In the ASO community, it has long been believed that the Title field in the App Store has a greater "weight" for indexing search terms and is therefore a higher priority when optimizing metadata.
But is this really the case? And if the weight of the Title is indeed greater, how does adding a search term to it affect the app's ranking for that search term?
We tried to figure it out.
To investigate how the Title affects the ranking of search terms in the App Store, we looked at how the positions of different apps changed for search terms over the past six months.
We picked apps from various categories and searched for terms in different languages to conduct the experiment.
Below, you can see graphs illustrating the changes in rankings.
The orange color represents keywords found in the Subtitle or Keyword fields, while the green color represents keywords found in the Title field.
We have quite a few cases where the search term was previously present in the Subtitle/Keywords field in full or in part (and partially in the Title) but was later moved entirely to the Title. This had a clear positive impact on the ranking, and this trend holds true for both English search term and also in languages that use hieroglyphic and Cyrillic characters.
For example:
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The impact isn't restricted to completely including the search term in the Title field, but it can also be noticeable with partial inclusion. Example:
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As illustrated in the graphs above, adding the search term to the title can have a significant positive impact or can only result in a minor improvement of 1-2 positions.
Interestingly, we did not find a clear correlation between these changes and the popularity of the search term (SAP). Nonetheless, it is important to highlight that such rearrangements can affect the application's position for a long time even if no modifications have been made.
It should be noted that such changes after moving the search term to the Title field do not always occur. Based on our observations, in 50-60% of cases, the app's position remains unchanged:
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We observed a similar ranking algorithm behavior when, conversely, we moved the search term from the Title to the Subtitle/Keywords fields completely or partially. Below are examples of a decrease in position for the search term after moving it from the Title:
Just like in the case of adding the search term to the Title, in the case of moving it to the Subtitle/Keywords fields, the position may not change. For example:
In 40-50% of cases, transferring a search term fully or partially from the Subtitle/Keywords fields to the Title has a positive effect on the app's ranking for that search term.
The likelihood of a positive impact does not depend on the popularity of the search term (SAP).
Adding a search term to the Title can have a significant positive effect, or it can be barely noticeable - sometimes the ranking improves by only 1-2 positions. At the same time, we also don't see a clear dependence between the significance of the changes and the popularity of the search term (SAP).
The algorithm works the same for all languages and countries.
We haven't seen any correlation between the likelihood of a positive impact and whether the search term is fully transferred to the Title or only some of its keywords that it consists of.
The algorithm works in both directions - if the search term is transferred from the title back to the Subtitle/Keywords, the position may decrease.
Do we recommend using this algorithm from the App Store?
Definitely yes.
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