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ASO vs SEO: your app needs both search engines
Two search engines decide your app's fate. The App Store gives you 160 indexed characters and judges you on behavior. Google gives you an unlimited content surface and judges you on usefulness. They're different machines, and they feed each other, which is the part most indies never wire up.
Two machines, two rulebooks
ASO is a knife fight in a phone booth: three metadata fields per storefront, rankings moved by download velocity, tap-through and retention. You can't publish your way to store rank: the surface is fixed. SEO is the opposite: infinite surface, ranked on relevance and authority, where a genuinely useful page can outrank giants on a specific question. The store owns install intent ("habit tracker" typed in the App Store means someone's installing something today); the web owns problem intent ("why can't I stick to habits" means someone might, once convinced). Different intents, different games, and only one of them lets you talk.
The loop that makes them compound
Here's the wiring: a useful page ranks on Google for a problem → readers meet your app inside the answer → some search your app's name in the App Store → branded search demand grows, which is store-visible interest in exactly you → the listing converts it (that part's on your screenshots). Apple never crawled your website; your website still moved your store numbers. The receipts for this pattern are everywhere once you look: apps whose organic engine is a stack of landing pages, one per search intent, each ending at a store button. You are, for the record, inside this exact strategy right now: a guide, ranking for a question, with an app at the bottom. We contain no surprises.
The landing-pages-per-intent pattern
- One page per problem your app solves: not one page per feature. Feature pages answer questions nobody asked; problem pages meet searches that exist.
- Actually answer the question. The page must be worth ranking: thin doorway pages die in both search engines and in the reader's respect. Give the full answer, then offer the app (the zero-budget playbook's community rule, applied to Google).
- Localize the winners: the same re-research rule applies to web queries; translated pages for markets where your store metadata already works double the loop.
- Directories and backlinks feed this side: authority is SEO's velocity, and a listing sweep is its cheapest source.
Where to spend limited hours
Order of operations for one busy human: ASO first: it's an afternoon, and install intent is waiting. SEO second, forever: a page a week compounds for years. And close the measurement loop across both engines: web analytics tell you readers came; the store funnel tells you searchers followed. A content bet that worked shows up as a step in impressions and branded discovery, dated and judged like any other change, because a blog that doesn't eventually move the funnel is a diary.
Both engines, one scoreboard
FunnelHound shows whether your content bets became store impressions and installs, from App Store Connect, milestone-marked.
Get FunnelHoundData notes: the branded-search loop is replicated across indie case studies as of 2026 but runs on months-long timescales: judge content bets in quarters, not weeks. App Store search does not index external websites; the connection is behavioral, through users.