With the App Store seeing faster growth than Apple’s iTunes due to devices such as the iPhone, iPod, and iPad it’s more important than ever for developers to get their iPhone app found by users in Apple’s App Store.

Enter iPhone App SEO strategies

Developers are recognizing the importance of traditional SEO strategies and how they can utilize some of these simple app marketing tips to gain visibility in Apple’s App Store.

Let’s break down Apple’s app submission form and look at how you can incorporate basic SEO strategies teamed with following good app marketing tips to launch you ahead of the crowd and improve App Store ranking.

Icon:

Think of your app’s icon similar to the Favicon for the web. What sets one Favicon apart from another and makes it recognizable in your favorites list?

You want to incorporate these same app marketing techniques to your iPhone app’s icon. This is a great way to capture the user’s eye and brand your iPhone app.

Title:

The Title should be easy to remember for the user and focus on branding.  If you can incorporate your keyword into the title of your iPhone app, it can help improve your app store ranking.

Description:

The App Store is no longer using your description when matching users search queries to results.

You will still want to incorporate your keywords into the copy because these pages do get indexed and ranked by the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing). This will enable users that are searching via their computer to have a better chance of finding your app.

Keywords:

This has now become the most important tag when submitting to the App Store. Apple started out using your iPhone app’s description in order to match apps to search queries, and has now moved to using the keyword tag.

Unlike traditional SEO where the keyword tag does virtually nothing, it appears that this tag is going to be making a comeback when submitting to the App Store. 

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• Do not use your iPhone app’s Name or your company name in your keyword tag. By default users will be able to search for your app by either one of these, and this will free up some space for you to enter more keywords considering that you only have 100 characters to work with.
• Auto Suggest for targeted keywords. Using the auto suggest feature within the App Store is a great way to discover what users are searching for and improve App Store ranking. Incorporate these into your keyword tag.

Category:

Similar to traditional directories on the web, choosing the right category is key for App store classification and findability of your iPhone app.

Summary:

One thing to keep in mind is that traditional SEO strategies change as Search Engines evolve, and you can be sure that the App Store algorithm will as well. You can already see the first evolution with the introduction of the keyword list.

Improve App Store ranking with these basic app marketing tips and enjoy the fruits of your SEO labor.  See you at the top of the App Store results! 

Michael Liebelt, Sr. Marketing Manager, W3i, LLC
As W3i’s senior media buyer, Michael helps establish the company’s SEO and SEM strategies.

Top search engine placements aren’t usually accidental. There remains a certain mystery related to how apps are ranked in Apple’s App Store search results. Determining what name, description and keywords to use for your iPhone app can make or break your chances for success in showing up high in Apple’s App Store search results. Follow these tips and you can increase your chances for iPhone app success:

SEO for Apps: Select the Most Popular, Relevant Keywords to Target

Since Apple isn’t sharing search data, it is difficult to gauge what users are searching for within the App Store. Thankfully, there are a couple of ways to get some idea of what people might be searching for in the App Store:

Auto-Suggestion Method- When any user begins to enter a search string into the App Store search box, ten auto-suggestion search strings are presented to help a user more quickly complete their search query. For example, when I key in “b” into the App Store search box, I receive the following ten search strings:

backflip studios
bump technologies llc
bump
backgrounds
bolt creative
bubblewrap
bluesky studio
bootant.com
bing
blackjack free

You’ll note that in this case, eight of the ten results are for registered trademarks. That leaves two auto-suggestions which are generic, namely “backgrounds” and “blackjack free”. Presumably these auto-suggestions rank among the most popular search queries within the App Store, and would make great words to target. This process of building auto-suggest lists could be repeated until a very lengthy list of popular generic keywords is compiled.

The auto-suggestion method is more time consuming than I would like, but it does allow you to extract search data from actual Apple’s App Store search functionality.

Google Keyword Tool- Google offers a keyword tool which ranks keywords for all web searches. Google’s tool allows for rapid prioritization and there is a mobile search setting in the advanced options. However, the data is limited and excludes smart phones and handheld digital devices with full Internet browsing capabilities.  Since the statistics are not just App Store mobile search queries, app developers should be cautious about how they interpret resulting data. For example, an app developer using the Google tool may want to throw out longer search strings given the unlikelihood of someone keying in a longer string via their iPhone.

Two additional tips from Apple’s “App Store Quick Reference Guide“:

• Try to avoid overly common keywords that make it harder to locate your app:
  • Game     App     Fun
• Try to use unique keywords that allow your app to stand out:
  • Flight     Galaxy     Starship

Submitting Your App’s Description & Keywords

Now that you have built a list of the most popular, relevant keywords for your iPhone app, you need to incorporate these keywords into your app’s description and keyword on iTunes. This can be done as part of your initial submission to Apple via iTunes Connect or on subsequent updates of your app.

