How to Optimize Your Google Play Store’s App Details Page

Get discovered on Google Play search today!
Google Play search is a primary tool for users to find relevant, and popular apps on the play store. Ensuring that your app and Store Listing are detailed and optimized is an essential factor in getting discovered by users on Google Play.
Yeah, optimizing your app’s details page to attract maximum users is a must. Why? Once your app hits the Google Play Store, it is pitted against thousands of apps and needs help to get noticed amongst the competition.
Here, I’ll discuss how you can optimize your app’s details page in the Google Play Store since not much has been discussed on the topic yet.
First, here is why optimizing your app details page for search is important on the Google Play Store: search represents 80% of organic downloads. I’ll admit that “organic download” is quite a vague criteria, but still.
So, how to optimize the app details page the right way?

Build a comprehensive Store Listing

The information in your Store Listing is critical to discoverability for your app. Consider my cheat sheet when optimizing your app’s Store Listing on Google Play.

GOOGLE PLAY STORE LISTING CHEAT SHEET

TITLE

25-30 characters allowed

Be creative and try to get at least 2-3 keywords in the title.

*It should be unique and accessible, avoid common terms

Be very careful using copyrighted keywords

Unique Brand Name- 2-3 words which describe the app’s function

SHORT DESCRIPTION

80 characters allowed by Google

Use your Unique Value Proposition and most important relevant keywords here.

LONG DESCRIPTION

Create a “Google Friendly” description. Look at the descriptions of featured apps to learn the best description patterns.

Use SEO Best Practices in your Description, but be mindful of Google Play Content Policies regarding SPAM and IP Infringement (e.g. keyword spamming, impersonation, etc).

The description is everything. Use the 4000 characters allowed.

Always link to your Google + account as well as other social media accounts (especially YouTube)

Make sure your description highlights your top app features in bullet points so they can be easily identified

Do not use “tag: followed by keywords”

Quotes or reviews of any kind are no longer allowed. (Nov. ’14)

Try to use keywords that related to each other, in a few words: Use LSI strategy. Google Linguistic Semantic Indexing to learn about it.

PROMO TEXT

Make it short and concise – a one-line description of your app experience is enough. This text is only used on older Android software versions.

Search Optimization

Having a beautifully designed App icons, images, and screenshots help make your app stand out in search results, categories and featured app lists. Just like on the App Store, you want to have the best graphic and image assets as possible to convince potential users to download your app.

*While not all image assets are required in your App Store Listing, I highly recommended that you add quality screenshots that showcase your app’s supported platforms (phone, 7-inch tablet, 10-inch tablet).

Having a promotional video is an awesome thing on the Google Play Store. You can add a YouTube video to promote your app so take advantage of it. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to show what your app is worth. When looking at an app’s page on an Android Smartphone, the video is in the first screenshot slot.
Ratings and reviews. Since ratings and reviews are part of the rank and search algorithm, you want to do everything you can to get positive reviews for your app.
Usage frequency. Having an awesome app that users will be addicted to and use on a regular basis is a good thing on Google Play store. The more people use your app on a regular basis, the higher it will rank.

Diversify your audience

Localize your App Store Listing

Google provides automated machine translations of Store Listings that you don’t explicitly define for your app. With that being said, hiring a professional translator for your app’s description can lead to better search rankings and discoverability for worldwide users.
In the Developer Console, you can purchase human text translations from a third-party vendor.

Additional Search factors

User experience

As I mentioned earlier, your app is ranked based on a combination of ratings, reviews, downloads, and other factors. While the details of these weights and values are a proprietary part of the Google search algorithm, you can still work to improve your app’s visibility by:

Developing an app that provides a long lasting and meaningful experience for your users.
Improving your app through regular updates.
Encouraging your users to provide feedback in the form of ratings and comments.
Providing world class quality service by responding to your users and addressing their issues.

The Google Play Store algorithm is a closely guarded secret. But here are the optimization factors that are currently understood.

Number of ratings and reviews
Ratings: how high (or low) they are
Amount of downloads
Downloads growth: your app’s downloads growth over the last 30 days
Retention: how many people uninstall the app
Usage: frequency with which your app is used
Links to Play Store page: “Getting people to write about your app improves your search rankings in the Play Store” (Google I/O June 2012)

Conclusion

So here’s how to optimize your Google Play app. Obviously, there is a lot of information here and a lot to master.
But use this post as your cheat sheet and go through each step to be sure you have done the best you can, at this point in time. Then test your work and learn how to make it better on your next app update. Another thing to note is that Google always prefers apps that use Google+ login, so make sure you incorporate that into your app. It will also help boost your ASO rankings.
We hope you find these tips helpful. Anything you want to add on how to optimize an app page on the Google Play Store? I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.