⬆️ Winners in the Search Innovation category
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.
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.
Main tasks:
Secondary Tasks:
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:
the rating of competitors’ apps in the top 8 ranges from 2.6 to 4.4 points;
the total number of reviews for most applications is more than 1000;
competitors try to respond to positive and negative reviews within a day;
the number of app installations — from 10,000 to 100,000+;
availability of screenshots and video of the application;
the presence of optimized meta tags and texts.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
By the end of the second month of promotion, 68% of requests were already in the top 3:
By the end of the third month of promotion, 100% of requests were in the top 1
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:
create and add a video to the application page;
write articles on the topic “Top 10 medical applications” and post them on thematic sites to get additional traffic;
write a press release and place it on thematic sites and in the media. Its main goal is not to get a link to the application page (which also works), but to increase the education of Internet users who have never used mobile applications for making an appointment with a doctor, maintaining a disease card, online consultation, online payment, etc. Thanks to such manipulations, in the long term, we will increase the frequency of requests, and with it the number of app downloads;
daily monitor new reviews and post responses to negative, neutral, and positive reviews;
to optimize the application page in the Apple App Store.
