ASO for gambling and betting apps on the App Store

Search is the main source of organic installs on the App Store, and for casino, slots and betting it works the same way as for any other niche. The difference is that every metadata change costs a gambling app more: review is stricter, and a mistake costs time or the app itself.

What Apple requires from gambling apps

The App Store Review Guidelines give gambling its own section, 5.3. In short:

• apps that offer real money gaming (sports betting, poker, casino games, horse racing) or lotteries must have the necessary licensing and permissions where the app is used;
• they must be geo-restricted to those locations;
• they must be free on the App Store;
• in-app purchase may not be used to buy credit or currency for real money gaming.

Apple itself warns that such apps should expect extra time in review. That makes another trip to review for a couple of new keywords a poor trade.

Where search traffic comes from

Queries in the niche fall into three groups:

• Generic: casino, slots, sports betting. High volume, maximum competition.
• Brand: names of well-known casinos and bookmakers. People are looking for one product but see its neighbours in the results too. The risks are covered in the article on competitor brand keywords.
• Long-tail and misspelled: "casino real money", "slots free spins", transliterations and typos in brand names. Lower volume, but much easier to appear for.

Why metadata runs out

Keywords live in a 30-character name, a 30-character subtitle and a 100-character keyword field. A gambling app cannot put much into the name and subtitle: Apple checks that metadata is not packed with other brands and irrelevant words. That leaves the keyword field, and 100 characters are gone after about ten queries. How the field works is explained in How App Store indexing works.

How to add keywords without a new version

We write keywords without an app update and without review: any keywords, including generic queries, long phrases and competitor brands. One order takes up to 100 characters per app. It is one shared field that works in all storefronts at once, and the keywords show up in search in about 2 hours.

We need a link to the app, the keywords, the cookies of your developer account and a proxy.

What indexing does not do

It gets the app into the results for a keyword. The place in those results depends on installs and conversion for the query, in other words on whether you send traffic and how the product page looks. Indexing without traffic gives you presence in search, not the top.

Where to start

Put together 100 characters of keywords: a few generic queries, a couple of long phrases and the brands your competitors are searched by. Send an order: one app is $49, payment in USDT (TRC20).