For app publishers, mobile-first brands and product teams
Fractional ASO & Search Lead for App Businesses
For most publishers, the constraint isn’t the listing, it’s that ranking is driven by signals nobody owns: install velocity, review volume, retention. Fixing the metadata alone buys you a few weeks, then the plateau returns.
Sound familiar?
The usual pattern
Apps usually have plenty of activity around them: paid campaigns, creative refreshes, the occasional keyword update. What they often lack is anyone joining those things up, or judging whether the store work and the paid work are pulling in the same direction.
- Store rankings lifting briefly after a metadata change, then flattening again
- Apple and Google Play treated as one job, when the keyword mechanics of each are fundamentally different
- Product page and store listing experiments either never run, or run without enough traffic to be conclusive
- Ratings and review generation left to a default in-app prompt nobody has revisited
- Apple Search Ads and Google App Campaigns budgeted and reported separately from organic, so neither informs the other
- Reporting that tracks installs, not cost per retained user or revenue by acquisition source
With a senior search owner
What changes
Keyword strategy built per store
Apple’s hidden character limit rewards restraint. Google Play indexes your full listing text. Both worked properly, from one shared intent map rather than two disconnected efforts.
A testing programme that concludes
Product Page Optimisation and store listing experiments run with enough traffic and enough discipline to produce answers you can act on, not arguments about screenshots.
Off-store signals treated as the lever they are
Review generation, install velocity around releases, web-to-app journeys and branded search handled deliberately, because that’s where the ranking ceiling actually sits.
Paid and organic on the same plan
Apple Search Ads and Google App Campaigns used to seed velocity and accelerate creative testing, not run as an isolated budget line with its own separate report.
How it works
Start with clarity, not commitment
Most engagements begin with an ASO Leadership Review, a fixed-scope diagnostic across both stores ending in a 90-day priority roadmap. If ongoing direction makes sense after that, I step in as your fractional search lead.
Also worth a look:
I help you decide what to test, what to fix, what to measure and what to stop paying for.
Next step
Book an ASO Leadership Review?
Book a short call and we’ll work out whether a leadership review or ongoing fractional support is the right starting point.