A few additional highlights to consider before you click “submit”:

• Include the Operating System Version as a Keyword- Apple recommends including the version of iPhone’s operating system you developed your app for within your keyword list. For example, 3.1.
• App Name Not Required in Description/Keywords- Apple says in their “App Store Quick Reference Guide” that you do not need to include your app name and company name in your app’s keywords.
• Don’t Do Anything Against Apple’s Policies- As with all items related to your app’s submission, you’ll want to make sure everything you do with your app’s submission meet’s Apple’s guidelines. A few specific policies related to app descriptions and keywords:
  • Do not use registered trademarks.
  • Do not use well-known public figures.
  • Do not use unrelated keywords.
  • Do not use offensive or objectionable words/phrases.

For other ideas, check out Apple’s App Store Tips.

Getting high search placements for your iPhone app within Apple’s App Store is important; especially if you are on a tight budget and are relying on guerilla marketing tactics to generate downloads of your app. If you have a budget to increase distribution volume, you can expand your horizons and consider additional promotional strategies. 

Exciting new iPhone app opportunities from W3i are on the way.  Stay tuned in to the W3i site, blog, and newsletter for the latest iPhone app information.

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

Affiliates that drive a lot of traffic always expect better rates.  However, quality traffic trumps quantity every time.  It is essential to understand the demographics of your current traffic and how to attract more of the users that actually value the offer.  Advertisers search for traffic that generates high quality leads.

It sounds simple enough, right? Wrong.  The most difficult hurdle I have, as an affiliate manager, is the old school way of thinking, the belief that the higher the lead quantity, the higher the rates.  In reality, it is higher lead quality that garners better rates.

Some of the factors that influence quality are:

1. Know your audience – Niche audiences can perform much better in generating quality leads than mass audiences.  Understanding what drives a niche audience makes it easier to find affiliate offers that match their interests.  If you have mass traffic, try to determine if you can segment the traffic to gain a better understanding of specific target audiences.
2.  Original Content with Specific Key Words - To attract a “niche” audience, it is imperative you have quality content that can be found by search spiders.  Identify what your target audience is looking for and include it on your web site. 
3. Update Content Regularly – Letting a web site with great content go dormant will not grow your business.  Share your passion and update your content continuously to keep the search spiders working to your advantage.

The trick to success is to attract a specific audience with enough scale to be meaningful.  As AOL mentioned in their earnings call, “We have a content plan which is based on hitting very important audiences with content that matters to them,” comments Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL.  You may never get to the scale of AOL, but build your site on solid marketing principles and you will be on your way to maximizing revenue with affiliate lead quality.

 If fun, downloadable consumer apps interest your audience, be sure to check out the W3i Affiliate Program.  Top performing offers include downloads for music, video, games, social, and desktop entertainment.

 Joan Jones, Account Executive, W3i, LLC
Joan is the guardian of Affiliate relationships at W3i, providing resources and solutions to strategic accounts. 

With the next holiday season right around the corner, it is important for businesses to be prepared and enter the season with an online holiday media buying strategy; so when Santa comes down the chimney at the end of the holiday season he is carrying sacks of money instead of coal.

Every company is unique; and because of this, everyone’s media buying strategies are different. There is, however, some common steps that every media buy should possess to ensure success during the holiday stretch, whether your business is connecting people with applications or selling computers. The holiday season is the highest traffic time period on the net, which means it is important that you have a marketing strategy to best help promote your company or product. If you wait until Black Friday or Cyber Monday to start running your campaigns, you’re going to play catch up and have a tough time being competitive and maximizing your ROI. All this traffic in such a short period of time means there will be a lot of online inventory available. It is important to have a strategy in place so you are putting your product in front of the most valuable and qualified user instead of throwing your money away like leftovers after Thanksgiving.

Below is a graph indicating the increase in traffic during the major holidays. It proves that you need your strategy in place in order to get the best ROI on your media buys because the traffic comes fast and drops off even faster.

 Graph provided by http://www.google.com/trends

Goals
With any good strategy and a holiday media buying strategy in particular, goals must be in place. In order to create accurate goals for your campaign you must set some benchmarks. Do your research and ask yourself these questions: What worked last year? What didn’t? How much was spent? What channels were effective? Was it paid search? Display? An affiliate program? What were the rates? CPM, CPC or CPA? If you can answer these questions, it will not only help you optimize your campaigns with efficiency, it will also help you in determining the precise and most effective window of opportunity when starting and ending your campaigns. The goals you implement into your marketing strategy this year must be based on last year’s results. If you are a startup company and you are approaching your first holiday season, it is important to document and track everything you do this season so you will be firing on all cylinders next holiday season.

