ASO Keyword Research: How to Find Keywords for the App Store

App Store keyword research looks like Google SEO from a distance, and that resemblance trips up almost everyone who tries it. In practice the two are different sports. App Store queries are short (often just one or two words), heavily brand-driven (“spotify”, “duolingo”), and shaped by autocomplete, because nobody wants to type a full sentence into a phone keyboard.

The good news: because the game is smaller, a solo developer with a free afternoon can genuinely out-research lazy competitors. Here’s the exact process we use when launching apps, from blank page to a filled-out 100-character keyword field.

How App Store Keywords Differ From Google Keywords

• Shorter. Most App Store searches are one or two words. Long-tail exists, but it’s a garnish, not the meal.
• Brand-heavy. A huge share of searches are for specific app names. You can’t rank for “instagram”, but “photo editor for instagram” style modifiers are fair game.
• Autocomplete-driven. People type three letters and tap a suggestion. Whatever autocomplete suggests IS the demand.
• Semantic since 2026. Apple’s search now reads intent, not just exact matches. Natural phrases (“split rent with roommates”) can surface your app without a literal keyword match, which we cover in our rundown of Apple’s 2026 ranking factors.

Step 1: Brainstorm Seed Keywords

Before touching any tool, write down 20 to 30 raw ideas. Pull from four buckets:

1. What your app does: the verbs and nouns (“scan receipts”, “habit tracker”, “invoice”)
2. The problem it solves: how a frustrated person would phrase it (“stop procrastinating”, “find duplicate photos”)
3. Your category’s vocabulary: browse the top 20 apps in your category and note recurring words in their names and subtitles
4. Your users’ words: read your own reviews (and competitors’ reviews) and steal the exact phrases people use. Review mining is criminally underrated; users describe your app better than you do.

Step 2: Mine App Store Autocomplete

Open the App Store, tap search, and type each seed keyword one letter at a time. Write down every suggestion that appears. “hab” gives you “habit tracker”, “habit tracker free”, “habits”. Each suggestion is a real query with real volume, straight from Apple.

Two tips from doing this a lot: use a real device rather than the simulator (suggestions differ), and check your main storefronts separately. US, UK, and Australian autocomplete all diverge more than you’d expect.

Step 3: Spy on Competitors’ Titles and Subtitles

Every character in a competitor’s title and subtitle is a keyword they’re paying rent on. List your top 10 competitors and put their names and subtitles in a spreadsheet, then look for:

• Words everyone uses. Probably high-volume, definitely high-competition. You’ll need some of these for relevance.
• Words only one or two use. Potential gaps. If a strong app ranks well with an unusual keyword, there’s demand behind it.
• Words nobody uses that showed up in your autocomplete mining. These are your best shots at ranking early.

ASO tools automate this (more below) and will even show you the hidden keyword fields competitors likely use, reverse-engineered from their rankings.

Step 4: Get Volume Data With Tools

Autocomplete tells you a query exists; it doesn’t tell you how big it is. For volume you have a few options at different price points:

Tool	Cost	Best for
Apple Ads popularity score	Free (with an Apple Ads account)	First-party 1-to-5 volume signal per keyword
Astro	Free tier	Indie-friendly keyword tracking on a budget
AppTweak	Paid	Full competitor keyword intelligence
Sensor Tower	Paid (spendy)	Market-level data, bigger teams
App Store Connect analytics	Free	Your own impressions and conversion per source

A word of caution on the Apple Ads popularity score: it’s first-party data, which is great, but it’s coarse. The scale is 1 to 5 in the interface (tools convert it to 5 to 100), the distribution is brutally skewed (most keywords sit near the bottom), and Apple recalibrated it in late 2025, which scrambled historical comparisons in every third-party tool. Treat it as a rough tier, not a precise number.

One more free trick: run a small exact-match Apple Ads campaign on your shortlist for a week. Tap-through rate and conversion per keyword tells you which queries actually produce installs, which no research tool can promise.

Step 5: Pick Keywords by Volume, Difficulty, and Relevance

Every keyword gets judged on three axes, and relevance is the one people underweight:

• Relevance: would someone searching this be happy landing on your app? If not, ranking for it just tanks your conversion rate, and conversion is itself a ranking signal. Irrelevant keywords are actively harmful.
• Volume: is anyone searching it? Below a popularity score of roughly 20 to 25, traffic is a trickle.
• Difficulty: can you realistically crack the top 10? Check who currently ranks. If every result has 100k ratings and you have 40, pick a longer-tail variant for now.

For a new app, a sensible mix is mostly mid-volume, low-difficulty keywords with one or two aspirational head terms. You can trade up as your ratings and velocity grow.

Step 6: Place Your Keywords (the Rules That Matter)

Placement has a strict hierarchy on Apple’s store: title beats subtitle beats keyword field. Your two most valuable keywords go in the 30-character title next to your brand, the next tier goes in the 30-character subtitle, and everything else goes in the hidden 100-character keyword field.

Keyword field rules, because this is where people waste characters:

• Separate with commas, no spaces after commas (“budget,invoice,receipt” not “budget, invoice, receipt”)
• Never repeat a word that’s already in your title or subtitle, duplicates earn nothing
• Skip plurals if you have the singular; Apple matches most variants
• Don’t waste characters on “app”, “free”, or your category name, they’re largely ignored or implied
• Apple combines words across fields into phrases, so “budget” in your title plus “planner” in the field can match “budget planner”

And don’t stop at English. Localizing your metadata unlocks separate keyword fields per storefront, and some locales (like Spanish in the US storefront) effectively give you bonus indexing. We break that down in our guide to localizing an iOS app.

Step 7: Measure, Then Iterate Every 4 to 6 Weeks

Keyword research isn’t a launch task, it’s a loop. After each metadata release:

1. Track your rankings for every target keyword (any tool from the table does this)
2. Watch impressions and search conversion in App Store Connect
3. After four weeks: keep what climbed, cut what stayed invisible, promote field keywords that perform into your subtitle

Resist the urge to change everything every release. One variable at a time, or you learn nothing. And remember keywords only get people to your page; your screenshots and a description written to convert close the install. The full picture, from metadata to ratings strategy, is in our complete ASO guide.

FAQ

How many keywords should I target on the App Store?

Between title, subtitle, and the keyword field you have 160 characters, which realistically fits 15 to 25 distinct words. Apple combines them into phrases across fields, so those words can cover hundreds of query combinations.

Is the Apple Ads popularity score accurate?

It’s the only first-party volume signal, so use it, but treat it as a tier rather than a measurement. It’s coarse, heavily skewed toward low scores, and Apple has recalibrated it, so combine it with autocomplete evidence and (ideally) your own Apple Ads campaign data.

Do keywords in the App Store description count?

Not for Apple search ranking; the description isn’t indexed. That’s a Google Play behavior. On iOS, spend your description effort on conversion instead.

How long until new keywords start ranking?

Indexing happens within about a day of your update going live, but stable positions take two to four weeks to settle as Apple gathers tap and install data. Judge a keyword change at the four-week mark, not the four-day mark.