ASO Keyword Research
ASO keyword research is the systematic process of identifying, scoring, and selecting the App Store keywords most likely to deliver organic installs given your app's current competitive position.
Keyword research for the App Store is a constrained version of the SEO problem: you have 100 keyword field characters plus a 30-character name and 30-character subtitle to work with, versus the unlimited word count of a web page. This constraint makes selection more consequential — every character choice is a tradeoff against something else.
A complete keyword research pass has three stages: ideation (building a list of candidates), scoring (assessing popularity and difficulty for each), and selection (choosing the highest-value terms that fit your metadata constraints). Ideation without scoring is guesswork; scoring without selection wastes the research.
Sources for keyword candidates include: your competitors' ranking footprints (teardown), search suggest (what Apple shows when you start typing a relevant term), your category browse terms, user review language, and Apple Search Ads suggested keywords. The goal of ideation is a long, messy list — you'll cut it down in scoring.
Research should be repeated before each significant metadata update, not just at launch. Popularity and difficulty change, competitors enter and leave, and your own app's authority in the store grows over time — terms that were too competitive at launch may become accessible six months later.
Frequently asked questions
- How many keywords should I research before choosing?
- As many as you can generate in the ideation phase — typically 50 to 200 candidates. The scoring pass quickly filters this down: terms below 25 popularity get cut, terms above 70 difficulty get deprioritized unless they're essential brand terms. What's left is usually 20-40 viable candidates for the space you have.
- How often should I redo keyword research?
- Before every metadata update, which ideally happens every 2-4 weeks during active optimization. After launch or after a major update, check scores again — the competitive landscape has changed in the interim.
Related terms
- Keyword PopularityKeyword popularity is a 0–100 score measuring how often users search for a given term in the App Store, derived from Apple Search Ads demand signals.
- Keyword DifficultyKeyword difficulty is a 0–100 score estimating how hard it is to break into the top-ranking positions for a given App Store keyword, based on the strength of apps currently holding those positions.
- Competitor TeardownA competitor teardown in ASO is the process of identifying which keywords a competing app ranks for — revealing their strategy and surfacing terms you may have missed.
Browse the glossary
Put this into practice
Score App Store keywords by popularity and difficulty across 109 storefronts — the numbers behind aso keyword research.
Start keyword research