Test, Test, Test
Testing is a vital part for any media buy especially during the holiday season. Starting your tests early will give you and your team time to analyze the results and build historical data. It is important to choose which KPI’s (key performance indicators) are important to the particular buy. Once you have chosen which KPI’s to measure you will then need to determine what to test. There are many variations of tests you can run so that’s why it is important to test early.

Deploy and Observe Vigilantly
Deploy and monitor campaigns before the holiday season enters its peak period. This is essential for a variety of reasons, most notably because consumers are beginning to shop online earlier than ever before, according to Shop.org. Prior to the season, identify the newest and hottest trends (examine user browsing behavior, wish list activities, or whatever is important and pertains to your business or product). Observe your buy closely so you can be prepared for any shifts, and you can optimize at a moment’s notice. This is especially important when running display campaigns because they tend to take more time and effort when optimizing.

No Guarantees
There are no absolutes to creating the perfect holiday media buying strategy or any media buying strategies for that matter. These three tips are not the magic bullet and will not guarantee a successful holiday season on their own, but if you add them to your holiday media buying strategy you will definitely increase your chances for success.

Mitch Bain, Marketing Manager; W3i, LLC
Mitch has 4 years experience focusing on Display Advertising, Search Engine Marketing, and Mobile Marketing, in the Integrated Interactive Media industry.

Many of the online marketers I speak with have been using AdWords for years.  They love the ROI they see from the program but a common gripe has to do with the fact that many of them are having difficulty increasing reach and growing their customer acquisition efforts.

When I hear this my immediate question is always, “Are you advertising on the content network?”  The typical response is usually a variation of, “We’ve tried it in the past, but the quality of the traffic was always extremely poor.”

At W3i we’ve found Google’s Content Network, as well as similar offerings from other publishers, to be a great source of ad inventory to increase reach and grow user acquisitions for the W3i Download Network.  Whether it’s audio, video, games or utility software there are a plethora of relevant sites to advertise on in Google’s vast network.  After all, where do you think the users you’re bidding on in search end up when they don’t click a paid ad?  That’s right, probably a site that is displaying AdSense ad units.  Google’s robust algorithms do most of the heavy lifting, allowing you to focus on what you do best.  To help jumpstart your AdWords account using Google’s Content Network I’ve put together a list of tips to keep in mind.

1. Implement Conversion Tracking.
   Perhaps this goes without saying, but the one thing needed prior to diving into any network is a method for tracking return on investment (ROI) at a granular level.  Google’s Conversion Tracking option provides the simplest tool for measuring key performance indicators (KPI’s) on the Google network. Of course there are non-Google tracking options as well.  Establishing conversion tracking up front will provide the needed clarity for decision making down the road.  After all, you can’t grow what you can’t measure!
2. Segment your search campaigns from your content campaigns.
   Be sure to separate your search campaigns from content campaigns.  For those who are fairly new to Adwords you may think “no brainer”, however, there was a time that co-mingling search and content was thought to be the way to go.  We know better now.  Separating search from content allows ads to be written with the context of the user interaction in mind.  Another benefit of segmenting campaigns is the creation of keyword lists specific to content placements.  Best practices call for smaller groups of keywords (10-20 keywords) and the use of broad matching. The bottom line is users behave differently on search than they do on content, and segmenting the two allows for optimization by network.
3. Remember to set a campaign budget!
   The fastest way to get noticed by your management is to not set a campaign budget! We don’t suggest this. Google’s content network is huge and can burn through thousands of dollars in a matter of hours, so make sure you’re setting reasonable caps, especially as you dip your toes into the water.
4. Utilize Cost Per Click (CPC) bidding on the content network.
   CPC bidding greatly simplifies the online marketing process. Review search network campaigns to determine a starting range for content campaigns. Google typically recommends starting content bids at about half of the rate of your search bids.
5. Keeping the budget tip above in mind – BE AGGRESSIVE!
   If you don’t get aggressive, you will never get the opportunity to show Google’s algorithms how well your ads perform.  We typically start with bids well above our estimated allowable CPC knowing we will lower them to meet our ROI goal once we begin to see some performance data rolling in.
6. Focus on clicks initially.
   Use the AdWords auto ad-optimization feature to make sure you’re going to auction with your highest click-through rate (CTR) ads.  You can always test different ad copy once you’ve scaled your campaigns, but focus initially on getting high effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) ads into the network.  Regardless of the way you are paying Google (CPM or CPC), your bids are always translated into eCPM so they can be compared to other ads in the auction and Google can maximize its revenue.  For example, if you are bidding .25 CPC and Google estimates your CTR will be 1%, Google will go to auction with an eCPM bid of $2.50.
7. Try using Frequency Capping.
   Frequency Capping is a relatively new feature which was introduced as part of the Doubleclick acquisition.  It allows you to limit the maximum number of times during any given time period your ad can be shown to each user.  This is commonly used when buying banner ads on a CPM basis because of the following logic.  Typically, each consecutive ad impression a user sees (depending on the length of time in between) will yield a lower CTR than the prior.  The logic behind this is basically that if a user is interested in an advertisement he or she will engage it the first (or first few) time(s) he or she sees it.  Using this knowledge you can frequency cap your ads so that each impression has the highest chance of yielding a click, thereby aligning your interests with Google’s (Google only gets paid when there is a click).
8. Research!
   Research the sites that rank high organically on keywords in your search campaigns. There is a high probability these are the same types of sites that your ads will be shown on in the content network.  Pay careful attention to the context of this type of site, and use this information when choosing content keyword themes and writing ad copy.  You can also use this information to target sites that you know rank well organically for your top performing keywords.
9. Use the Placement Performance Report.
   Using the Placement Performance Report will allow you to see your historical performance on every site in the content network, including conversion rate.  From there you can take two actions: exclude low performing placements and target high performing placements in their own campaign.
10. Bid to performance.
    Using the ad scheduling feature to adjust your bids by hour and day of week will allow you to increase your bids during the times you convert the best and reduce bids (or pause bids) when you’re performing poorly.  You’ll be surprised how much your conversion rate varies by day of week and time of day.  Look at the data and see for yourself!

