New App Keyword Strategy (Cold Start)
A new app with few or no ratings needs a different keyword strategy than an established one — targeting lower-difficulty terms first to build the ranking history and engagement signals that later unlock more competitive keywords.
An app with under 100 ratings competing directly for the same high-difficulty terms as an entrenched competitor with tens of thousands of ratings is starting from a structural disadvantage that better copywriting alone won't close. The realistic path is targeting keywords with difficulty scores well below what an established app in the category could accept, often below 40.
This isn't a permanent constraint. As the app accumulates installs, ratings, and retention data from those winnable early keywords, its overall ranking weight increases, which gradually makes higher-difficulty terms more reachable — the same dynamic described in app tenure as a ranking signal.
A practical cold-start approach: build a keyword list weighted toward niche and long-tail terms with acceptable popularity and low difficulty, ignore the broad category terms for the first few months, and re-score the full candidate list periodically as the app's own authority grows.
Frequently asked questions
- How low should difficulty be for a brand-new app?
- Below 40 is a reasonable starting filter for an app with under 100 ratings. As ratings and engagement accumulate, the accessible difficulty ceiling rises — many apps can reasonably target 55 to 65 once they've crossed a few thousand ratings.
- Should a new app avoid high-difficulty keywords in metadata entirely?
- Not entirely, if a term is core to what the app is (it may still contribute a relevance signal even without a top ranking), but it shouldn't be the primary strategy while the app has no ranking history to compete on.
Related terms
- App Age / Tenure as a Ranking SignalAn app's time in the store, and the ranking history it accumulates during that time, functions as a form of algorithmic trust that new apps have to build up rather than start with.
- Niche KeywordsNiche keywords are terms specific enough to describe a well-defined subset of App Store users — they have moderate-to-low popularity scores but often dramatically lower difficulty than the broad category terms.
- 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.
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Put this into practice
Score App Store keywords by popularity and difficulty across 109 storefronts — the numbers behind new app keyword strategy (cold start).
Start keyword research