Hi! This is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, we're going to talk a little bit about keyword research for Google Play.
Alright. So, yesterday I talked a little bit about the difference between
searchers and browsers. You know, a lot of times, when we develop our apps
or we develop products of any kind, we're thinking in terms of the browser.
Somebody who picks it up and starts using it. We don't think
about how they actually find the product beyond and I made the - I
compared it to software back in the 90's and specifically Mavis Beacon Teaches
Typing. How when you go to Best Buy back in the day, you would have like a couple
rows of software with shelf space, right? And you just go - you
just browse through and find something that looks interesting. But with
the App Store, if the App Store was actually a physical store and we each
have like a little bit of shelf space, that thing would be miles long. It
would be impossible for anybody to find anything, which is why we have to think
about search and in optimize things in - so people can find them. Which
is not really - as creators of something, it's not something we like to think
about a lot because guess it's boring. We just want the best user experience so, we
don't have to worry so much about how they actually gonna get to
where we need to do. And one of the ways that people find things, you know,
the fact though - one of the big core tenants of App Store Optimization
or ASO is keyword research and doing it's searching for
keywords. Now, I want to start by saying, I am NOT an expert with keyword research.
I don't - I don't do things in a scientific way. I mean, we'll
change keywords out, we'll try new things, we'll measure them using App Annie,
we'll do different things to see how they go. But I don't - I know lots of other
people who are much more methodical about it and they have really good
YouTube channels. If you check out appmasters.co, Steve Young does a
really good one over there. There's a lot of other ones where they'll take
spreadsheets and they'll run them through like Mobile Action and Sensor
Tower, and they'll actually scientifically change things here and
there. I don't do that. What I do is when I'm looking for keywords, I'm trying
to find new things which I think are uncrowded and do a bit of
testing. In the past, I've used tools like Sensor Tower, I've used a
mobileaction.co, I've used Long Tail Pro, things like this. But I find them to be a
bit expensive and I don't usually get a lot of value out of them. So today, I want
to focus specifically on Google Play keyword research, and also on using free
tools. So, some of the things I do and like I said, I'm not an expert. You, guys,
might have some better methods out there than I do. I'm just gonna - I'm
just gonna tell you what I do. And you, guys, could let me know, yeah, whether
or not - maybe it'll help you a little bit. And also, Google Play is a
lot- is a much different animal than iTunes. I mean, the Apple App Store,
I mean, iTunes Connect will ask you what are your keywords. You'll have
that field there of 100 characters, so it's a lot easier. With
Google Play, you have your title, you have your short description, you have
your description, all that kind of stuff. But a lot of the things you're gonna
rank for aren't even in that. So it's - it's not exactly an exact science.
Well, I suppose the next - if you know the algorithm, it would be an exact
science. But a lot of us are guessing the algorithm. We know what Google tells us,
like if your app crashes a lot, it's gonna be downgraded. If there's a lot of
bad reviews, it's gonna be downgraded, all that kind of stuff. But a lot of
the other stuff, we're guessing. So, I'm going to talk about keywords, but
keywords are not the be-all and end-all. They're just - you know, they're what
we have to start with. Let me give you an example of why. So have a
look at my screen over here. Now, if I go to Google Play, I'm going to the desktop
console here. And I type in "spy." I know I do this in a lot of videos.
