So you have an app that you want to take to market, achieve as many downloads as possible and become a viral sensation. What next? how do you start to make money from your shiny new game?

Well, you need to get discovered. 65 per cent of all app-store downloads come from search, but with over two million apps in existence, competition for a user’s attention is vast.

Consumers are demanding, short on time and impatient - you only have a matter of seconds to capture their imagination. And the marketplace is becoming more convoluted, with voice search on the rise as a result of growing popularity of devices like the Apple Watch and Google Assistant; it’s never been harder for an app to get discovered.

At Redbox Mobile, we specialise in getting our clients to the crucial number one position in the App Store, through a combination of App Store Optimisation (ASO) and paid search.

We’ve compiled a few tips and tricks to help you out on your quest to get to position one, from the super easy (taking only a few minutes), to the super hard, taking several days of your time.

An easy peasey way to build download velocity

At Redbox Mobile we have created a platform known as ‘Blackbox’. It’s a machine-learning tool with the ability to run Apple Search Ads campaigns for you and only takes two minutes to set up.

The ad copy and keywords are pulled directly from meta data in your App Store listing and Blackbox makes optimisations every 10 minutes, meaning that the better your ASO strategy, the more likely your campaign is to perform effectively.

We are offering $100 free media spend for every new app registered on the platform, to give you the opportunity to test it out for yourself.

Of course, you can set up a campaign on Apple Search Ads directly, using the Advanced version, or Basic if you are based in the US.

Neither has the feature set and AI that Blackbox does, so unless you are able to employ an army of experts to make 500,000 tweaks and changes every day, Blackbox will save you a serious amount of time.

Check out the above example from one of the games on our platform. Since November last year this game has achieved over 4,000 downloads and a cost per download of $0.26. So not only is Blackbox a very easy way to acquire new users for your app, but also extremely cost effective.

Medium - 10 minutes of ASO and paid search optimisations

If you’ve got a few spare minutes today, it’s well worth updating the promotional text in your App Store listing.

You don’t need to wait for the next app update to do this and it’s a great way grab the user’s attention by letting them know them what’s new and great about your app. Make sure to get as many relevant keywords in your promotional text as possible as this will help support your paid search campaigns and help you achieve a cheaper cost per download.

Next make sure to ‘boost’ your most important keywords. These are the ones that are most important to you, which you are willing to pay a higher cost per download for because users that search for these words are particularly valuable.

By boosting a keyword, you further increase the likelihood of your advert being shown. Remember that ultimately it’s Apple who decides which adverts are displayed, so in the competitive games category you want to give yourself as much of a chance as possible.

Hard – Build your Meta Data strategy

Our last point is about building your Meta Data strategy, which comprises of your app’s title, the long description, promotional text and other things.

Optimising your Meta Data is the hardest part because you need to research the keywords that your app should rank for, and trickiest of all, decipher whether these terms are actually being searched for in the App Store or not.

After all, you don’t want to create an entire Meta Data strategy around terms with no search volume. It’s important to include a variety of search terms in your Meta Data, like core and product related words; to make sure you cover all the different types of search query. This will give your app the greatest chance of being found.

Building an effective Meta Data strategy can take several days. At Redbox Mobile we review natural search ranking positions and attribution data (amongst other things) both prior to and after an ASO strategy update and monitor improvements.

We work with our clients to ensure our recommendations are reflective of their individual needs to help them get the greatest possible success in the App Store.

We’ve talked about three ways to help get your app ranking in the app store, however, it’s not that simple. It can take weeks and months of keyword optimisations, Meta Data updates and conversion history to get you where you want to be.

For help getting to you the top spot, speak to Redbox Mobile or the Blackbox team by emailing admin@blackbox-platform.com.