My name is 
Tomasz Kolinko. I'm the lead developer in AppCodes, and also the founder of Motivapps.com - iOS Development company, started in 2010.
As indie developers, we never had too much money to invest into the PR actions for our iOS apps. Like most beginning developers, we put our apps out there, and just hoped for the best. And of course, like most of the beginning developers, we earned almost nothing.
Then, after half a year, we decided to take a look at the App Store SEO opportunities. I built a script, that checked how high in the app store is each one of our apps, for each key phrase. It looked more or less like this:
After the first run it became clear why we didn't have sales - our apps just didn't come up anywere in the App Store search. The keywords, the 100 chars that Apple allows, were poorly chosen.
We changed the keywords to some better ones. Still relevant to the app, but with less competition. We also changed the names of our apps to better reflect what they do (For example, instead of "Tete A Tete", we now have "Love Letter Writer" :). The sales? See for yourself:
The above is for Goal-Setting Workshop, and marks point to the moment when we did three things:
- improve keywords
- start asking users for reviews
- implement iPad version (+50% of sales from that alone)
I've got a similar chart for a few apps, and right now these apps give us break even at Motivapps.
What surprised me the most though, was that there was no good tool for tracking the App Store SEO. Therefore each developer has to either test their position in the store by hand, or write their own tracking script.
Like Einstein said - "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity". I'm giving you this tool, so you can promote your app. Use it to plan better keywords, and to track what your competition is doing.
Good luck!
Tomasz Kolinko
AppCodes, Founder
support@appcodes.com
