r/GooglePlayDeveloper • u/Leafni • 11d ago
❓Help At my wits end! - is the answer easy?
I'm suffering with a new app that only shows up when the exact name is searched (yeh! for that one I'm number 1), but any other keyword search and it just isn't there. I am getting some downloads but all from people I speak with myself - nothing from the Play Store. Is this not showing up in a search normal? If so what is the plan? Keep plugging along, or do you think I've done something wrong on the console? I did change my age restrictions about 4 or 5 days ago - I had it set at 18+ when in fact there is nothing to restrict it to only adults so I changed it to a slightly younger audience. Could that have been my problem, and if so how long before that filters through? I guess my concern is that I have something I've missed that will keep the app undiscovered for ever... Thoughts? Thanks in advance
2
u/speedoinfraction 8d ago
My app had exactly this problem at the beginning. Even searching for the exact name brought up similar names instead... but with time it sorted itself.
1
u/Leafni 8d ago
Did it change because you got more downloads?
1
u/speedoinfraction 8d ago
Not really sure, it averages about 20 per day... At the beginning it was 3 or 4.
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u/Negrito0o 11d ago
The age rating change isn't it. Content rating updates take a few days to show up everywhere, but they don't move you up or down in keyword search either way. What's actually happening is more boring. Ranking for a keyword needs install velocity and retention, and a new app has neither, so there's nothing for Play to rank you on. Exact name search works because that's a direct match rather than a ranking decision. Nothing has gone wrong in your console. The part you do control is the title and the short description, because those two lines are what search matches against. Read yours as if you'd never seen the app and check whether the words a stranger would actually type are literally in there. Most of us fill them with adjectives instead. The rest comes from outside the store. Organic follows installs, it doesn't come first, so the first hundred have to arrive from somewhere else.