When it comes to your ASO strategym, effective keywords are both singular and multi-word phrases input by users to find apps. To determine which keywords you should use in order to improve app discovery; you can start by brainstorming a list based on what words you believe are good matches for your app. Then, compare your list against the results found from a competitor or an rival app that operates successfully in your industry or niche.  Analytic data providers like SensorTower, MobileAction, SearchMen, or AppAnnie can be used to help you identify potentially important keywords based on their analysis of your app, seed keywords, competitor’s keywords, etc.

Once you have a list of potential keywords that you want to use, you need to edit and prioritize your list. (note: there is a limitation of 100 characters in Apple’s App Store).  

There are three primary factors you must consider when choosing keywords for your app.  We’ve listed them in order of importance:

1. Relevance

2. Difficulty

3. Popularity

Relevance - 

Which keywords best match my app?

The relevance of your keyword association is the most important factor.  Achieving a high ranking for

keywords irrelevant to your app will not have any benefit on your chart ranking.  If your app has nothing in common with the keyword, users will either choose not to download it, or they will likely delete the app immediately after their initial use.  What’s worse, they may even leave a negative review

Complete a search on the app store for a potential keyword and look at the other apps that rank at the top of the charts for that keyword.  This gives you a clearer understanding of what users are expecting when searching with that keyword, and if your app will be a good match.

Difficulty - 

How difficult will it be for my app to rank for the keyword (based on the strength of competition)?

In most scenarios, a very popular keyword will have a higher volume of apps competing for it, and this makes it more difficult to rank effectively with popular keywords.  There are also instances where a smaller number of well-established and popular apps index with specific keywords they associate with, and these can also be quite difficult to out-rank.  

Most of our research tools provide information which is useful when evaluating the difficulty in applying a chosen keyword, as well as the number of apps which are competing for that specific keyword. These two data points will help guide an effective keyword selection strategy.

While the presence of numerous apps with keywords which are difficult to out-rank does mean that it will be harder to unseat them with the same keyword, you can still bank on the fact that the more successful your app is, the higher it will rank. 

New apps which are just introduced to the App Stores should start with less competitive keywords. Thus, you can (and should) continuously adapt and evolve your keyword strategy in order to maximize your ranking so that it will then score incrementally higher with difficult to obtain keywords.

For iOS, an additional consideration is the “7 Day Cliff”. Apple systematically boosts the rankings of new apps during their first 7 days on the App Store.  This means that you might consider going after keywords that have a higher difficulty-score during your initial launch and then switching to less difficult keywords on day 8.

Popularity - 

How often are users searching for the keyword?

Most existing ASO research tools provide a ranking of a keyword’s popularity. The accuracy of the provider may vary, but generally most can be trusted resources for identifying the general popularity of keywords. 

Pro Tip

A final consideration before finalizing your list of keywords is to know that Google will automatically associate common synonyms of words or phrases in the Google Play Store, whereas Apple’s App Store will not. Google also effectively understands what a search query was meant to be if there are human errors such as typos and grammatical errors.  Apple’s search tools are also designed to understand a user's most lintended search query, but the feature is not as robust.  

If you’re looking to develop an elegant keyword strategy and boost your target keyword’s rankings; contact the LumoSpace team today!