How to Choose an App Store Optimization Company

What an App Store Optimization Company Actually Does

An app store optimization company improves how your app is found and how many people who find it actually install it. That covers two separate jobs: getting the app to show up in search results and browse pages inside the App Store and Google Play, and getting the people who land on your listing to tap install instead of scrolling past.

Most people hear "ASO" and think it's just keyword stuffing in the app title. That's a small piece of it. A competent ASO company works across metadata, creative assets, ratings and reviews, localization, and conversion testing, and treats all of it as one system rather than a checklist.

If your app isn't getting discovered organically, no amount of paid user acquisition fixes that cheaply. Paid installs can cost anywhere from $1 to $5 per install depending on category and geography, and that cost keeps climbing every year. Organic ranking is the only channel where the cost per install trends toward zero over time.

The Core Pieces of ASO Work

A real ASO engagement usually breaks into these areas:

• Keyword research and mapping: finding the actual search terms your target users type, not just guessing based on your app's features.
• Metadata optimization: title, subtitle, short description, long description, and keyword field (on iOS) tuned to those terms without reading like spam.
• Creative optimization: icon, screenshots, preview video, and feature graphic, tested for which version actually converts browsers into installers.
• Ratings and review management: prompting happy users at the right moment, responding to negative reviews, and tracking rating trends by version.
• Localization: translating and re-optimizing listings for each major market you operate in, since keyword volume and competition differ by language.
• Conversion rate testing: running store listing experiments (Google Play's built-in experiments, or third-party tools for iOS) to see which screenshots or icon actually win.
• Competitor tracking: watching what ranking apps in your category change and reacting before you lose position.

Why Position 27 on Google Doesn't Mean Anything for App Store Ranking

If you're researching this term through a search engine, it's worth being direct about something: ranking well on Google for "app store optimization company" tells you nothing about ranking well inside the App Store or Google Play. Those are two completely different search systems with different signals, different algorithms, and different update cycles.

Google's search algorithm is public knowledge in broad strokes and documented extensively. App Store and Google Play ranking factors are not published in detail by Apple or Google, which is exactly why this is a specialized skill rather than something any general marketer picks up quickly. Apple's own App Store Connect documentation covers what metadata fields exist, but it does not explain how the ranking algorithm weighs them, and that gap is where ASO expertise actually lives.

How Much an ASO Company Actually Costs

Pricing for app store optimization work varies by scope, but you can reason through it honestly instead of guessing.

A one-time ASO audit and metadata overhaul for a single app on one platform is a fairly contained job: keyword research, competitor analysis, rewriting metadata, and a basic screenshot redesign brief. That's roughly 20 to 40 hours of specialized work. At a realistic blended rate for this kind of work, that lands in the $300 to $600 range for one platform, or $500 to $1,000 if you need both iOS and Google Play done properly with separate keyword sets.

Ongoing ASO management (monthly keyword tracking, iterative metadata updates, creative testing, review monitoring, competitor watching) is a different commitment. A lean single-app program runs about 8 to 15 hours a month of actual work once the initial setup is done, which puts monthly retainers in the $150 to $400 range for a straightforward app. A more competitive category, multiple localized markets, or an app portfolio with several titles pushes that to 30 to 60+ hours a month, landing between $500 and $1,500 monthly.

Full creative testing programs (running structured A/B tests on icons, screenshots, and preview videos across multiple variants) add real hours because each test needs a hypothesis, asset production, a run period of usually 2 to 4 weeks, and analysis. Budget an extra 10 to 20 hours per test cycle, which is why serious creative optimization programs often run $400 to $900 per test cycle on top of base ASO management.

These numbers assume the app itself is stable and doesn't need engineering changes to support the ASO work. If your app needs new screenshot-worthy features, deep links for store experiments, or crash fixes uncovered during the process, that's separate development or software testing and qa services work, not ASO.

A single well-optimized keyword can move an app from page 3 to a top-5 position in its category, and that shift alone often does more for install volume than doubling a paid ad budget. Ranking position inside the store, not raw search volume, is usually the bottleneck.

Signs You're Talking to a Real ASO Company vs. a Reseller

Not every agency claiming ASO expertise actually does the work in-house. Some resell generic keyword reports pulled from a third-party tool with no interpretation layer on top.

Ask these questions before signing anything:

1. Can they show a before-and-after ranking change for a real app, even anonymized?
2. Do they run store listing experiments themselves, or just recommend you try Google Play's experiment feature on your own?
3. Do they separate iOS and Android strategy, since keyword fields, ranking weight, and creative rules differ meaningfully between the two stores?
4. Do they track review sentiment, not just star rating averages, since Apple and Google both factor recent review velocity into ranking?
5. Will they commit to a reporting cadence with actual ranking data, not just a monthly summary email of activities performed?

If the answer to more than one of these is vague, you're likely paying for a templated process rather than genuine strategy.

ASO and Development Are Not the Same Conversation, But They Overlap

A pattern worth naming: apps with real ranking problems often have a product problem underneath the metadata problem. If your uninstall rate is high in the first 24 hours, no keyword tweak fixes that. Apple and Google both weight retention and engagement signals into ranking, so a buggy onboarding flow or a crash-prone first session actively hurts your ASO results regardless of how good your screenshots look.

This is why the best outcomes usually come from treating ASO as connected to the product itself, not a marketing layer bolted on afterward. If your app was built or is maintained through mobile app development work, the same team or a closely coordinated one should be feeding retention and crash data back into the ASO strategy, because those numbers directly affect ranking.

Our own engineering team's take: we've seen ASO recommendations get ignored for months because the "marketing fix" and the "product fix" lived in two different vendor relationships that never talked to each other. Coordinating them from day one is worth more than any single keyword change.

DIY vs. Hiring: What Actually Changes the Outcome

Founders often start ASO themselves using free tools and público guides. That's a reasonable starting point for a brand-new app with low competition. Where it stops working is once you're competing in a crowded category or trying to scale past a few thousand monthly installs.

The honest crossover point is usually around 1,000 to 5,000 monthly organic installs or an app that's plateaued in ranking for more than two consecutive months. Below that, DIY with a good keyword tool is defensible. Above it, the hours needed to do it properly exceed what most founders or in-house marketers can sustain alongside everything else on their plate.

Timeline: What to Expect and When

ASO is not instant. Set realistic expectations up front so you don't judge a company unfairly in week two.

• Week 1-2: Audit, keyword research, competitor mapping.
• Week 3-4: Metadata changes go live, initial creative recommendations delivered.
• Week 4-8: First ranking movement visible for lower-competition keywords; app stores need time to re-crawl and re-index listings.
• Month 2-3: Creative testing cycles begin producing statistically meaningful conversion data.
• Month 3-6: Ranking for higher-competition keywords starts shifting if metadata, creative, and review signals are all improving together.

Anyone promising top rankings inside two weeks is either targeting keywords with near-zero competition or overstating what's realistic.

Getting Started

App store optimization isn't a one-time fix you buy and forget. It's an ongoing discipline that connects your app's metadata, creative, reviews, and actual product quality into a single feedback loop, and the companies that do it well treat it that way rather than as a keyword-stuffing exercise.

Dignizant approaches ASO as part of the same conversation as the app itself, connecting store performance data back to development and quality decisions instead of treating marketing and engineering as separate tracks. If you're trying to figure out whether your app's ranking problem is a metadata issue, a product issue, or both, reach out to Dignizant and we'll walk through what's actually holding your app back.

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