What are the best strategies and resources for doing effective app store optimisation?

Here's an article that I wrote recently for Entrepreneur magazine on ASO which should answer your query.

How to Use App Store Optimization to Get Attention
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227905

Great question! Since 60% of App Store customers use search to find apps, ASO can help you boost sales.

It's a big topic but I think the basics are to optimize those parts of your profile that are being searched by users - your app name (make it keyword rich if possible), your keywords (use terms that are popular but not overly competitive), and your company name (if you haven't created it yet).

I'd love to do a review of your app and give more ASO tips... let me know if you want to chat.

I will not go into too much details but I want to mention that store optimization is a good place to start but it will not get you too far.

High quantity of downloads and reviews gets your app noticed.

The more downloads and reviews your app gets, the more people will think: "If that guy (girl) liked it so much - let me download it 2". And then the app gets the 'snowball' effect - keeps getting bigger and bigger. But you need to promote the app.

There is so much to be said about this… It's like asking the same for SEO, 10 years ago.
App Store Optimization (ASO) implies leveraging to elements: enhance visibility (high rank in results) and improving conversion (compelling artwork).
Although there are common strategies apps usually implement to achieve this, the tactics will be very different depending on target demographic, competition and nature of the app.
you can find more details (multiple posts) here: http://giacomoballi.com/?s=app+store+optimization

