If you are in the business of making games you know how difficult it is to get discovery for your game. I’m currently actually writing an entire book on how to market your games and make money through them which will be coming out next month but recently I got a comment on my podcast from Rajesh asking me to provide some insights on ASO. I have covered this topic in great detail in my book however I’d be more than happy to share a summary of this topic here so it can help you out to get started with this. We will be talking about how to improve your game’s ranking based on title, description and screenshots for your game. Alright so before I tell you about what is a good ASO strategy let us first understand what ASO is exactly. In a world where literally thousands of apps and games get uploaded on the Google Play Store you have to be extremely competitive in order to make your game stand out. App Store Optimisation, or more popularly known as ASO, is what helps you stand out from the crowd of apps and games being uploaded to the store. ASO for games is what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is for websites. General principles for ASO are very much similar to SEO but with a slight twist. Let’s understand why is it so important to get this part right for your game. User’s decision to download your game is a 3 step process: Search Discover Download Each of these steps is crucial and your game needs to satisfy all these 3 points for the user to download your game. Your users need to search for your game, they need to discover your game after searching for it and then download it. This entire process can be termed as “User Acquisition”. Companies spend millions of dollars on acquiring users to their games. To be able to win the battle of discovery you got to be prepared with the knowledge of how to get your game in front of your target audience. Which brings us to the next point. Know Your Audience In order to acquire users you first need to understand who exactly your audience is. You’ve made a casual game and you think that the target audience for your game can be literally anyone in the world. That’s not true in reality though. You need to be able to define your audience properly. You have to know their age, gender, interests and also the type of games that interest them. You must also be aware of your competition. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to know your audience: What is the gender of my TG? What is the age group of my TG? Where do my TG live? What games do your TG play? What genre is your game? What does your TG do? School student, college student, working somewhere, etc. What device do you TG have? ASO generally involves a lot of factors such as taking into consideration your game’s visuals, title and description and more. Let us dive into each of these starting with your game’s title and description. Your game’s title and description plays a huge role in getting discovered by users. It’s true that most of your users won’t bother reading your description in the first place itself but that does not make it any less important. If anything, it is extremely important to have a proper description. For this you need to work on understand how to pick the right keywords for your game. Selecting keywords itself is an extremely important task in order for your description to be relevant and I will be covering more about it in another post. Let’s consider your game’s name is Subway Train Surfer. In order for your game to be downloaded you will need to be in the top search results of your game’s keywords. Let’s consider your target keyword for this game is ‘subway’. So general rule is that your keyword should get repeated in your description at least 3 times and should exist in the title you choose. It’s keyword density, which means the number of times i