Health and fitness is all the rage in society today. Everyone seems to have the best running, biking, weight lifting, dieting plan for you to lose the most weight. On the App Store, “Fitness” has a keyword volume of 62/100, “workout” is 66/100 and “food tracker” is 54/100. Obviously, in their search for a guide for healthier lifestyles, people are turning to the App and Play Stores for help.
Noom is one such app that has burst onto the app scene. Previously featured in the coveted “App of the Day” spot on the App Store, it could be safe to assume that Noom has established itself in the app world. But, as we’ve seen before, prior success does not always mean continued success. Let’s look at some ways Noom could whip its ASO into better shape.
Title and subtitle
At the moment, Noom doesn’t utilize any keywords in its app title, and we all know by now that the title holds the most weight when it comes to indexing keywords, so this is a huge missed opportunity for Noom here. Currently, Noom is just barely within the top 10 for keywords like “weight loss”, “diet” and “diet tracker.” These keywords all have 39/100 and above search volume, which means Noom needs to climb the ladder a little bit in order to catch up with competitors who are all ranking well in these keywords. There are some keywords, such as “food tacker”, where Noom doesn’t even show up in the top 20 while all of its competitors are there.
On the Play Store side of things, Noom’s title is “Noom: Health & Weight”. This is an improvement from the App Store, as there are keywords added. However, Noom doesn’t rank in the top 10 for either Health or Weight on the Play Store. This shows us that maybe they should reconsider their title.
Noom does make effective use of the subtitle with “Healthy Weight Loss and More.” Utilizing keywords in the subtitle is important, but by moving some of these high-value keywords into the title, we can free up characters for additional keywords in the subtitle.
Screenshots
Noom’s screenshots clearly explain some key features about the app — they’re just a little bit hard to read on the App Store. By having shorter and larger callouts, users will have an easier time understanding why they should download Noom over other apps. Noom earns a cheat day for having a preview video for the iPhone 8 and on Android. Preview videos can help increase conversion rates by up to 30%, so they’re highly essential in ASO
Noom also has different assets for iPhone 8 and iPhone X. There’s no preview video for the iPhone X and it has a different first screenshot. By all means, we encourage experimenting with screenshots to find out if a different design works better or worse. However, Apple doesn’t break down downloads by different iPhone devices. Therefore, it doesn’t make much sense to have different screenshots between your iPhone 8 and iPhone X sizes. You’re better off keeping the same screens — and if you want to experiment with different designs, check out how to split test on the App Store.
On the Play Store, Noom opts to use horizontal screenshots. Since they also have a preview video, this is an awesome thing. On the Play Store, having a preview video automatically shrinks the size of your vertical screenshots to fit in line. But horizontal screenshots don’t resize, making them easier to read.
Android Description
In the Play Store, keyword density in the description is an important factor. Upon examining Noom’s description, it’s easy to say that it’s a little sparse. They have two keywords that have greater than 1% density in their description: healthy and habits. Compared to their competitors’ descriptions, we can see Noom is a little behind in the keyword density aspect.
When you look at the gaps in Noom’s ASO Strategy, it’s apparent that they’re relying heavily on the success of their brand name and branded searches. Being featured on the App Store is no small thing — it can skyrocket app downloads overnight. The keyword “Noom” has a 62 and 52 keyword volume on the App Store and Play Store, respectively. By focusing on growing the highest value keyword rankings, Noom can achieve even more significant growth from the organic side by attracting new users looking for their weight loss solution.