Maximizing our ad spend is a crucial element for the success of W3i.  If you are looking for more revenue, distribution, or engagement for your Windows applications, contact W3i.  W3i has spent nine years perfecting a Windows installation technology, Install IQ, which provides a lot of marketing opportunities for companies with consumer demand for their Windows applications.

Peter Novotny, Manager of Marketing, W3i, LLC
Peter Novotny uses his years of experience in Media Buying and Search Engine Marketing to lead the B2C user acquisition efforts for W3i’s web properties.

Every time your keyword matches a search query, a quality score is given to your landing page.  Why is this important?  Because according to Google, “the higher your quality score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position.”  Here are four easy ways to quickly improve this score.

Give Users What They Want
What does “relevant content” really mean?  It means that your content matches the keywords you are buying for – whether it is a software download or an informational article.  Load up on descriptive copy of your offer, but also make sure your keywords match your landing page descriptions.   Ultimately, give people what they are after.  Content is king – even if it is additional content beyond just the offering.   This, of course, does not have to be as prominent as the downloadable content.  Another thing to keep in mind is to avoid having redundant copy with different landing pages or affiliate pages.  Google considers this to be less original.

Add Navigation
The navigation piece is twofold: it must be quick and easy for the user to access the content promised in your ad, but not so simple that the landing page becomes a trap.  If your landing page is too basic, then Google considers this a removal of choice and consent.  Solution – send users directly to the page where they can download the content, but build in additional navigation. This allows the users to look around if they are interested.  The navigation could be as simple as linking to similar products or offerings on your site. In order to reduce conversion rate loss, try using less prominent buttons, tabs, or text links.

Briefly Explain Your Business Model
This applies to the whole concept of trust, or as Google refers to it, “transparency”.  In some form or another, explain what you are up to, even if it is a small paragraph at the bottom of your page.  Give a brief description of your offer and overall business model.  Give users an idea of what is in store for them.  For instance, if you have an ad-supported model, explain to users why it is that way and highlight the benefits of it (it is free!).  Also, if you insist on collecting user’s personal information on your landing page, clearly explain how you intend to use it.  Your best bet with personal information is to just not collect it.

Add Legal Documentation
This is a very basic one and supports your landing page’s “transparency” level.  Simply add links to your Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy at the bottom of your landing page.  Easy access to these documents not only makes your page appear more reputable to users, but also increases your quality score.

Now go forth, and increase your quality score!

If you have in-demand downloads and are in need of additional cash, contact W3i.  By using the W3i Download Network you can increase distribution, revenue, or traffic using our proven software marketing solutions.  In no time there will be a positive impact to your bottom line. To learn more, click here.

Peter Novotny, Manager of Marketing, W3i, LLC
Peter Novotny uses his years of experience in Media Buying and Search Engine Marketing to lead the B2C user acquisition efforts for W3i’s web properties.