How to pick App Store keywords
Two questions pick a keyword: do people type it, and can you win it. Apple's search suggestions answer the first; the apps already ranking answer the second.
Most first keyword lists are written from the wrong side of the screen. You know your app, so you describe it the way you think about it, and you end up with words nobody types. Picking well is two questions asked in order, and the second one is where the real decisions get made.
Words people actually type
The words that matter are the ones a stranger would type while looking for something like your app, and those are usually shorter and plainer than the ones you would choose. You may have built a “mindful journaling companion”. People search for “journal”.
There is a way to see this rather than guess at it. Open the App Store, start typing in the search box, and read the list Apple offers you. That list comes back in an order, and the order is not alphabetical and not random. Apple does not publish how it is worked out, but it is the closest public signal of what people actually type, so it is the best available read on which of two phrases more people are looking for. Type the first few letters of your category and watch what Apple completes it to. Those completions are your candidate list, in your users’ vocabulary rather than yours.
Two things that ordering is not. It is not a download count, and it is not a monthly search volume with a decimal point in it. It points at which term is looked for more, and that is enough to choose between two words.
Fights you can win
Demand alone will lead you straight into the words you cannot win. “Photo editor” is typed by an enormous number of people, which is why the large apps in that category are already sitting on it.
The plain version of difficulty is this: look at who already ranks for the word. Run the search and read the first screen of results. If it is filled with apps that have thousands of ratings, years of updates, and a marketing budget, a new app is not going to displace them soon, whatever you write in your listing. If the first screen is thin, or the apps on it are older and rated poorly, that is a field you can compete in.
Longer and more specific phrases usually have a smaller field, and they also bring people who know what they want. “Journal” is a fight. “Gratitude journal” is a narrower fight with a clearer visitor.
Apple does not publish how ranking is worked out, so no honest tool can tell you the exact effort a keyword requires. What any of us can do, including ASOblick, is look at what already ranks and estimate from that.
The trap of your own name
Your app name and subtitle are already read as words. If your app is called Ledger Pro and your subtitle says “expense tracker for freelancers”, then “ledger”, “expense”, “tracker” and “freelancers” are already in your listing. Typing them again into the Keyword field, the hidden 100-character list in App Store Connect (Apple’s website for managing your app), spends the same characters twice and buys nothing new.
The same trap has a second half. New developers often track their own app name as a keyword and feel good about ranking first for it. You were always going to rank first for it. The only people typing your exact app name are people who already know your app, so that position tells you nothing about whether strangers can find you.
Spend the Keyword field on the terms your name and subtitle do not already cover.
Start small and measure
You do not need forty keywords. Start with a handful, five or so, chosen where real demand meets a field you could realistically place in. Write them down, and check where you rank for each of them every day.
Then leave them alone for a while. A single position on a single day is noise; the same word checked daily for two weeks is a direction. After a few weeks you can see which words are climbing, which have not moved since you added them, and which you were never going to win. Drop the ones going nowhere, put new candidates in their place, and repeat. That is the whole loop, and it is more useful than a longer list you never look at.
ASOblick puts both halves of the decision on one row. Next to each keyword it shows popularity, ASOblick’s reading of where Apple’s own search suggestions rank that term, and difficulty, ASOblick’s estimate based on which apps already hold the results. Both are the app’s own numbers rather than Apple’s, and both say so where they are shown. What comes from Apple is the raw material underneath them: the suggestion ordering, and who currently ranks.