Lesson: Scaling User Growth with Maud Pasturaud

Step #9 Unpaid Channels: The benefits of ASO and SEO

SEO was an art that started with Google and it is still working today. It is very competitive so it is harder to get traction through SEO. And the equivalent on mobile is what we call ASO, which is app store optimization. The concept of SEO is today I am searching for something on Google. I am searching for flash sales. I want to make sure that I capture a person who is looking for flash sales so I developed a bunch of those SEO pages for natural search results from the search page of Google. That has been an art and people have been working on it for years.

What’s really new and it's much harder on the app store optimization. If you had to look at the same use case on the app store, today if you search for “flash sales” on the app store, it’s a total mess. You don't necessarily get the relevant results at the top or the company that you are looking for that actually does flash sales may be at the total bottom so you have to scroll. So app store optimization is really hard. It’s an art to those little optimizations and there is a bunch of criteria that go into it that are much harder than the web. SEO and ASO is a way to drive traffic. It is a bit harder today as a result of SEO on the web being more competitive and ASO being really hard mobile. That is the nature of how Apple and Google have built these app stores. That is one and you definitely need to optimize for it and that's a given.

The second one is PR. We’ll look at PR, so I am not going to go into it. It’s very traditional. Third is content growth. Content growth, the principle is you are taking whatever content you are building and you seed it all over the Internet and it is a bit linked with SEO. By virtue of your content being in other places, people are going to come back to your site.

An example is that at Secret we had a lot of amazing content in the app and people were telling stories and talking about things that you had not seen anywhere else. What we took is we grabbed all the best secrets that our users had shared and we would share it with BuzzFeed for example. So we created an article of all those top secrets. And the direct effect of that was that readers from BuzzFeed who did not know about Secret were hearing about us there and then downloading the product. So that is the typical growth content type of partnership. So there are a bunch of things that you can do around that. That's the third.

Another one is virality and virality is very much product orientated. The rest of the channels including paid are really hard but virality is something that's really built within the product and really thought through that way.