App store optimization is a lot like search engine optimization. And like SEO, app store designers have a role to play in APO. In this post, we’ll look at four things you can do to increase the visibility and discoverability of your fintech products in app store search results.
Similar to SEO, app store optimization (APO) allows us to increase the visibility and discoverability of a mobile app in search results. For new fintech apps, APO is especially important as it gives these apps a chance to contend with existing frontrunners in their space.
Of course, there are many factors that contribute to how well a fintech app ranks in the stores. Quality of experience. Overall value. Number of reviews and average rating. Keyword optimization.
Assuming you’ve built a great app that’s chock full of value, what else can you do as a designer/developer to help your fintech product rank better in the app stores than others?
Today, we’ll look at four things you can do to optimize your app listing for search, increase the chances of the app getting featured and, of course, get more installs.
1. Pay Attention to How the Content Is Formatted
There are a number of areas in your app store page where important details about the app will go and that you should pay attention to as a designer/developer:
- Title & Subtitle (these are two different fields in the Apple App Store)
- Description
- What’s New
Look at the main metadata—the title and subtitle.
The title looks good. We see the app’s name (“SoFi”), along with a brief summary of what app users can do with it (“Investing, Money, Loans”).
The subtitle, however, doesn’t fit on the page, which is a problem. While users might be able to guess that the last word in the subtitle is “Crypto,” it doesn’t look good that there’s incomplete data there. Who knows if the app developer was trying to tell us something else. Right?
Whenever creating the main title and subtitle for your app store page, make sure that it:
- Fits within the word count parameters for that app store
- Includes the name of the app
- Quickly and simply sums up the purpose of the app
You can follow Acorns’ lead when formatting your own title and subtitle:
Notice how nicely all of the information fits here.
The title “Acorns: Invest Spare Change” perfectly sums up what the users are going to get out of the app.
The subtitle “Investing. Earning. Growing.” doesn’t just provide extra context for the app—it also adds an eye-catching punch to the headline.
Also have a look at the “What’s New” section in the Acorns screenshot above.
Since you have to work within the formatting rules of the app store, there’s no using bold, italics, headers or any of the other formatting you’d use to make a web page more scannable or readable. So, you have to get creative with it as Acorn has done—spaces to break up paragraphs and dashes to call attention to sub-points.
SoFi also has a creative formatting solution:
Spaces are added in between paragraphs so the description can be long, but still easy to read. A triple-dash mark (—) helps SoFi draw attention to its app features. And the bullet points break down those benefits and features even further.
You can use these kinds of formatting to your advantage in both the What’s New and Description sections of the app page. The first major benefit of doing so is to create a more readable format for interested app users. APO is another potential benefit.
