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Mountain Project App Store Spotlight

April 23rd, 2021

Mountain Project App Store Spotlight
Anh Nguyen

by Anh Nguyen

COO & Co-Founder at Gummicube, Inc

Summer is just around the corner, and as the days grow longer and warmer, more people are looking for ways to get outside and have fun. Adventure Projects Inc is here to help with various guides for different outdoor activities.

Mountain Project is a comprehensive digital guidebook for rock climbers and mountaineers. Whether you are traveling the nation looking for the coolest crags, or a gym rat searching for the best walls in your town, Mountain Project helps you find the perfect spot.

Users can sort over 155,000 routes by discipline, difficulty, and star ranking and connect with others to learn stats and critical information about a climb before they set out. Best of all, the in-app map helps people find and navigate to outdoor climbing sites near them.

Mountain Project is an incredible app that can replace hundreds of guidebooks for the avid climber. However, a quick search for “Mountain Climbing” won’t bring you close to this handy tool. Taking a look at the listings in the app stores, we can suss out where the weak spots might be and see how App Store Optimization could send it to the top.

iOS App Store

Mountain Project boasts a 4.7 star rating on the iOS App Store with over two-thousand reviews. At first glance this app looks very clean and professional, with an on-brand icon and detailed screenshots.

The screenshots here do a great job of reflecting the in-app experience, but the text overlay is much too small. The font size combined with the length of these callouts makes the text not easily noticeable at a glance. Using more concise callout text that is easily legible from a quick look in the search result view can help users more immediately understand what the app has to offer.

Moving on to the description, there is very little introduction before being plunged into the list of features. A few short sentences related to keywords a user can find the app by searching, preceding the feature list, help the user connect their search with the app.

On the topic of keywords, not a lot of highly searched terms appear anywhere in the description. While apple does not index the description for organic search, it can still help the user connect their search query with the app, leading to higher conversion potential.

The Google Play Store

Mountain Project has a lower rating in the Google Play Store, coming in at 4.4 stars. While this could have to do with the different user bases of each platform, it appears that the Google Play Store’s listing suffers from more critical issues of visibility than the iOS App Store. Here, the screenshots lack any overlay text whatsoever. This could really discourage users from investigating the app any further by not calling out features that may be of interest to them.

The Google Play Store description is identical to the description found on the iOS App Store, skipping straight to the features without a lead-in. The huge problem with this approach in the Play Store is how Google uses descriptions for categorization.

Google’s algorithm crawls the description to determine how it should be indexed in search results. Having a description that offers few-to-no relevant keywords leaves the app poorly suited for indexing, thus reaching fewer potential users. Mountain Project might benefit from being more keyword-focused when describing their features, to aid in search indexation potential.

Overall

Mountain Project is an invaluable app for any climber to have. Unfortunately, with its current visibility, not many potential users will even find it without really digging first.

With its rich features and strong community support, it’s a shame for new climbers to not have this resource in their arsenal. Adventure Projects could benefit from revisiting their strategy for app store listings, and incorporate some tried-and-true methods for reaching a broader audience of new users.

Sprucing up screenshots with highly visible, compelling briefs about features and resources would grab the eyes of passers-by to come take a closer look at the app. Once there, adding some keyword-rich language in the description could not only pique the interest of potential new users, but also provide the indexing machines with the right information to put this app in front of those actively searching for it.

App Store Optimization can help your app climb the highest peaks. Let Gummicube be your guide!

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