Most apps rank for a handful of keywords by accident. Choosing them on purpose is the cheapest growth work in ASO. Here is a method that works on Google Play today and carries over to the App Store.
1. Start from what your app does
Write down, in plain words, the three or four jobs people hire your app for. A scanner app: "scan documents", "make a PDF", "read text from a photo". These are your seeds. Everything else grows from them.
2. Gather candidates from three places
- Your own listing. The words you already use are the words you can rank for fastest. The metadata view lists every word and phrase of your title and descriptions.
- Store autocomplete. What the store suggests while you type comes from real searches. Type each seed and add letters.
- Your competitors. Phrases in their titles and short descriptions that are missing from yours are ideas with proof that someone is targeting them.
3. Check every candidate on three things
Volume tells you whether anyone searches it. Difficulty tells you whether you can win it. Relevancy tells you whether the people who search it want your app. A keyword that scores well on only one of the three is a trap.
4. Sort them into three piles
- Win now. You already rank 11 to 30, the difficulty is low or medium, and the keyword is relevant. A small listing change can lift these.
- Grow. High volume and relevant but hard. Put them in the title, and aim for a slow climb.
- Skip. Hard and only loosely relevant, or high volume but nobody who searches it wants your app.
5. Place them where the store looks
Google Play weighs the title most, then the short description, then the long description. Put your "grow" keywords in the title (30 characters), your "win now" keywords in the short description (80), and weave the rest naturally into the long description. On the App Store, use the title, the subtitle and the hidden keyword field, and do not repeat a word across them: repeating wastes space.
6. Track, wait, adjust
Store rankings move slowly. After you change a listing, give it a week or two, then compare ranks before and after. Add the keywords you chose to your tracked list so each one is checked every night, and watch your competitors' listings for the changes that worked for them.
Common mistakes
- Chasing the biggest keyword in your category when five apps with a million times your installs hold the top.
- Stuffing the long description with a keyword many times. It does not help and it reads badly.
- Judging rank from your own phone in another country or language. Rank depends on both.
- Changing everything at once, so you cannot tell what worked.