A Step-by-Step Guide to App Keyword Research

• Review: Audit your current metadata performance
• Research: Build your keyword list
• Prioritize: Define the top keywords to include in your metadata
• Target: Add keywords to the different metadata, keeping in mind store ranking factors
• Monitor: Monitor, measure, and iterate

2. Keyword research: Build a list of 150-250 terms

This step may seem obvious but it is the most crucial, as all your subsequent actions depend on its success.

Your app keyword research starts by building an extensive list of around 150-250 keywords.

Make sure you don’t miss out on any relevant keywords that have the potential to drive downloads to your app.

1. Brainstorm keywords

Think of the words you use when describing your app, its features and values, as well as the keywords used by your competitors. Also, check the keywords used in your app reviews (if your app has already been published) and competitors’ reviews to understand how users describe your app.

Here are a couple of pointers to get started:

• Think about your app’s main features and benefits
• Check your website for keywords
• Learn from your colleagues some keywords they would use to search for your app

2. Take a look at competitor keywords

Analyze the app titles, subtitles, descriptions, and even screenshot captions of your competitors to a good sense of the keywords they’re using, which might be useful for your own app as well.

On Google Play, it’s easy to view all the metadata elements that your competitors include.

However, on the App Store, the process isn’t as clear-cut. The App Store Connect hides the 100-character keyword field used by other apps, so fully grasping the keywords your competitors use in their metadata involves a bit of guesswork.

A simple way to check if an iOS app ranks for a specific keyword is to perform a search using the app’s brand name along with the keyword you’re interested in. For instance, if you want to find out if Spotify ranks for the keyword “streaming,” you could search for “Spotify streaming.” This helps you figure out if “streaming” is likely included in Spotify’s metadata.

3. Find long-tail keywords

Enrich your app keyword research with long-tail keywords, which contain three or more words. These keywords often provide a clearer sense of user intent and, while they may attract fewer searches, they typically lead to higher conversion rates compared to more general, single-word terms.

Long-tail keywords are generally less competitive, which can make it easier for your app to achieve a higher ranking. This is particularly advantageous for newer or smaller apps that are trying to gain traction in a competitive market. By focusing on long-tail keywords with lower search volumes, you might gain more visibility than if you were to compete for highly sought-after single keywords, where larger, established apps tend to dominate.

You can expand your keyword backlog by exploring keywords based on:

• Product or service description: For example, entering “food delivery app” might yield a comprehensive list of relevant keywords, many of which could be crucial for your app. Include these in your keyword strategy.
• Specific product category: Tools like Google Keyword Planner can generate keyword ideas from different product categories, further tailoring your search to your app’s niche.

4. Dig into user reviews

User feedback is a great way to discover how people describe your app or your competitors’.

For instance, if you manage a travel app similar to Skyscanner or KAYAK, you might notice that reviewers often mention “multi-city trips.” If this term is relevant, consider adding it to your keyword backlog to align with user search behaviors.

Find out how our data science team leveraged AI model to extract the most valuable insights in app reviews

5. Leverage an ASO platform

Once you run out of ideas, use an ASO tool to strengthen this step of your keyword research.

With AppTweak, you can leverage 12+ keyword suggestion tools in AppTweak to save time finding new visibility opportunities. For instance, our AI-generated list powered by Atlas AI provides you with 100 relevant keyword suggestions for your app in seconds.

Before you start using an ASO tool, read through this detailed guide to navigate the complexities of ASO

• Keyword clusters: Keyword clusters are a powerful ASO tool, revealing groups of keywords that Apple or Google find closely linked to your initial keyword. You can uncover new keyword opportunities that may be less competitive than your main keywords. Targeting these related clusters can also boost your app’s relevance to its main keywords, improving rankings over time.

• Related keywords: Type a single keyword here, and we’ll provide a list of 50 related keywords, especially relevant in an app store context. These unclustered keywords offer additional opportunities for expanding your keyword strategy.
• Keyword shuffler: You can use this to create long-tail keyword combinations effortlessly. Enter up to 5 keywords and click on “Generate combinations” to get all possible single-, double-, and triple-word combinations. AppTweak also retrieves the search volume for each combination, displaying it once available.
• AppDNA/GameDNA: AppDNA is a more precise category describing its core purpose, while GameDNA refers to a more detailed categorization based on the game’s gameplay. In this section, discover the most relevant keywords for a specific AppDNA or GameDNA classification.

