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      Promotion of the Dobrobut mobile application on Google Play. 100% of queries in the top 1 in 3 months

      Author
      Author: Yurii Oshchapovskyi
      Optimizer
      Reviewer
      Head of SEO
      2022-03-21

      For the teaser image:

      With the growing popularity of the Android platform, the number and quality of mobile applications on Google Play are growing. The level of competition in many niches is very high. This makes it difficult to achieve your goals.

      Customer

      The network of medical clinics “Dobrobut” in Kyiv is the largest in Ukraine. It is engaged in all major areas in medicine and has a large staff of qualified employees.

      Our tasks

      Main tasks:

      Secondary Tasks:

      Stages of mobile app promotion

      Competitor analysis

      Competitor analysis is an important stage for promotion, based on which we understand the ranking factors by which we need to outperform competitors. For example:

      Collecting the semantic core

      Collecting the semantic core is one of the most important stages of optimization since it is the basis for a further plan for optimizing the application page. Since Google Play does not provide official statistics on keyword frequency, we used AppFollow Keyword Research, a private service to measure the popularity of keywords, which allows you to get comparative indicators of keyword popularity, as well as showing queries that our competitors are visible for. Based on the AppFollow indicators, the company’s specialists have collected the widest possible semantic core suitable for our application.

      *Query popularity is calculated on a 100 point system, where 100 is the maximum popularity.

      Metadata optimization

      Based on the popularity of requests, as well as the prioritization information provided by the client, we have determined that the most important promotional area is “Online Doctor Appointment”. Based on this, we have optimized the metadata.

      In addition to keyword mentions, we’ve also added emoji. The practical experience of our optimizers in the field of SEO and ASO has shown that the use of Emoji increases the visibility of the snippet and, accordingly, the CTR. Especially in cases where competitors do not.

      In addition, we have translated and optimized the Ukrainian and English versions of the pages — there is not much traffic on these versions, but their optimization allows you to capture even a single download of the application.

      Meta tags in Ukrainian:

      Meta tags in English:

      Text optimization

      Since it is not possible to place all promoted queries in the “Application Name” and “Short Description” blocks due to the limited number of characters, we wrote a keyword-optimized text for 4000 characters for the “Full Description” block. This text was translated into English and Ukrainian and then posted on the corresponding language pages of the application.

      Step by step text optimization

      After the publication of the text, once a week our specialists added, replaced, and removed keywords from the text, and also monitored the change in positions due to changes in the content. In this way, we got a text that was qualitatively optimized for all key queries, which later gave very good results.

      Image optimization

      Icon

      Since the main icon of the application is the official logo of the Dobrobut clinic chain, we did not change it to a brighter and more eye-catching one due to the good recognition of the logo.

      Screenshots

      When accepting an application for promotion, screenshots that show the performance of the product, the features and benefits of the application have already been published. As an improvement, we have implemented inscriptions in Ukrainian and Russian for the corresponding language versions of the application.

      The plans include the implementation of inscriptions for the English version.

      Rating and working on the block of popular reviews

      Dobrobut MS mobile application is one of the first of its kind on the Ukrainian market. Since this network of clinics is very popular, users began to find and download the application for branded queries. Some reviews helped to understand the possibilities for improving the application based on the needs of Dobrobut MS customers.

      Since users did not find the desired functionality, the assessment of the application was mostly negative: at the time of accepting the application for promotion, the average rating was less than 3 points, which is a critically low indicator compared to competitors.

      Like all pioneers, the development team had to quickly respond and adapt to the suggestions and requirements of the first users, and we had to strategize to work with reviews and improve the average rating.

      Thanks to the relatively new formula for calculating the average rating for Android apps, we have a good opportunity to increase the app’s rating. Since 2019, the rating is not calculated as the average number of all the votes of the application over its entire life: now the main focus in the rating is on the new ratings of the application for the last 20-45 days. Old voices are also taken into account, but their influence is too weak.

      To increase the rating, we used targeted incentives for users to leave a review with a positive rating. And in the first iteration, our specialists were faced with the fact that most users did not even bother to read the name of the application to at least partially understand what tasks the application was designed to solve. Because of this, several reviews with “water” appeared.

      To correct the error, we began to offer users the best options for writing reviews.

      Already in the first month of promotion, the average score increased from 2.91 to 3.5 and continues to grow further, at the moment it is 3.694.

      But, as we wrote above, the Google Play app page does not display the average rating for all time, but the rating, which is calculated based on the latest ratings. Now it is 4.670

      This indicator exceeds the rating of all our closest competitors.

      To maintain the rating, we periodically motivate ourselves to leave a small number of reviews for placement.

      Block of popular reviews

      This block displays 4 relevant and important reviews from the point of view of Google algorithms. It is these reviews that most users read when deciding to install the application. Therefore, it is very important to work so that only good and useful reviews appear in this block.

      To optimize this block, we selected high-quality reviews from the available ones, increasing the number of likes for each of them. Thanks to such actions, only good reviews are displayed in the popular block:

      Similar Apps

      The block is located on the application pages and shows cards of similar applications:

      The algorithm of this block is not fully understood, however, we assume that it hosts applications of the same category that are downloaded along with the main application.

      We have no direct influence on the download of applications. Therefore, we changed the category of the application to “Medicine”, which indicates the niche of the application as accurately as possible and may affect the block of similar applications:

      Before this, the application was in the Health category, which did not accurately reflect its niche.

      Promotion results

      Below are the dynamics by the number of app installs over the last 180 days. The arrow marks the start of the advance:

      As you can see in the graph, in the first 3 months of promotion, we increased the number of organic installs by about 3+ times.

      Positions in the first month of promotion

      The promotion of the Dobrobut MS application started on May 2, 2020, and already in the first month of work we have achieved good results in the following positions:

      Positions in the second month of promotion

      By the end of the second month of promotion, 68% of requests were already in the top 3:

      Positions in the third month of promotion and beyond

      By the end of the third month of promotion, 100% of requests were in the top 1

      Further promotion plans

      Even though all positions are top 1, the application has room to grow and develop. In addition to the already standard tasks that we implement every month, shortly we plan to: