How long does ASO take to work?

Conversion improvements from screenshots and copy show up immediately. Ranking movement from keyword work takes four to twelve weeks, because stores weigh sustained behaviour rather than the current text.

Does ASO still matter with paid acquisition?

More, not less. Paid traffic lands on the same listing, so conversion improvements multiply your paid spend as well as your organic traffic. And paid install velocity feeds the ranking that brings organic installs.

What is the single highest impact ASO change?

The first two screenshots, almost always. They are what most visitors see, they are rarely tested, and a genuine improvement there lifts every source of traffic at once.

Do keywords in the description affect App Store ranking?

On the App Store, no; the description is not indexed. On Google Play, yes, the description carries significant weight. The two stores need genuinely different text and copying one to the other wastes both.

App Store Optimization

ASO is two jobs that get discussed as one: being found, and being chosen. They need different work and only one of them is about keywords.

9 August 2026 · PAD team

Two jobs, not one

Job	What it depends on	How fast it moves
Being found	keywords, category, install velocity	weeks
Being chosen	screenshots, first lines, ratings	immediately, once changed

Most ASO effort goes into the first and most of the available gain sits in the second. A listing that converts at twice the rate is worth more than a ranking two positions higher, and it is far easier to achieve.

Keywords, briefly

On the App Store you get a title, a subtitle and a hundred-character keyword field. On Google Play the description carries the weight. In both cases the rules are dull and stable:

Do not repeat a word across title, subtitle and keyword field. It buys nothing.
Do not include your category name if you already rank for it.
Drop plurals and spaces in the keyword field; the store handles both.
Target phrases someone would actually type, not phrases that describe your architecture.

Keyword work has a ceiling. Once the obvious terms are covered, further gains come from conversion and velocity, not from finding a cleverer word.

The conversion half

This is where most of the available gain sits, and it is mostly design work rather than marketing work.

Element	Weight	Note
First two screenshots	highest	most visitors never scroll past them
First three description lines	high	the rest is below a fold nobody opens
Rating and review count	high	affects both conversion and ranking
Subtitle	medium	read as a promise, also carries keywords
Icon	medium	matters most in search results
Preview video	varies	helps for games, mixed elsewhere

The part ASO guides skip

Install velocity feeds ranking. Velocity comes from traffic. And a share of the traffic you send from social apps never reaches the listing at all, which means it cannot convert, cannot install, and cannot contribute to the velocity signal that ASO depends on.

Measured on 21,000 taps routed between 3 and 9 August 2026, 19,381 came from inside social apps, 95.6% on iOS. Traffic that dies before the store page is not just a lost install. It is a lost ranking signal, which compounds.

A sane testing cadence

Change one thing at a time and give it long enough to read. Screenshots weekly is too fast to attribute anything; monthly is about right for a small app. Google Play offers real A/B testing through store listing experiments, so use it there and infer carefully on iOS, where the tooling is thinner.

What to expect

ASO takes four to twelve weeks to move rankings meaningfully, and conversion changes show up as soon as they ship. Anyone promising faster ranking movement is describing either a very small keyword or something you would rather not buy.

Traffic that never reaches the listing cannot convert or rank.

Create a link