3. Prioritize keywords using smart KPIs & live metrics

Next, shorten your keyword list and decide which terms deserve to be in your app’s metadata.

Search results are increasingly crowded, so ASO practitioners must perform thorough app keyword research to choose the best terms for their app.

At AppTweak, we provide smart KPIs and live metrics, updated daily, to inform your decisions. When choosing keywords, focus on these 4 important KPIs:

• Keyword relevancy: An AI-powered indicator between 0 and 100, showing how relevant a keyword is to a specific app. Keyword relevancy should be the number one criterion in your keyword selection, as it is essential to know that users searching for that keyword are likely to be interested in your app.
• Keyword volume & Maximum Reach: These are the search popularity and visibility potential of your selected keywords respectively. Even if your app ranks #1 for a low-volume keyword, it will struggle to drive traffic.
• Keyword difficulty: Once you’ve found a very relevant and high-volume keyword, don’t forget to check its difficulty. It’s no surprise that high-volume keywords are the most competitive ones, with very powerful apps ranking in top results. These keywords are very difficult to rank in top positions for.

These three elements can work against each other, so it’s difficult to find the right equilibrium between all three.

Let’s deep dive into each of these metrics to understand how to best analyze them when optimizing your app’s keywords:

Keyword Relevancy Score

Keyword relevancy should be your first priority. You should regularly make sure that the keywords added to your app’s metadata are related to your app’s features and functionalities.

But how do you quantify keyword relevancy for different apps?

At AppTweak, our team has developed Atlas AI, a unique intelligence that has been trained to understand the relationships between apps and keywords, and specific app store mechanisms. Thanks to Atlas AI, you can leverage Relevancy Score to understand exactly how relevant each keyword is to your app.

Discover more AI features to grow your mobile apps & games

Search popularity (keyword volume)

Keyword volume is an obvious KPI to keep in mind.

It’s great to have your app rank for different keywords, but you want to make sure these keywords will actually drive traffic to your app. If no one searches for a keyword in the first place, ranking in the #1 position still isn’t going to drive a lot of visibility to your app.

Volume is a very interesting metric to consider. But it is also important to understand how much traffic a keyword could potentially drive to your app. For this, AppTweak has developed a metric called Maximum Reach.

Maximum Reach

Maximum Reach is an estimation of the total number of times a specific keyword is searched for on the stores over the last 30 days. It indicates the potential number of impressions (the number of times your app is viewed) an app could receive if it consistently ranked as the top result for that keyword.

Unique to AppTweak, Maximum Reach is an extremely powerful indicator, as the ultimate goal of keyword optimization is to increase impressions. Since Maximum Reach understands both Search Popularity and impressions (the number of times an app is viewed in search results), this metric can also more accurately represent the exponential relationship between search volumes and traffic.

The image above shows this in practice. Despite the volume of “strava” being only 2.1 times the volume for “hike,” we can clearly see that “strava” has a much larger maximum reach, generating 76 times more searches than the keyword “hike.”

The higher the Maximum Reach, the greater the app’s opportunity to gain visibility from this keyword.

This exponential relationship between volume and traffic makes high-volume keywords very attractive. However, they are also very competitive and just as difficult to rank for. That’s why, you should also always look at a keyword’s difficulty score when selecting keywords to add to your metadata.

Difficulty score

AppTweak’s Difficulty score helps you judge how competitive a keyword is.

When selecting keywords for your metadata, eliminate keywords that are too competitive, or for which there are very powerful apps already ranking. Sometimes, this means going after keywords with a lower volume.

To illustrate this, we see here the keyword “running tracker” has a great balance of high volume and low difficulty.

In general, the higher the difficulty score, the more powerful the apps already ranking for that keyword.

4. Optimize your metadata & add keywords

Now that you have analyzed a large number of keywords and reduced your selection to only a few high-potential terms, the next step is to add them to your metadata.

To effectively boost your app’s visibility, position your keywords within the metadata strategically. Remember, their impact varies depending on where they appear, such as in the title, subtitle, keyword field, or full description.

