App Store Metadata and ASO for Organic Discovery
For a client whose app had solid retention but weak new-user growth, we found the App Store listing hadn't been touched since initial launch two years earlier — a title that didn't include any of the search terms real users typed to find apps in that category, and a keyword field, the 100-character hidden field Apple provides, that was about half wasted on branded terms already covered by the app's own name.
Title and subtitle carry the heaviest search-ranking weight on the App Store, more than the keyword field itself in Apple's current algorithm. We restructured the title from a purely branded name to an 'AppName: Category Descriptor' format, working in the highest-volume relevant search term we found through App Store Connect's search terms data and third-party ASO tooling (AppFollow, in this case), which showed a measurable increase in impressions from search within about three weeks of the change.
Screenshots matter more for conversion than discovery, but the two interact — a listing that ranks well but converts poorly still loses. We A/B tested screenshot sets using Google Play's built-in store listing experiments, adopting Apple's Product Page Optimization once it became available, and found that leading with a benefit-focused caption overlay on the first screenshot outperformed a plain UI screenshot by about 18% on install conversion rate.
Localization of store listings, not just the app itself, was underexploited. The client's app was already localized into Spanish and Portuguese for the app content, but the store listings were still English-only in those markets. Localizing the title, subtitle, and screenshots for the Mexico and Brazil storefronts specifically, not just translating but re-researching locally relevant search terms, drove a visible uptick in organic installs from those regions within the first month.
Ratings and review velocity feed back into ranking on both stores, so we added a well-timed, non-intrusive review prompt, triggered after a genuinely positive moment in the app like completing a goal rather than on cold open, using each platform's native review API rather than a custom modal linking out to the store, since the native prompt has a materially higher completion rate and doesn't count against the platform's own prompt-frequency limits.
