How to leverage ASO for app growth in 2023 — Podcast with Ariel Michaeli, Appfigures

Are you neglecting a key element affecting your app’s potential for growth? While most businesses have an SEO strategy, many neglect App Store Optimization (ASO).

In this episode of the Sub Club podcast, Appfigures founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli covers the ins and outs of ASO, and why subscription app developers can no longer afford to ignore it.

At the helm of Appfigures — a resource for ASO tools, analytics, and app intelligence — Ariel knows exactly how ASO affects your overall growth strategy, and how it stacks up against SEO. For one, you have less control over ASO content than you do SEO content — three elements instead of as many pages as you put out.

Should you care about ASO?

“Something that I get asked a lot is, should I care about [ASO]? And they ask me because they don’t know what it is,” Ariel explains. “Some people say, we have an SEO team. So do we need ASO?”

As it quickly becomes clear, businesses without an ASO strategy are shooting themselves in the foot. “You need discovery and that’s what should matter to everyone: Whether you own the company — you’re the founder [or] CEO [and] you run the company — or you’re responsible for a product,” Ariel says, “that’s where ASO comes in.”

With the App Store getting more crowded every day, ASO is set to get more challenging than it already is. “You can optimize for all the keywords you want, but pretty much every keyword is so crowded these days,” Ariel warns. The nature of the game has to change.

Back in the good old days, less apps meant more visibility among users. Now, tapping into user intent “is really the best way to get found,” Ariel highlights. 

Explore the topic further in our guide to app store optimization >

You can’t just set and forget ASO

It’s not hard to get discovered with ASO, Ariel is quick to point out, but hard to get discovered without doing enough of it. Taking a “set and forget” approach to keyword optimization won’t yield real returns. “But as you put in more time and start to specifically understand your app and core competitors, that’s when you can start seeing real results,” he says.

This doesn’t mean every change creates a big impact, but it does mean focusing on the key factors that impact ASO — like app name, keyword order, subtitles, screenshots and video previews. App developers should research the competition in as much depth as possible to see what works and what doesn’t.

Ariel Michaeli on the fundamentals of ASO

On the podcast, Ariel dives into the fundamentals of ASO and how to research and optimize keywords. He also explains why ratings matter much more than reviews, and why you should never, ever duplicate keywords.