Getting found in the stores, and converting the people who find you

What this actually solves

The situation that brings people to this page is nearly always the same. A business paid for an app, the app is finished and live, and a couple of months later the install count is embarrassing. Nobody knows why. There is no advertising budget left after the build, and the app is simply sitting in a store where several million other apps are also sitting.

Store search is the answer to that, and it works differently from web search in one way that matters commercially — there is no cost per click. You fix the listing once, keep it maintained, and installs continue arriving without a media spend behind them. That is why this is the first thing to do after a launch and the easiest one to leave undone once the build has spent the budget.

The half of the job people forget is conversion. Ranking for a term gets someone onto your page. What decides whether they install is the icon, the title and the first two or three screenshots, which is roughly all anyone looks at before deciding. A listing that ranks well and converts badly is a slower, more expensive failure than one that never ranked at all.

What we do, and in what order

1. Baseline audit, both stores. Where the app currently ranks and for what, which terms it is invisible for, what competitors are doing with their titles and screenshots, and what the existing conversion from page view to install actually is. Screenshots of every number, dated, because this is what everything afterwards gets compared against. Three to five days.
2. Keyword research, split by store. This is where the two platforms genuinely diverge and where most generic advice falls apart. The App Store has a hidden 100-character keyword field that nobody but the algorithm reads, comma separated, and repeating a word already in your title wastes space in it. Play has no keyword field at all — Google reads your title, your 80-character short description and your 4,000-character long description as prose. The same research produces two quite different documents. Three to five days.
3. Metadata rewrite and screenshot plan. A 30-character title for both stores, a 30-character App Store subtitle, the Play short and long descriptions written so the terms appear naturally rather than stuffed, and a plan for the first three screenshots — what each one says, which real screen sits behind it, and what job it is doing. Five to seven days.
4. Ratings and reviews. Where in the app the rating prompt appears matters more than whether it exists — asked after a successful action it helps, asked on launch it harms. Negative reviews get answered, because prospective installers read the replies as much as the complaints. Two to three days to set up, then continuous.
5. Ship one change, measure, ship the next. Play Console's own store listing experiments are used where traffic supports them. Where it does not, changes go out one at a time with enough time between them to attribute the result. Monthly, ongoing.
6. Monthly report. Rankings for the tracked terms, page views, conversion to install, what changed, what it did, and what is being tested next. Half a day each month.

Tools — the Play Console and App Store Connect analytics first, because the real data is there and it is free; AppFollow, Sensor Tower or Mobile Action for keyword and competitor visibility; Figma for screenshot production; and Play's built-in experiment tooling for testing listing variants.

What moves the price

The retainer runs $300–$1,500/mo and it is ongoing rather than a fixed engagement, because a single pass at a listing is a guess nobody ever checks. Three things set the level.

How many apps and how many stores. One app on one store is a different monthly commitment from a portfolio, or from an app maintained on both platforms where every metadata decision has to be made twice in two different formats.

How many markets and languages. Each localised listing is its own keyword research, its own copy and frequently its own screenshots. Search terms do not survive translation, so this is genuinely additive work rather than a discount for volume.

Advisory versus production. A keyword plan and a screenshot brief for your team to execute sits at the lower end. Writing both listings and producing the screenshot sets each month sits at the upper end, because that is where the hours are.

What usually goes wrong

The keyword field gets stuffed and the screenshots are never touched. Search visibility is half the job. Being seen and not installed is the other half, and the first three screenshots move that far more than any keyword decision. Most listing work spends all its effort on the first half and leaves the more profitable half untouched.

Play is treated like the App Store. Someone learns the 100-character keyword field and then writes a Play long description as a comma-separated keyword dump. Google reads it as prose, it looks like spam to any human who scrolls, and it earns nothing. The two stores need two genuinely different pieces of writing, not one adapted.

Five things change at once. Title, icon, screenshots, description and price all move in the same week, installs go up, and nobody can say which change earned it — so it cannot be repeated and the losing change cannot be identified. Attribution is the whole value of doing this monthly, and it survives only if changes are made one at a time.