A Step-by-Step Guide to App Keyword Research

• 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

1. AI-powered 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. Taking your time here will help ensure you don’t miss out on any relevant keywords that have the potential to drive downloads to your app.

• Start by brainstorming keywords. Think of the words you use when describing your app, its features and values, as well as the keywords used by your competitors. Be sure to 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.

Use automation to identify all the main topics in your app reviews

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.

Search results are more crowded than ever!

When exploring keywords for your app’s metadata, remember that the App Store and Google Play have introduced new elements to their search results. To boost visibility, ASO experts must adapt to these changes and expand their focus beyond just keywords.

Optimize your visibility strategy with paid ads (e.g., Apple Search Ads), in-app events, promotional content, featured stories, similar apps, and more. This is important as being the third app ranked in search results for a keyword no longer guarantees the same visibility as before.

Let’s look at the example of the keywords “match games.”

2. 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 dofficult to find the right equilibrium between all three.

The more specific and relevant a keyword is, the better it will encourage users interested in that keyword to convert and download your app. However, the more specific and niche the keyword is, the lower its volume (generally), thus reducing your potential reach.

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

a. 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 combines 9+ years of AppTweak data with hundreds of hours of training.

Atlas AI has been trained to understand the relationships between apps and keywords, and specific app store mechanisms. Thanks to Atlas AI, you can leverage a powerful KPI – the Relevancy score – to understand exactly how relevant each keyword is to your app.

Discover more AI features to grow your mobile apps & games

b. Search popularity (keyword volume)

Keyword volume is an obvious KPI to keep in mind.

The whole purpose of ASO is to increase your app’s visibility and have your app rank for the keywords users search for on the stores.

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 also understand how much traffic a keyword could potentially drive to your app. For this, AppTweak has developed a metric called Maximum Reach.

c. 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.

d. 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.

Discover how AppTweak can help you find valuable keyword opportunities

3. Optimize your metadata & implement 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.

How to conduct app keyword research 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 may also see our comments/warnings to stay aligned with the latest app store rules and best practices (e.g. not repeating keywords, character limits, etc).

Consider the following elements when drafting your new metadata on AppTweak:

• Character count: Maximize your character usage to effectively target a broad range of keywords. Don’t worry, AppTweak will let you know when you reach the character limit.
• Total Market Searches (TMS): This indicator provides a total estimation of all the times your target keywords are searched for by the whole market. Targeting high-volume keywords with lots of combinations will increase your TMS, but beware – this doesn’t mean you will rank on or convert with all of them. The TMS acts as a proxy for the maximum reach of all the combinations in your list.
• Add keywords you were not following: In this section, we’ll also show the keywords you wrote in your draft that have not yet been included in your list. Click on these keywords to add them to your list and see all their metrics in the table on the right.
• Comparison table: You can also expand or hide the table that shows you the specific differences between your current metadata version and the selected draft.
  

4. 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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