Case Study: How A Racing Game App Boost 110% Downloads By Keyword Optimization?

Racing games are some of the most popular in mobile gaming. It's a highly competitive genre with a plethora of actually good options. Racing games were among the first to make use of phone hardware, using the accelerometer as a sort of steering wheel to steer cars. There are other ways to control the game, but turning the phone is a classic racer feature. This is also one of the most diverse genres, with a wide range of free-to-play and premium options.

Total revenue in the Racing Games segment is projected to reach US$2.81bn in 2022. It is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2022-2026) of 12.26%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$4.46bn by 2026. In 2022, In-app purchase (IAP) revenue in the Racing Games segment is projected to reach US$1,580.00m. Paid app revenue is projected to reach US$25.66m in 2022. Advertising revenue is projected to reach US$1,205.00m.

The number of downloads in the Racing Games segment is projected to reach 9,745.2m downloads in 2022. The average revenue per download currently is expected to amount to US$0.29. A global comparison reveals that most revenue is generated in China (US$1,065.00m in 2022).

App story

Our customer has a mobile car racing app, the goal of the game is to collect different car cards and race them either online or against the AI on your mobile. The game includes over 1600 officially licensed cars to collect and race, ranging from Bugatti and Pagani to Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and even Caterham. You'll be able to put your cars to the test in a variety of racing environments, such as drag races, circuits, and hill climbs, and it's free to download on your mobile device. 

The app‘s name remains anonymous here to protect the privacy of our customers. To give you a better idea of ​​the app's story we're sharing, we show one of its competitors on the Google Play Store.

App Store Optimization challenge

When we performed our first ASO analysis for the app, we found that it had a lot of room for improvement at the ASO. Next, we commented on the ASO metadata fields before implementing optimizations.

In the App Name in the App Store and the Title in Google Play, it does not utilize all available characters and only works for one interesting keyword: "car".

On the other hand, the subtitle field in the App Store and the short description in Google Play could be improved, even though they use keywords and make use of the available character space. In the App Store, it does not use the Promo text field, which is also useful when sharing with users the latest app news or the next available feature.

Finally, the long description fields in Google Play, while improved and they use bold to highlight certain keywords, require changes in structure, and content, adding new keywords, and increasing the density of other keywords.



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App Store Optimization solution

As you know, the App Store provides three text fields that can be optimized for ASO: App Name, Subtitle, and Keywords Field. on the other hand, Google Play provides a Title, Short Descriptions, and Detailed Descriptions. Each field has a certain weight, but App Name in the App Store and Title in Google Play are the most relevant and must contain the most important keywords that we want to target. Unlike the App Store, long descriptions on Google Play do affect search ASO.

We always recommend using all available characters in the text fields and performing previous keyword research before optimizing the application files. In this way, it is possible to define the list of keywords for which we want to achieve visibility.

ASO Keyword research part

Keyword research is a very useful technique for researching and defining the keywords our potential customers will be looking for us (traffic) and the keywords we want to be found for (difficulty ranking of said keywords). It should be noted that once keywords have been defined, it is important to monitor them frequently, review them if necessary and repeat the keyword research. Here we recommend Appranking, a powerful ASO/ASA keywords tool, which can help you find the best keywords for your app.

To start our keyword research, we first search for all racing game apps to see how they build their keywords list, and also to identify our competitors.



Then we choose one of them, for example, Asphalt 9: Legends, to see its ASO keywords list. We can see this competitor app did well in keyword ranking, it got the brand name (even the competitor's brand name) and category keywords in the very top place: 



Then we continue on ASO Self Diagnostics feature, to see how we can optimize our app and the suggestions by Appranking. Here we can see a comparison between Asphalt 9: Legends and its competitors. At the same time, Appranking will give us some keyword suggestions. 

ASO optimizations in tab

Once we have defined our list of keywords, the next step is to develop the text of the application file for both stores. Keep in mind that, as we mentioned in the first point, these fields have different weights at the ASO level and are not the same for the two operating systems.



To optimize the keywords on your product page, we can use the Keyword optimization feature here. This time we take Rebel Racing in iOS for example (you can also switch to Google Play in this feature), we can see there are 10 keyword repetitions in the app description,  which can be optimized. And in the Metadata Analysis, we recommend changing your keywords to those search volumes less than 4605 and reducing the number of occurrences of repeated keywords.



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App Store Optimization result

As we've seen, good optimization of your application files can make a difference and generate more traffic, more downloads, and more business. With the changes ASO World made, we saw ASO impact category charts, keyword visibility, and most importantly downloads in just two weeks, with a 110% increase in the App Store and a 70% increase in Google Play. The app's search keyword visibility in the USA App Store has increased significantly, we have seen a huge increase in the keywords: 130% more keywords we rank in Top 1, with a 70% increase in the top 10 keywords.

However, this is just the beginning. ASO takes time and constant attention, it's not something you can do all at once, that's it, you have to keep working on it over time so that the gains made are not lost.