App Store Optimization (ASO) 101: Why You Should Not Bank On Sensor Tower

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If your only keyword research tool is Sensor Tower, then you are leaving money on the table.
Don’t get me wrong. You may use Sensor Tower as a starting point for your ASO strategy because it is a known ASO keyword tool that provides traffic score, difficulty, and rankings. It also provides keyword suggestions, translations, and track competitors. Just don’t make the mistake of using it as your primary ASO keyword research tool.

What Makes Keyword Data Useful For App Store Optimization:

● Traffic Score ‐ are people interested in your niche or topic?
● Keyword Difficulty ‐ can you rank for this keyword ASO wise?
● Ranking Probability ‐ can you actually rank for this keyword or you are just wasting your time and effort?
You can read various articles online about ASO, and for sure you’ll find out that Keyword Data is what matters.

Low Keyword Competition Does Not Mean Easy App Store Optimization “ASO.”

When you are looking at the Sensor Tower tool, please bear in mind that low keyword competition does not translate to “easy to rank” organic keywords. This means that Apple does not don’t bid or fully rely on them. This is just a sign that the keyword is too generic to result in conversions or downloads. You can not run an active ASO campaign by bidding on keywords that don’t convert or lead to more downloads.
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Low Competition In Sensor Tower Tool Does NOT Correlate To App Store Optimization

At the surface, this high volume/low competition ASO keyword looks like it would be great for your ASO
strategy. Guess what? Couldn’t be further from the truth.
Unfortunately, a lot of ASO practitioners don’t understand the significant difference between keyword competition and keyword difficulty for ASO. If you don’t know the difference, you could be targeting the wrong keywords. The dilemma here, is compounded because many paid ASO search tools aggregate data from the App Stores to fuel their competition score. Yeah, they may provide robust competitive data which is useful for keyword gap analysis, but most of these tools don’t provide an easy to understand organic keyword difficulty metric.
High Competition Does Not Mean App Store Optimization Will Be Too Hard”You should avoid highly competitive keywords when developing your App Store Optimization strategy.” Yeah, this is partially correct, but not when it comes to data from Sensor Tower Tool. If a keyword or a term is highly competitive, you shouldn’t disregard right away. In the SEO World, advertisers are spending money on these type of keywords because they turn into sales. Am I making any sense?
What I am trying to say is that it might be worth the long term ASO effort to rank for these “money aso” keywords IF the organic competition is not too competitive. These phrases, keywords, or terms can be byproduct of your long tail ASO efforts. To put it simply, don’t directly spend all your efforts “optimizing for these harder terms”. You may focus on your lower difficulty keywords but just don’t dismiss the difficult terms as you can still rank on them because a lot of companies are not targeting them.The bottom line is that Sensor Tower does not provide a keyword difficulty metric.
There is A Better To Help You Understand Organic App Store Optimization Competition

Mobile Action
(WARNING I DON’T WORK FOR THEM ANYMORE – but they are still better than Sensor Tower)

mobileaction
Mobile Action is an ASO tool that does a lot of heavy lifting for you when it comes to keyword research.“This difficulty score is derived by comparing your app for the term to other apps that already rank — including comparing the quality of the app, popularity or authority, and social media shares, and number of downloads.”
In addition to keyword research, Mobile Action also helpful in analyzing your app for relevance. Check out the full list of features here.
Most people understand that the Sensor Tower tool was meant for ASO experts. But really, you shouldn’t depend on this tool for product ASO. It’s just great for ideas, but you have to take the information with a grain of salt.

So, What Can You Bank On?

In your own stupid logic vs ASO tools. Personally, I I use Google Keyword Planner for my initial ASO keyword research and ASO campaigns, then I use App Annie, Mobile Action and sometimes I even use MobileDevHQ…
What I do is I try to figure out the possible keyword topics and search volume for the topics as a whole.
I will use all the information I gathered as my guide, and would go after keywords that are most relevant for my app, always using my own template…
So they say they say the best things in life are FREE…. but in this case may be paying helps…. specially  when it comes to ASO. In ASO, you can’t just bank on free. Spend a little cash on a keyword difficulty tool (Mobile Action premium). You can’t afford to chase the wrong keywords with ASO.
I’d love for you to comment below and let me know which ASO keyword tool you decided to use.
Regardless LOGIC wins vs ASO tools.
Be smart , smile more… do ASO right.

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