App Store Optimization is a multifaceted process where we need to perfect every aspect of our strategy from keyword optimization to conversion optimization. Although people often undervalue the keyword translation process, localization is a step that we just can not look over. Especially if we plan on going big and taking your app worldwide.

Although English is a widely spoken language around the world, we shouldn’t forget that the majority of the world’s population are non-English speakers. So, it might be a good idea to salute them in their own language.

You are off the hook if you are merely targeting the US market but we all know that you have your eyes on the other markets, too. Therefore, as ASO Managers, you deserve the best App Store Optimization tools to support you in your efforts.

Translating every keyword that you stumble upon in your keyword research can be a little frustrating. It takes too much time, too much copy-pasting, and too much effort but it’s a necessity. So, it would be amazing if there was an easy way, wouldn’t it?

As you might have guessed already from the Headline, there is. We launched the Keyword Translation module last year to lighten your burden. Now, you can use it on all pages in our ASO Intelligence, giving you complete power over all of your keywords.

Let’s take two apps that are close competitors. We will analyze their approaches and display how you can localize your app to any market in seconds.

Let’s begin by getting to know the competitors.

Health & Fitness Apps Localization Example

Freeletics and Keelo are two apps offering similar services and targeting a similar user base. When this is the situation, you have to keep in step with your competitors. Localization will surely help your local app rankings, increasing your app visibility in different markets.

Otherwise, you simply let your competitor steal the users that might have been yours.

As you can see, while Freeletics is doing localization for Japan, Keelo isn’t. Freeletics has translated both its App Title and Subtitle. However, localization is not limited to indexed keywords. As you can see, they also localized their creative assets and descriptions in order to maximize conversion rates. This puts Freeletics a few steps ahead of Keelo in the Japanese market. The difference in rating counts and category rankings speak for themselves.

However, we can easily reverse this in 6 steps.

Analyze your Competitor’s Localized Metadata 

Let’s take a look at our competitors and see what they have been doing to improve their ASO in Japan. In order to do that we go to our Keyword Spy tool, choose Japan, and turn on the translation module. As you will notice, after we turn on the translation feature, every keyword you see in different ASO tools will automatically be translated. You can simply add the keywords of interest to your tracking list straight from the Keyword Spy tool without the need for any external translation.

In this way, we easily access their localized metadata, can see which keywords they are ranking for and the search score of these keywords.

This step gives an idea about the search tendencies of Japanese users as we see the search scores. With this data, we can decide on the best keywords that will boost our organic app growth in Japan.

Find More Variations

First, we looked at our competitors, analyzed them, and took their best-performing keywords. Now, we will find more variations to solidify our ASO game in Japan.

So this time we go to our Keyword Research tool.

For a Health and Fitness app, the first keyword that comes to mind is fitness, right? So we type that in, and our Keyword Research tool brings us a list of variations for this keyword. In this way, we can find long-tail keywords that we may not find on our own.

For instance, We get to see some long-tail version keywords such as フィットネス無料　(fitness free), フィットネスアプリ人気無料 (fitness app popular free), and フィットネスコーチ (fitness coach). We can also see some misspellings such as フィトネス and フイットネス.

As you know, the longer the keyword, the higher the download intention of users. Including such local keywords can have a serious impact on your download numbers.

Find New Keyword Suggestions

We have started this to even the scores, right? So what is better than seeing keywords we don’t get ranked at all but our competitor does? Let’s visit our Keyword Suggestion tool for this.

As you can see, our app Keelo doesn’t get ranked for these highly popular keywords in Japan, even though Freeletics is organically ranking for. Especially popular keywords such as fitness and muscle training can significantly increase our app visibility in the storefront.

For instance 筋トレ (Muscle Training), －ジム (Gym), 筋トレ無料 (Free Muscle Training) are all highly popular keywords that may rain downloads yet Keelo is not ranking at all for these. It might be a good idea to add these keywords to our list by clicking on the “+” button next to them. By doing so we can track their performance easily.

See Your Competitor’s Big Guns

If we know which keywords bring the most downloads to our competitor, we can adjust ours accordingly.

This time we are going to jump on the advanced side of our ASO Intelligence and utilize our Keyword Intelligence.

Freeletics gets 25% of their total downloads from the keywords above. They are ranking in the top ten for these keywords. However, what’s more significant for us as the competitor of Freeletics is that these keywords have great chance scores.

“Good result”, “Digital Personal Trainer” and “Free Weight Training” all have 90+ chance scores. Therefore, we should add them to our tracking list.

As seen, we have already discovered 3 important local keywords, thanks to our Keyword Intelligence.

Localize Your Metadata with Ease

Our Keyword Optimization tool allows us to choose and test popular keywords in our app title and subtitle. In this way, we can localize our metadata for a region where we don’t even speak the language. Plus, we don’t have to run back and forth between our metadata and Google translate.

Monitor and Iterate

Localization never ends with translation. And just like we do for English, we should always track the performance of our keywords, our position in the new market and iterate based on the findings.

For this matter, our ASO Report will give you all the information you need from ranking distribution to comparing keyword performance by date.
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by Talip Sencan
source: MobileAction.co