What are ways for your app to rank high in Google Play?

With 3,300,000 apps in the Play Store by September 2017, competition is harsh. There are several factors that influence your app’s rankings in the Google Play Store and help you fight for the top ranks! Here are a few:

• Number of Downloads: the more downloads you get the more credibility the algorithm will give to your app and the more ranks you will win.
• Download retention: its good to have many downloads, but if people download your app and then uninstall, this will negatively impact your rankings.
• Download Growth: it is said that the proportion with which your downloads increment with time also boosts your rank.
• Total number of Reviews and Ratings: the more reviews and ratings your app (total and current version) has, the more it will weigh in the algorithm.
• Average Rating: the global average rating of your app. Of course the Play Store wants to offer the best quality content, so 5 star apps will rank better than 2 star. Good ratings will also encourage users to download your app, further boosting your ranks.
• App usage statistics: how frequently your app is opened and used. If people download your app but never use it, you have less chance of reaching the top ranks.
• App Update frequency: Apple wants the App Store to always provide fresh content. Therefore, apps that are regularly updated will be favoured by the algorithm.

It’s also important to make sure your app ranks high on relevant keywords. To do so, you have to identify the most powerful keywords for your app (in terms of relevance, competition and volume) and include them into your app’s metadata field.

In the Play Store, there are 3 major fields that the algorithm takes into account when considering how your app should rank on a set of words:

• Title: max 50 characters - best practice is to put the name of your brand and a couple of strong keywords or a strong keyword combination that are highly relevant to your app. Words in your App Title are those that weigh the most for the algorithm.
• Short Description: max 80 characters - The best practice here is to explain what your app is about using a maximum of strong keywords or keyword combinations. Words in your Short description also have a lot of weight for the algorithm.
• Long Description: The Play Store algorithm also takes app descriptions into account so don't forget to use relevant and important keywords in your description to increase your discoverability. We recommend to have a description of at least 1500 words and repeat relevant words 4 to 5 times. Keep in mind that the text has to be nice to read, avoid keyword stuffing.

To select the keywords with the highest potentiel, you can use AppTweak’s Keywords Analysis Tool. The indicators given in the Analysis Table will help you understand the performance of a keyword in terms of Apple Search Popularity, Volume, Competition, Ranking History etc.

I hope that helped!