.
Screenshots contribute nothing to ranking and frequently decide the outcome, because they are what people actually look at. Most visitors never read the description; they glance at the first two screenshots, look at the star rating, and decide.
So the first two screenshots are doing the work of the entire listing, and the most common failure is that they show the app rather than what the app does for the person. A picture of your settings screen is a picture of a settings screen. A picture of the one thing somebody downloaded your app to accomplish, captioned in five words, is an argument.
Ratings and reviews are the only thing on the listing that feeds ranking and conversion simultaneously, and they are the slowest to move. That combination makes them the element most worth a deliberate strategy and the one most often left to chance.
The conversion effect is blunt and well understood: a rating visibly below about four stars suppresses installs regardless of how good the screenshots are, because the star count is the one piece of information the visitor believes did not come from you. No amount of listing copy argues with it.
The lever is when you ask. An app that prompts for a review on first launch is asking a person who has not yet experienced anything, and the responses reflect that. An app that prompts at a moment of genuine success — the task completed, the thing found, the goal met — is asking somebody who has just been helped, and the difference in both response rate and score is large.
The other lever is replying. Public responses to critical reviews are read by the next person deciding whether to install, and a calm, specific reply to a complaint does more for that reader than any positive review does. It also, frequently, gets the original review updated.
The mechanics differ in one respect that changes everything: keyword stuffing is a real and enforced risk in app stores, and it is not on the open web. Apple and Google both operate review guidelines, and a title or description crammed with terms can get a listing rejected or removed — an outcome with no equivalent in organic search, where Google simply ignores what it does not find useful. The second structural difference is that stores separate ranking from conversion far more cleanly than the web does: the keyword field ranks you, the screenshots convert you, and neither does the other's job.
Not as a ratio, and this is where habits imported from SEO mislead people. On the web, keyword density is not a ranking factor at all — it is a ratio that rises when you delete text, which is why optimising for it rewards writing less. In an app store there is likewise no magic percentage, but there is a real hazard on the other side: repeating a term to game the index is precisely what the review guidelines prohibit, and enforcement is a human decision rather than an algorithmic shrug. Write the listing for the person deciding whether to install.
On iOS: the title, the subtitle and the hundred-character keywords field. The long description contributes nothing to the index, which reliably surprises people arriving from web SEO where body copy is everything. On Google Play the long description does feed the index, which makes the two stores genuinely different optimisation problems rather than one problem with two sets of screenshots. Getting this wrong is the most common structural error in ASO: a keyword-rich iOS description that ranks for nothing, or a sparse Play description that leaves the index half empty.
No, and they are frequently the highest-leverage element on the entire listing anyway, because they decide whether the people who already found you install. Hold on to that distinction. Ranking buys impressions; screenshots buy the download. An app ranking tenth and converting at twelve percent beats an app ranking third and converting at three — and the second team will spend a quarter trying to climb, because rank is the number that feels like the goal.
Yes, and they are the one element that works on both sides of the funnel simultaneously. They feed store ranking, and they are the strongest single conversion factor on the page: a visible rating below roughly four stars suppresses installs regardless of how good everything else is. They are also the slowest thing to move, which is why asking for a review at a moment of genuine success inside the app — rather than on launch, before the user has experienced anything — is worth more than any amount of listing copy.
Change one thing, wait until enough installs have accumulated to say something, then change the next. The temptation is to rewrite the title, subtitle, keywords and screenshots in a single release, at which point you have learned nothing about which change did what — and if installs fall, you cannot tell which one to undo. Both stores offer experiment tooling; use it where you can, and where you cannot, at least leave a gap between changes so the data has a chance to mean something.
What is missing, then what is misleading, then what is merely suboptimal. A missing subtitle is unused ranking surface, costing you nothing to fill. Screenshots that do not show the app doing the thing people downloaded it for are a conversion leak that no keyword work will compensate for. And a listing that oversells produces installs followed by one-star reviews, which damages the rating, which damages ranking and conversion at once — the worst available outcome, and one reached by trying to optimise.
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