Best strategies and resources for doing effective app store optimisation can be as follows, as we begin with strategies
1. Understand your customer and your competition: How well do you know your customers and your competition? A well-formed ASO strategy hinges on understanding how your customers use your app, along with a deep view of your competitive landscape. Your ASO strategy begins with putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. Your goal is to improve discovery in app store searches and target those keywords that drive the most traffic. The best way to identify these optimal keywords is consumer research finding out exactly what search queries brought your customers to your app and the natural language they use to describe it. It is equally important to survey your competition to identify which keywords are being targeted by apps like yours.
2. Choose the right app name: Titles in the App Store can be up to 255 characters, allowing for plenty of keywords or keyword phrases. You can augment this short title with nonessential keywords after the name, typically preceded by a dash or vertical bar, to associate your app with select keywords. It is also important to use only URL-friendly characters in your title, particularly in the App Store. Special characters or symbols will detract from your ASO strategy and cause iTunes to refer to your app’s numeric ID, rather than its name, to scan for relevant keywords.
3. Maximize your keywords: While many of these strategies apply across the board when it comes to the different app stores, the App Store and the Google Play Store have two very different approaches when it comes to ASO keywords. The App Store has a 100-character keyword field. It exclusively uses title and whatever keywords or keyword phrases you include in these 100 characters to determine which search strings your app will show up for. On the other hand, the Google Play Store takes an approach more like modern SEO. Google does away with the specified tags and scans your app’s description to extract relevant keywords. In this scenario, you are given 4,000 characters to describe it in natural, customer-facing language. Without trying to jam as many keywords into this text as possible at the expense of your messaging strategy, try to sprinkle relevant keywords where they logically make sense. A recent Sensor Tower study showed that the optimal number of times to repeat a keyword in an app store product page is five, at which point you will maximize the likelihood of ranking prominently for that keyword. Additional mentions have little to no effect on ASO and may even turn off potential customers if your description appears intentionally repetitive.
4. Create a compelling description: Except for a few of the strategically placed keywords, your app’s description should be targeted toward your customer base, rather than a search engine index. Your description should be viewed as a call-to-action for potential customers. We recommend focusing the bulk of your energy on the first three lines of your description to immediately grab your reader’s attention. Your app’s description, as well as the rest of your product page, should be treated as a living document. As it changes with each new update, so should your description. Each time you submit an update, take the time to reflect the changes in your product page’s description and screenshots to call out new features and accurately portray it.
5. Stand out with a unique icon: When approaching your icon design, it is important to note that the App Store and Google Play vary in their approach to, and rendering of, app icons. From here, the Apple OS will resize your icon for any other applications, including app icons, navigation icons, and tab bar icons. Your image must therefore be designed with the meticulous detail of a 10241024 icon and the simplicity necessary to still look good scaled down to the smallest size. When designing an Android icon, the only difference is that Google Play requires a 512512 icon, rather than 10241024. While not required, Google recommends designing app icons in accordance with its material design guidelines, which details everything from icon anatomy to lighting and shading. Regardless of which OS you are designing for, you need an icon capable of breaking through the clutter. As such, don’t overcomplicate your icon with unnecessary words or logos that demand extra time from your customers.
6. Include screenshots and videos: Like icons, screenshots in your description may not have a direct effect on search rankings, but they do drive downloads. Images convey more about what it is and bring your descriptive text to life, allowing potential customers to visualize using your app before they make the download. Take special care in ensuring that these screenshots speak to your biggest customer benefits and are strong enough to convince the reader to browse your additional screenshots or download it. For example, Candy Crush Saga adds a graphic overlay to its screenshots to promote its new update. Whatever your approach, your screenshots should show off your app’s most pivotal features, latest updates, and the pages on which your customers will spend most of their time.
7. Increase traffic with outside promotion: At the end of the day, it is important to remember that on-page optimization is just one tool in your mobile marketing kit. A relatively new concept, app indexing is the process of making Android or iOS app content searchable and linkable from a web or mobile web search. Customers who see you indexed in a search result can click on your link and be deep linked to either it's product page or to the page in your app from which that content is indexed. App indexing allows you to drive downloads and app store traffic directly from a search engine results page.
8. Update frequently: Mobile customers are looking for apps that are constantly improving, with regular updates based on customer feedback. Apps that are frequently updated are seen, by both the app store and the customer, to be of a higher value and more customer centric. Consequently, app updates highly correspond to better reviews as each new and improved version of the app should naturally receive higher ratings than the version before. The next step is to encourage existing customers to download the update. Maintain a large volume of five-star reviews for your app, and especially its latest version.
9. Localize your app listing: At the most basic level, speak to your customers in the language they use at home. Both the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store allow you to localize your listing to make both discoverability and readability easier for customers in different countries. By doing so, you can increase both adoption and conversion, as more customers find your app using keywords in their language and as more customer download it after seeing a welcoming product page in their language.