When creating your metadata, you should always try to balance traffic and conversion.

For instance, your title not only has the biggest impact on ranking algorithms, but is also the most visible element of your app page on the App Store and Google Play (and can thus strongly impact your app’s conversion rate). So, make sure to optimize your title with your top-priority keywords that describe your app.

Keywords placed in the iOS keyword field do not impact conversion. These keywords are not visible on the app page, and you can optimize this metadata field with the sole purpose of increasing traffic.

Discover how AppTweak can help you find valuable keyword opportunities to optimize your app’s metadata

How to draft metadata with AppTweak?

Selecting the keywords that you’ll implement in your metadata can be a scary step in your keyword optimization – but don’t worry, we have useful features that will help you draft and assess different metadata variations.

With Metadata Simulator, you can write and compare drafts of your title, subtitle, and keyword field (iOS), or your title, short description, and long description (Android).

When you prepare your drafts, you can see our comments/warnings to stay aligned with the latest app store rules and best practices (e.g. not repeating keywords, character limits, etc).

Tips for drafting app metadata

Title

• Include a keyword in your app title, which is the most weighted element in both Google Play and App Store algorithms, to boost your ranking potential.
• Keep your app title within the 30-character limit, and ensure it is unique, clear, and not misleading. Avoid generic superlatives like “best” or “#1.”
• Use your brand name for recognition and optimize character space with root keywords and symbols like colons (:) or ampersands (&) instead of dashes (–) or “and.”

Subtitle/short description

• For App Store apps, add strategic keywords in the subtitle (up to 30 characters), which is highly visible and impactful, though less so than the title.
• On Google Play, use the 80-character short description to reinforce your app’s value proposition. Consider repeating the primary keywords to leverage Google’s emphasis on keyword density.

Keyword field (App Store)

• Use commas to separate keywords instead of spaces.
• Avoid keyword duplication in the keyword field and between the title, subtitle, and keyword field to save space and prevent redundancy.
• Break down phrases into individual words (e.g., use “photo,filter” not “photo filter”) to help Apple automatically create combinations.
• Remove stop words and category-derived words as they don’t help in ranking.

Long description (Google Play)

• Use well-structured paragraphs and clear subtitles for easy readability
• Place your most important messages and keywords early, as Google gives more weight to these.
• Incorporate mentions of awards and positive reviews to build credibility, but ensure all content complies with store guidelines and avoid unattributed testimonials.

5. Monitor your work & repeat over time

Keyword optimization is an ongoing process that requires continuous updating, testing, and iterating. Once you’ve updated your metadata in line with your ASO strategy, it’s time to begin monitoring your progress.

How often should you update your app’s metadata?

How to monitor keyword performance with AppTweak?

To monitor your app’s rankings for your targeted keywords, you can leverage numerous keyword monitoring tools on AppTweak:

• Visibility history: Provides a general overview of how your keyword performance evolves (for all the keywords in your selected list). Use this chart to get more in-depth insights into each app’s visibility/ranking history.
• Keyword impact: Allows you to understand how your and competitors’ organic downloads have evolved for the selected keyword list. In this section, you can compare organic growth between two dates and leverage our smart filters (e.g. compare organic app installs from keywords with volume/relevancy/etc greater than 50).
• Brand vs. generic installs: Allows you to analyze your installs from branded vs. generic keywords in one view, to easily compare your brand awareness with competitors.

However, monitoring your app doesn’t stop there. To gain insights into your global presence and overall app store visibility beyond your chosen keywords, explore the All Ranked Keywords Report.

Get the complete picture of your app’s keyword rankings with All Ranked Keywords

Conclusion & next steps …

In this blog, we covered the major points related to app keyword optimization – from researching new keyword opportunities to increase visibility to testing new app metadata drafts for your app.

Want to take your app store marketing game to the next level? Consider these key points for your next steps:

• Continue boosting your visibility by uniting ASO and Apple Search Ads or by getting featured on the stores.
• Want to optimize for more conversions? You’ll need to work on your app creatives, custom product pages (CPPs), and A/B testing strategy.
• Monitor the impact of your work on app performance using our App Store Analytics. Don’t forget to keep track of your competitors’ performance at the same time!

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