Google play store app reviews are gaining more and more important in terms of App Store Optimization. Especially since the change in the Google Play Store algorithm, aiming at “humanizing” the app world.
Having a good app is no longer enough if you want to succeed in the app world. Being creative and cool is not sufficient anymore. From now on you absolutely need to focus on App Store Optimization (ASO), exactly the way you would with SEO for your website.
It is already very challenging to get users to see your app. Title, keywords, description, icons, and screenshots must be sharpened to get the best chance of appearing at the top of the list. But what’s even more challenging is to get positive reviews & ratings from your customers and drive downloads of your Google play store app.
Importance of Google play store app reviews:
Google play store search algorithm gave much more importance to the social factor in the ranking evaluation of an app. Rankings (stars) and reviews have now a bigger weight in the algorithm. This concretely means that if your app has a lot of good reviews and rankings, its ranking position will improve drastically. On the other side, if you have a majority of negative appreciations, your app will inevitably downgrade in the App Store.
From an ASO point of view, the importance given to reviews aims to reward alive apps and, at the same time, to penalize dead ones.
How Google handles Google play store app reviews?
Google Play Store algorithm makes it difficult to cheat with machine-generated reviews. If you want to post an app review on Google Play, you have to log on to your Google+ account. That way, your real name will publicly appear on your post.
This has been elaborated to give more importance to reviews coming from users with a higher influence. Genuine and active profiles will therefore have more impact than others. Reviews coming from trustworthy users have a higher degree of influence on the algorithm.
It gives less importance to reviews coming from unknown users with a suspicious or inactive and incomplete profile. We can compare this method of classifying apps with Google’s PageRank algorithm, giving more importance to links coming from trusted websites than unreliable ones.
App Reviews works Feedback for the developer:
Reviews are also very interesting for app developers as they can warn them of any bugs or problems the app is facing. Users won’t hesitate to mark their anger or disappointment if an app is not working as expected.
They also enable the app launcher to have general feedback. This will allow him to know if the app is globally appreciated or not. Users can also stress out features that could be improved.
At the same time, you have the ability to see how users perceive your competitors’ apps. You, therefore, have the opportunity to focus on your weaknesses in order to offer something greater.
It is also interesting to check apps with very bad reviews but still lots of downloads. Why? Because it means that people still need this app or this service no matter its flaws.
CONCLUSION:
Google play store Reviews give credibility to an app. People won’t download an app with a lot of bad reviews because they trust other people.
Many good reviews help to increase an app’s ranking position.