10. Encourage ratings and feedback: In an analysis of the 500 top-ranked apps posted last year on the Moz blog, we found the highest correlation between ratings and ranks than any of the other factors we tested. Across the board, apps with a large volume of positive ratings dominate the top charts. The apps with the highest rating counts are those that keep their customers engaged and proactively solicit customer feedback to shape their product roadmap and future updates. It is important to keep in mind, however, that app store ratings provide just a myopic view of customer satisfaction. Most of your customers lie somewhere between these two extremes and require that extra engagement or prompt to give their feedback.
Tools for ASO are as follows:
1. Apptweak
Apptweak is an ASO platform that provides mobile marketers with a comprehensive optimization report and a great UI experience. This tool is serious about localization and the report covers 60 different countries (for iOS), giving marketers an overview of their relevancy through stats, visuals, and more. To make the most of this report, you will still need a solid understanding of the ASO procedure; nevertheless, it is a good starting point for your research.
Apptweak Features:
Apptweak is an ASO tool that allows you to do keyword research and monitor your app. You can use Apptweak to create a powerful optimization strategy and spy on your competition, and even receive revenue estimates for most apps uploaded on the app store.
You can also use this tool for search Ads research.
Apptweak Pricing:
Apptweak has 1 trial plan, 3 standard plans, and 1 custom plan that can be negotiated. Almost all features are included in the basic package, yet if you plan to receive estimates or data from smaller countries, you will need to go higher up the ladder.
The prices for Apptweak are:
1. 7 day Trial – Free
2. Starter plan – $69/month,
3. Guru plan – $299/month,
4. Power plan – $599/month
Paying 1 year in advance will give you a 15% discount.
2. Sensor Tower
When performing your keyword research, Sensor Tower allows you to track valuable measurements such as traffic, difficulty, and competition. You can also compare your app to competitors and learn more about keywords that you might be missing. It’s important to note that certain information is based on an internal scaling system, which might make it harder for you to translate to objective App Store values. Another major problem is that most features are available for paying customers only.
Sensor Tower Features:
Sensor Tower is one of the best aso tools on the market. A tool that we also use at Moburst. Powerful and accurate, Sensor Tower can be used for keyword research and optimization, keyword translation, download, and revenue estimates and tracking.
Sensor Tower Pricing:
Sensor Tower has 2 Small business packages and 3 enterprise solutions:
1. Pro – $79/month
2. Business – $399/month
3. App Intelligence – negotiable
4. Store Intelligence – negotiable
5. Ad Intelligence – negotiable
3. Mobile Action
Mobile Action is one of our favourite ASO tools, thanks to a few unique features. It is currently the only platform that provides information regarding the app’s chance to rank high for a specific word, as well as a general overview graph for iOS apps. You’ll also find download estimation data, alerts, and keyword suggestions to help you get started. Finally, Mobile Action manages to support this data bundle with an attractive UI, something that we always appreciate.
Mobile Action Features:
Mobile Action can be used for keyword tracking and suggestions, competitor and keyword suggestions, ASO reports, and localization. It also has a nice 7-day premium trial.
Mobile Action Pricing:
This Aso tool has 1 free trial and 3 packages:
1. Trial – Free for 7 days,
2. Starter plan – $69/month,
3. Winner plan – $599/month,
4. Premium plan – $499/month.
4. Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Even though this is not a mobile-specific tool, the insight it provides is still very relevant and important, and here’s why: one of the biggest challenges for app marketers looking to optimize their app is coming up with relevant keywords to track. Google’s keyword tool gives marketers a wonderful playground for keyword suggestions and makes the whole process much simpler. It is wise to remember that the traffic score for tracked terms is web-based and that you should check it using another ASO tool, but if you’re looking to find out what people are searching for – no one does it quite like Google.
Keyword Planner Features:
Google keyword planner can be used to download keyword data from any specific location in the world. By doing this, you can discover the interests of users on a specific topic. Data can be filtered by language and location (global > country > state > city).
It is split into 2 sections, keyword discovery and historical metrics.
Keyword discovery is used by integrating 10 keywords into a search bar. The tool will then gives you the search values for those specific keywords and thousands of other related keywords.
Historical metrics are used by pasting up to 2,500 keywords into the search bar. Google will then give you the historical data for those specific keywords, without adding any extra suggestions.
Keyword Planner Prices:
Google keyword planner is a “free-ish” tool. There is no monthly fee for using it, yet data is filtered for non-paying users.
Free users can still use all the capabilities of the Keyword Planner, but the data will be presented using intervals. (For example, meditation app: 10k-100k searches). This is not the best for understanding intent or market size. As 11,000 searches are minuscule compared to 99,000 searches. To surpass this limitation, users need to have a running AdWords campaign. The payment can be as low as $10 a month if the campaign is active.
5. App Annie
Probably the biggest ASO platform available, App Annie’s strength is in its massive database, which provides insights on a wide variety of apps. Here you will find a great overview of your chosen market and you will have the ability to check out the competition from the inside out. Certain features are still lacking, such as traffic and difficulty scores (come on now, Annie!), but it’s still a wonderful source of information and a must-visit stop for mobile entrepreneurs.
App Annie Features:
App Annie provides a high count of ASO tool features. From App Store Optimization and Tracking to App Usage, Downloads, and Revenue estimates.
They have some free features as well:
App store tracking: Top charts, Rank History, App details
Keyword Ranking
All your app data in one dashboard. – App Annie Connect:
App Annie Pricing:
This ASO tool has no standard plans or packages. They craft an offer around each of their clients. For this reason, it is not suitable for small developers.

Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath