Keyword stuffing your app title stopped working years ago. Here is what actually influences ranking and conversion in the App Store and Google Play today.
ASO advice online is mostly recycled from 2019. Both stores have shifted weight toward behavioral signals — retention, conversion rate, and engagement — over keyword density, and treating ASO as a one-time setup task rather than an ongoing practice is the most common mistake we see.
Your Screenshots Are Doing More Work Than Your Description
Most users never scroll to your app description. Your first three screenshots carry the conversion weight almost entirely, and they need to answer one question fast: what does this app actually do for me? Feature-tour screenshots that require reading outperform aspirational lifestyle imagery almost every time we test it.
Retention Is Now A Ranking Signal, Not Just A Business Metric
Both stores factor in how long people keep an app and how often they return to it. This means the highest-leverage ASO work often is not in the store listing at all — it is in your onboarding flow. An app that gets users to their first real value faster will often outrank a competitor with better keywords but worse day-one retention.
Reviews Respond To Timing, Not Just Volume
Prompting for a review immediately after a meaningful action — a completed booking, a finished workout, a saved item — produces both more reviews and better ones than a generic prompt on day three. Where you ask matters as much as how often you ask.
Localized Listings Still Get Skipped Too Often
A fully translated listing for your top three non-English markets is one of the cheapest conversion gains available, and most small teams never get to it. If a meaningful share of your traffic comes from outside English-speaking markets, this is usually the highest-return item on the list.
