A Step-by-Step Guide to App Keyword Research

Lucas Riedinger by 
Product Manager at AppTweak

16 min read

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Boost your app’s visibility with proven keyword optimization tips and practical insights you can apply right away.

  1. A Step-by-Step Guide to App Keyword Research
  2. How to Find Long-Tail Keywords for ASO?
  3. Brand vs. Generic Keyword Optimization for App Store Search
  4. 4 Ways to Monitor Performance of All Your Ranked App Store Keywords
  5. Measuring the Effects of App Updates on Keyword Visibility

Optimizing your app for the App Store or Google Play involves careful app keyword research, performance monitoring, and data-driven decisions. In this guide, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide to app keyword research to ensure your app gets the organic visibility it deserves.

One of the cornerstones of ASO is keyword optimization – the process of researching, analyzing, and selecting the right keywords to include in your app’s title, subtitle/short description, keyword field (iOS), and full description.

In this blog, we’ll explain every step of the app keyword research process in detail. We’ll also share actionable tips to optimize your app’s metadata using AppTweak’s keyword research tools powered by AI:

  • 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

1. Review your current metadata performance

Before you start to think about adding new keywords to your metadata, you’ll need to take a step back and first audit your app’s current performance to ensure you retain high-performing keywords.

Start by answering the following questions:

  • How is my existing metadata performing?
  • Which keywords am I currently targeting?
  • Are these keywords driving downloads to my app?

To find valuable keywords, analyze both your own metadata and that of your competitors. By looking at the keywords your competitors use, you can discover which ones are most relevant and competitive, helping to boost your app’s visibility and organic growth. See if these keywords can improve your app’s search rankings. You can begin with AppTweak’s App Page Preview feature, which lets you visualize an app’s current metadata right next to its default page listing.

App page preview of Spotify (US, App Store)
App page preview for Spotify (US, App Store). Source: AppTweak

2. 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.

AppTweak keyword picker tools powered by AI
AppTweak keyword picker tools powered by AI. Source: AppTweak
  • Metadata keywords: You can also easily identify the most relevant keywords for your app or even your competitor’s metadata. Add suggested keywords from our panel, found in the title, subtitle, and description, directly to your keyword list. AppTweak also supports keyword research in foreign languages. Use the “Auto-translate to English” feature to analyze keywords in languages you don’t speak. This feature translates keyword suggestions from any language based on your AppTweak language settings, helping you choose the best keywords for your app.
  • Top installs & ranked keywords: You should also look at keywords driving the most downloads for your app and competitors. This helps you understand user intent when they search for your app or your competitor’s. Top installs are keywords estimated to drive the most organic downloads for the selected app. They are high-volume search terms on which your app ranks well. Ranked keywords are those on which the selected app ranks, divided into different ranking tiers.

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.”

AppTweak Live Search for match games on iOS, US
Live Search for “match games” (US, App Store). Source: AppTweak

Users see many elements in search results, including Apple Search Ads placements and featured stories.

Expert Tip

We recommend using our Live Search feature when choosing keywords to understand what might rank for your chosen keywords. Live Search mirrors the keyword results you see on your phone, making it a valuable tool for understanding which apps rank highly for specific keywords. This feature helps you evaluate how your app might stand out among these search results. It also offers insights into different elements that can appear in search results, such as stories, ads, and custom product pages.

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 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:

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.

Expert Tip

Both Apple and Google want to provide a good user experience. This means only showing apps in the search results that match a user’s search query. Apple and Google are pretty good at this: if a keyword in your metadata is not relevant to your app’s functionality, your app will likely not rank in the top 10 for that keyword.

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

Comparing the relevancy score of the same keyword for two different fitness apps
Comparing the Relevancy Score of the same keyword for two different fitness apps (US, App Store). Source: AppTweak

AI keyword tools

Powered by AI, our keyword research tools provide all the data you need to increase your app’s visibility and attract new users:

  • Keyword clusters: Keyword clusters are a powerful ASO tool, revealing groups of keywords that Apple or Google find closely linked to your initial keyword. These clusters 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. Powered by our exclusive Atlas AI, trained on App Store and Google Play data, our keyword clusters are tailored to understand keyword/app relationships within app stores. For example, Atlas AI identifies “run” as more relevant to mobile games, while “running” is more aligned with running apps.
AI keyword clusters on AppTweak
AI keyword clusters on AppTweak. Source: AppTweak
  • 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.

Discover more about AppDNA and GameDNA

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.

Expert Tip

Search Popularity (also known as volume) is a metric between 5 and 100. On AppTweak, you’ll be able to see the exact Search Popularity provided by Apple (and its evolution through time), allowing you to understand how popular each keyword is in your specific country.

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.

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.

Comparing keyword volumes vs their maximum reach potential on AppTweak
Comparing keyword volumes vs. their maximum reach potential (US, App Store). Source: AppTweak

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.

To kick-start your ASO strategy, target keywords with low competition and difficulty scores that your app can realistically rank for, unless your brand is very popular.

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.

Comparing keyword volume vs. difficulty score on AppTweak
Comparing keyword volume (search popularity) vs. difficulty score (US, App Store). Source: AppTweak

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.

Impact of keywords in the app title, subtitle, keyword field, and long description on traffic and conversion
Impact of keywords in the app title, subtitle, keyword field, and long description on traffic and conversion. Source: AppTweak

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).

Write & compare drafts of your app metadata with AppTweak Metadata Simulator
Write & compare drafts of your app metadata with Metadata Simulator. Source: AppTweak

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.

Expert Tip

Keep in mind that store rules evolve, and it can be challenging to keep track of them all. We offer alerts if your metadata doesn’t align with store guidelines or ASO best practices.

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

Warnings for unsuitable metadata drafts on the App Store
Warnings for unsuitable metadata drafts on the App Store. Source: AppTweak

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.

Expert Tip

We recommend keeping your new metadata for at least 3-4 weeks to give the app store algorithms enough time to stabilize your ranking for all the keywords you added. Once this time has passed, you can start assessing your performance and making iterations.

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.
Comparing Strava’s keyword performance with Nike Run Club - visibility history, keyword impact, and brand vs. generic installs
Comparing Strava’s keyword performance with Nike Run Club. Source: AppTweak

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.

All Ranked Keywords Performance report for Spotify over the past year
All Ranked Keywords Performance report for Spotify over the past year. Source: AppTweak

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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Lucas Riedinger
by , Product Manager at AppTweak
Lucas is a Product Manager at AppTweak, helping to fuel growth for the world's most popular apps and games. He is passionate about rugby, basketball, and video games.