An App Store Keyword Research Checklist Before Launch

A pre-launch app has no ranking authority — plan around that, don't ignore it

An app with zero ratings and no store history has none of the engagement signals (retention, download velocity, rating count) that established apps use to compete for higher-difficulty terms. Every pre-launch keyword decision should assume you're starting from the most accessible end of the difficulty range, not the terms you'd eventually want once the app has traction.

This isn't a permanent constraint — it's a starting condition. The checklist below is about making good decisions for month one, with the expectation that difficulty targets widen as ratings and installs accumulate.

The checklist

1. Build a candidate list of 50-100 keywords before scoring anything, pulling from your own feature vocabulary, competitor subtitles, App Store search suggestions, and (if available) Apple Search Ads Discovery campaign data.

2. Score every candidate for popularity and difficulty in your primary storefront. Set your difficulty ceiling low — under 40 is a reasonable target for an app with no ratings yet, rather than the 55-65 range an established app might target.

3. Reject anything below roughly 20-25 popularity regardless of how low the difficulty is. A pre-launch app especially can't afford to spend scarce character-field space on a term with no real demand behind it.

4. Check your top 15-20 surviving candidates across 2-3 secondary storefronts. A pre-launch app has no existing localization commitments yet, which makes this the cheapest point in the app's life to build a multi-storefront keyword strategy from scratch.

5. Write your name, subtitle, and keyword field against the surviving list, prioritizing the single best keyword for the name, two to three for the subtitle as a natural phrase, and the rest for the keyword field without duplication.

6. Manually search your top 10 chosen terms in the actual App Store before submission. Confirm the results are genuinely apps like yours, not an unrelated category — a pre-launch app has zero track record to recover from a bad first relevance signal.

7. Plan your first re-score for 4-6 weeks post-launch, once you have some initial ratings and installs, to check whether your difficulty ceiling can widen.