Type in "spy", you can see that my app, Ear Spy, I'm sorry, Ear Agent: Super Hearing
comes up first. It still does now. The thing is if I go into this,
back in July - I think it was back in July, we changed the name, we changed the
description, we got rid of a lot of the words in the title and description,
because of changes in Google Play's policy. The app itself is like a
hearing-augmenting type thing, so we're going to go towards hearing aid or go
towards spy. So we went towards the spy route, we were going on the
keyword spy, the keyword eavesdrop, all this kind of stuff. And even though
we removed it, the only places on our description here, let
me show you here, is right here. It was previously called Ear
Agent, but it is not a spy device. That is the only place in this entire
description, keywords, short description, where we use a word spy. And if you take
a look over here, if I go over to our App Annie page and by the way, if you're not
using App Annie for the keyword tools, it's a really good free tool. They have
paid things too but I've never used any of them. They are like, I mean,
they're really expensive. So, if I go down here to the keywords ASO
section, it will show me by default the location I'm in, which is United
Kingdom. You see the keyword spy, the keyword agent, is kind of ranking. Here we
got Ear Spy so, we got a lot of keyword ranked number one. If I go
switch the location to the United States, you can see we got the same kind of
thing here. If we select spy, you see, it's number one, all this
kind of stuff. So that's despite the fact that we're not using it into title. We're
not using it in the description. And the reason behind this is because it's
mentioned a lot, because it was part of our title, was part of our marketing for
so long that a lot of people use it in their reviews. So, we're still
ranking really well for that. I did a video on this back in February, it was
video number 36 called the "Keywords that you don't control"
where I talked about a lot of things that we're ranking for that were never
intentional.it was just - it was crazy and it was a lot to do with the reviews.
This is one of the big things you have to consider, like just because you get
your keywords right doesn't mean you're gonna have success. There's gonna be a
lot of things there. And the fact that this application is so established
that we still ranked well for that keyword even though we're
not using that keyword anymore. That just shows that if you want to go for a
keyword that's really saturated, that's gonna be very difficult. So, you have to
start looking for things that are not so mainstream. Let's go
through a couple of these tools. Anyways the reason I bring that up is
just to say keywords aren't going to be the solution to all your problems. But
when your app is just starting out, it's a thing you have to start with. It means
the only thing that you have. I mean, you have the keywords in
description, you can pay for advertising, all this kind of stuff. And the more
crowded the app store gets, its gonna continue to be that way. And by the way, I
don't think it's gonna - my app is gonna rate, it's going to rank for the word spy
forever, because since we remove that from there, I mean, at some point,
people already don't mention those words anymore in the reviews. And
that's gonna get smaller and smaller and smaller. Eventually, it's gonna fall
off from that spot. But we still kind of hold that which is kind of just nice.
I still kind of chuffed with it even though, because I was really scared
when we had to change it. I thought, that's it. You know, the money maker's gone.
So, let's look a few more these tools. Here now, back in -
I mentioned before that we have an ASO tool on our website. This is not the one
I want to focus on, but I just thought I would mention it. So, if you go to the
Overpass website you go to development, we moved it to a less prominent place
because we have other stuff we want to put on here. We basically - we got the
Google Play here, so if I wanted to say give me keyword suggestions based on a
say ear agent, I select my things and I say, I want to do one similar to mine,
give me 30 keywords, I go there and I could keyword search, and it will give me
a few suggestions which sounds really cool. It sounds like we're really
smart here at Overpass. But what we did was, we just put a wrapper around the
tool that I mentioned in a previous video which is done by -which is on
github. So, if you're a node.js person and you want to automate a lot of stuff, as
this tool over here called the App Store optimization ASO by Fackundolano
I'm not sure what his real name is, but it's a really cool tool.
So, basically we did that and we just sort of wrapped it up there. So that's
there if you need it. If you do your own node.js stuff and you want to like
automate a bunch of stuff and put a bunch of those stuff through testing,
which would be awesome, you could use that tool there too, And I use
like web scraping and stuff like that. But, let's talk about some of the
other tools. One of the ones that a lot of people use is a Google Keyword
planner. Now, this is Google Keyword planner is use a lot tool for
coming up with keyword research on websites. It has a lot to do with
one of the things that I was concerned with when I was starting out.
Everyone we're talking about ASO, was talking about the Google Keyword planner,
but I was kind of concerned that that's web. That's not exactly the App Store.
