ASO glossary

The terms you meet while optimising a Google Play listing, defined for any language.

• ASO (App Store Optimization)

  The practice of improving how an app is found in a store's search and browse surfaces and how often a listing view turns into an install.

• Keyword

  A search term a user types into the store.

• Keyword popularity (search volume estimate)

  An estimate of how often a term is searched.

• Keyword difficulty

  How hard it is to reach the first results for a term, estimated from the strength of the apps already there: their ratings count, average rating, install band and whether the term appears in their titles.

• Opportunity score

  A combined signal for "target this next": high popularity, low difficulty and high relevance to the app's own listing, for terms the app does not yet rank well for.

• Rank (position)

  Where an app appears in the results for a search term in a given store and language.

• Top 10

  The first screen of results on a phone.

• Autocomplete (search suggestions)

  The terms Play proposes while a user types.

• Harvest

  A batch of autocomplete queries that starts from one seed keyword, takes Play's suggestions, and expands each of them with a trailing letter of the store language's alphabet.

• Seed keyword

  The starting word or phrase given to a harvest or an idea generator.

• Long-tail keyword

  A longer, more specific search phrase with lower popularity but usually lower difficulty and clearer intent.

• Head term

  A short, high-popularity keyword that many longer phrases start with ("budget", "driving test").

• Brand keyword

  A search term that contains an app's or developer's name.

• Keyword gap (competitor gap)

  Keywords a competitor ranks for and your app does not, or ranks much lower for.

• Store listing

  The public Play page of an app: title, short description, long description, icon, screenshots, video, category, ratings and release notes.

• Title

  The app name shown in the store, up to 30 characters on Google Play.

• Short description

  The 80-character line under the title on Play.

• Long (full) description

  The up-to-4000-character text of the listing.

• Keyword density

  How often a term appears in a text relative to its length.

• Coverage

  Which of your target keywords appear in which listing fields.

• Stemming (root matching)

  Treating inflected forms of a word as the same term: "tracker" and "tracking", or a noun with and without a case suffix.

• Stop words (filler words)

  Words with no search value on their own: articles, conjunctions, common prepositions.

• Diacritics (accents)

  Marks that change a letter: ü, ş, ç, ñ, é.

• Store and language (gl / hl)

  Two separate axes of a Play request: the store (country, `gl`) decides which results and ranks you see, the language (`hl`) decides which listing text is read and which suggestions come back.

• Locale

  A store plus a language, such as Germany/German or Canada/French.

• Install band

  The rounded install count Play shows publicly ("100K+", "1M+").

• Ratings count

  How many users have rated the app.

• Metadata change (listing change)

  Any edit to a listing's title, descriptions, icon, screenshots or release notes, detected by comparing successive full reads of the listing.

• Visibility score

  A single number for "how much of the search demand I track can see me": each tracked keyword's popularity weighted by the app's position for it, summed and divided by the total popularity.

• ASO score (listing audit)

  A 0-100 audit of a listing's text and store signals: title length and keyword use, short description, long description density and coverage, screenshots count, rating.

• Rank drop alert

  A notification sent when an app falls by more than a chosen number of positions for a tracked keyword, or leaves the top 10 or top 50.

• Crawl window

  The nightly period in which an ASO tool re-measures every tracked keyword.

• Category ranking (top charts)

  An app's position in a store category's top list, such as top free in Finance.

• Review mining

  Extracting candidate search terms from an app's public reviews.

• Store creatives (icon and screenshots)

  The visual half of a listing.

• Relevance

  How closely a keyword matches an app's own listing text, with root matching in the app's language.