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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: do people type this, and can you win it.
How do I find keywords people actually search for?
The words that count are the ones a stranger types while looking for something like your app. They are usually shorter and plainer than the ones you would choose. You may have built a “mindful journaling companion”. People search for “journal”.
You can see what they type. Open the App Store, tap the search box, and type the first few letters of a word your app is about. Apple offers a list of completions as you type.
That list comes back in an order. The order is not alphabetical. Apple does not publish how it is worked out. It is the closest public reading of what people type into that box: a completion near the top is read as one more people type than a completion further down.
Read the order for what it is. It is not a download count. It is not a number of searches a month. It tells you which of two words more people look for, and that is the question that changes what you write in your listing.
Two habits make the list more useful:
- Type short. The search box completes the start of a search. Type a short word and Apple completes it. Type a whole sentence and it completes nothing, however popular the subject is. An empty list after a long phrase says nothing about demand.
- Type the problem, then the category. “sleep” and “sleep tracker” give different lists. The people typing the problem are often the ones who have not found an app yet.
What is normal: the completions differ from country to country, because each country has its own App Store.
Which keywords can a new app win?
Demand alone leads you to the words you have no chance at. “Photo editor” is typed by an enormous number of people, and that is why the largest apps in the category already hold it.
To judge a word, run the search and read the first screen of results. Look at four things about the apps there:
- How many ratings they have. An app with tens of thousands of ratings has years of downloads behind it. A first screen full of those is a long fight.
- Whether the word is in their names. When most of the first ten apps carry the exact phrase in their names, every one of them is going after that search.
- How many different developers hold the first ten places. Ten apps from ten developers is a crowded field.
- How many results the search returns at all. A search with a few dozen results is a small field. One that fills page after page is a crowded one.
A first screen of old, thinly rated apps is a field you can compete in. A first screen of household names is not, whatever you write in your listing.
Longer 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. Nobody outside Apple can tell you exactly what a keyword takes. What you can do is read who holds it today and compare words against each other.
Skip the words your listing already has
Apple reads the words in your app name and subtitle for search. If your app is called Pennory Ledger and your subtitle says “expense tracker for freelancers”, then “pennory”, “ledger”, “expense”, “tracker” and “freelancers” are already in your listing. The keyword field is the hidden 100-character list in App Store Connect (Apple’s website for managing your apps). Typing those words there again spends the characters twice.
The same trap has a second half. Ranking first for your own app name feels good, and it says little. The people typing your exact name already know your app. A search for what your app does is where strangers find you.
The guide on the name, subtitle and keyword field goes through the characters in detail.
Start with five and watch them
You do not need forty keywords. Start with about five: words many people type and few apps with many ratings hold. Write down where you rank for each one, every day.
Then leave them alone for a few weeks. One position on one day is noise. The same word checked daily for two weeks is a direction. Then drop the words going nowhere, put new candidates in their place, and repeat. How long it takes covers the wait.
Do this today
Take half an hour with the App Store and a text file:
- Type the first three or four letters of three words your app is about into the App Store search box. Write down each list of completions, in the order Apple gives them.
- Pick the two completions that describe your app best.
- Search each one. For the first five apps in the results, write down how many ratings each has and whether the search’s words are in its name.
- Keep the word whose first five apps have fewer ratings. That is your first keyword to watch.
In ASOblick
Beside every keyword you track, two answers on one row: popularity and difficulty, each a number out of 100 with a bar beside it. Hover over either one and its tooltip gives the word: Low, Medium or High for popularity, Easy, Medium or Hard for difficulty. Popularity is ASOblick’s own estimate, worked out from where Apple’s search suggestions place the term and refreshed every week. Difficulty is ASOblick’s own estimate, worked out from the ten apps holding today’s results: their rating counts weigh most, then whether the term is in their names, how many developers they come from, and how many results the search returns, with phrases of two or more words scored a little lower. Each tooltip says so in the app. Every night ASOblick also looks for new terms for your app, and the Suggestions sheet lists them with a line saying where each came from, such as “Apple suggests this when someone types ‘habit’”. Track adds one to your keywords. In the Workshop, every word of your title, subtitle and keyword field shows how many of your searches hold it, with each search’s popularity and your rank. For an app you have not built yet, Ideas shows the same reading: Apple’s suggestions for your idea’s words, in their order, with the app holding the top of each today.
Free for your first app and five keywords, Pro for as many as you like.
Next on the path: App name, subtitle and keyword field: what to put in each