That's not exactly Google Play. So, is it the same thing? I think
basically, the similarities are you know, they're very similar. If
somebody's gonna go do a search on the web, there's a good likelihood they're
gonna do those search on Google Play too. So, that's one of the things
and it's got a lot of tools in here. If we go basically - if you go into Google
Adwords and you go to the tools section over here, you go to keyword planner and
you can put in a few root keywords. And we'll go through and generate some
different variations based on that. And the nice thing about it is you get to
see search history competition and things like that.
So, let's go. You got three options here, you check volume and data if you have
some existing keywords, you can check for new keywords based on the phrase.
Let's say, I go in here, I'll type in spy, landing page whatever, I go get ideas and
it's a little bit slow here. We go - then it will give me like a bunch of
keyword suggestions or keyword phrase suggestions here. And then I can see
based on how many monthly searches it has, low, high, I can add it to a plan
and I can export that. And it's - but to me, that's always seemed a bit -
I think it just seems a bit more complicated. It was always more than I
needed. So the tool that I use most of all when I'm doing some keyword research,
when we're putting on a new app, is I'll use one called Ubersuggest. And that's
over here. This is a free tool, you don't even need to login or anything
like that. I go in here and I type in spy, it will go through and it will take
the spy keyword and it'll basically put it through Google Suggest engine. So,
Google Suggest is - so here you can see spy, spy kids, spy whatever, so let me
just show you so if I go to Google here
and I type in spy, it will give me the suggestions. It will give me like ten
of them. So, what that will do is it'll take - it will take that one and
will also take, you know, spy A, spy B, so it gives you those kind of suggestions.
So, what Ubersuggest does, it would just go through and
do that for every single one of them. And just look down the list and choose
which ones you like and this is usually when I release an app. I'm
thinking of - I think of the app name and I think a few
different keywords. I'll put those in there because there may be things that I
haven't thought of. What I want to do, the whole goal of this is to find
competitions that or find keywords that are searchable. Like people are
searching on them but they're not - they have very low competition. Alright, so
you could take these keywords out, put them in like a spreadsheet or you put
them in to view Google Keyword planner and then have a look to see how they do
there. So ideally, there would be another Ubersuggest out there that uses
Google Play. So, you know, if we were to go to let's go back to Google Play over
here, and I will type in spy, it will give me five suggestions there.
If I typed in spy A or give me suggestions here. So, ideally there would
be a keyword tool like that but there isn't. So, when it comes to
keyword research, I don't do a whole lot. I mean, I'll do a little bit.
I've tried lots of different tools. I spent - I guess, I spent a few
thousand pounds on on different keyword planner tools, everything like that. But
in the end, I find that I just don't use them enough and I always come back to
the free alternatives anyway. Anyway, I would love - so, this is such - the reason I
have been putting off this topic for so long is, first of all, I find it
incredibly boring. Then secondly, because I'm not an expert in it.
But it's something that I'm always keeping track of, like I I have no
desire to be an SEO person or to be the person who's always thinking about
keywords and search and things like that. I prefer just to produce products and
put products out there. And get people using them, hopefully get people to
spread the words about them and everything like that. But this is
something we're also always thinking of. Every time we name an app now I
obviously give up what would people be searching on and what would be similar
to this, and what would people want - what would they search on when
they search for that stuff like that. Anyway, I hope this has been a little bit
helpful. Let me know what tools you, guys, think do you find the paid for ASO
tools to be be worth it? Or do you hire consultant? Which is something
I've been thinking about too. But, you know, we're doing okay, like we're -
everything seemed to be going pretty well. And when it comes
to - it might be when it comes the App Store, there's a lot of really good
advice out there. There's a lot of really good consultants and everything
I assume But when it comes to the Google Play, it's a little bit more, yeah,
the rules are more flexible. Anyway, let me know
what you, guys, think. Let me know what tools you, guys, use. That's it for today.
Hey, you know what, this is one things I always forget to say this. If
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