Read a competitor's reviews for keywords and features
Their one-star reviews are your roadmap and their five-star reviews are your subtitle. How to read fifty reviews in ten minutes and take four things away.
A competitor's written reviews are the only place their users say what they wanted, in their own words. The words they use for the thing are search terms: someone who writes "I just wanted a simple calorie counter without the meal plans" types "simple calorie counter" into the store. The praise that repeats is what the category values; the complaint that repeats is the feature the category is missing.
The app page groups a competitor's reviews into complaints, likes and requests. Read the complaints first: a complaint that appears in more than a tenth of the reviews and that your app already answers belongs in your subtitle or first screenshot, phrased as they phrase it. Read the likes second: those are the words that make people rate, which is the thing that ranks you.
Do the same for your own reviews with the opposite aim. Your complaints are the next release; a release that fixes the complaint that repeats raises the average, and the average is read before the subtitle.
In order
- 01On your app's page, open Competitors: the apps in the top 10 of the terms you share, sorted by how many they beat you on. Take the top three.
- 02Open each one's Reviews tab. Read the complaints group; write down every phrase that appears more than once.
- 03Read the likes group; write down the words they use for the thing the app does well.
- 04Run both lists through the explorer. Phrases with popularity go on your keyword list; the rest are feature notes.
- 05Put the strongest phrase your app already delivers into the subtitle, in their words, in the next release.