How to Evaluate App Store Keyword Difficulty

What difficulty actually measures — and what it doesn't

Keyword difficulty is a score of the competitive strength of the apps currently holding the top positions for a given keyword. A high difficulty score means the apps ranking for this term are well-established — they have significant rating counts, long store tenure, and metadata that is well-aligned to the keyword. A low difficulty score means the top-ranking apps are weaker, newer, or less optimized.

What difficulty does not measure: how much search demand exists (that's popularity), how relevant your app is to the keyword, or whether your app's features match what users are looking for. Those are separate considerations that you layer on top of the difficulty read.

The key insight is that difficulty is about the incumbents, not about you. A keyword with difficulty 70 is hard not because it's inherently hard, but because the apps sitting in the top positions are hard to displace. As those apps change — as new competitors enter or established ones lose ranking weight — the difficulty score for the same keyword changes.

How to set difficulty targets based on your app's stage

A brand-new app with under 100 ratings has minimal ranking authority — the engagement signal Apple has for it is thin. At this stage, targeting keywords with difficulty above 50 is likely futile regardless of how good the metadata is. The ranking set above you has years of engagement signals that you simply don't have yet.

The practical difficulty threshold scales roughly with rating count: below 100 ratings, aim for difficulty under 40; 100-1,000 ratings, aim for difficulty under 55; above 1,000 ratings, difficulty up to 65 becomes accessible; above 10,000 ratings, you can compete for 70+ difficulty keywords with optimized metadata and some deliberate install velocity.

These thresholds are approximate — what matters is that you calibrate expectations to your current position rather than assuming any keyword is equally accessible. Good keyword research at the wrong stage of app development still generates poor results.

Interpreting difficulty across storefronts

The same keyword will have different difficulty in different App Store storefronts, and the variation is often dramatic. A US difficulty of 70 for a productivity keyword might correspond to a UK difficulty of 55, a German difficulty of 40, and a Brazilian difficulty of 25 for the equivalent terms.

This variation exists because the competitive density of each market has evolved differently. The US market has been active since 2008 and has attracted the most optimized apps and the most aggressive ASO investment. Markets that developed their app ecosystems later have had less time to build up entrenched competition.

For an app blocked in the US on its target keywords, running difficulty checks in secondary markets is not a fallback — it's the expected next step. The objective is finding where the demand-difficulty ratio is best, which is often not in your primary market.

When to target high-difficulty keywords anyway

High difficulty shouldn't automatically mean 'skip'. There are situations where targeting a hard keyword is strategically correct even if you won't rank top-3 for it today.

The clearest case is exact-match terms for your app's core function. If your app is a budget tracker, having 'budget' or 'tracker' in the title is important for user expectation-setting and brand alignment, even if the organic ranking benefit from that specific placement is modest due to competition. The metadata serves human readers as well as the algorithm.

A second case is terms where any ranking is valuable. A position-12 ranking for a very high popularity keyword (65+) may generate more installs per day than a position-1 ranking for a low-popularity term (25). The install math can favor including the high-difficulty term even if your rank is not top-5.

The third case is forward-looking: if you expect your rating count to grow significantly over the next 6-12 months, including a term you'll eventually be able to rank for means the metadata is already in place when your authority crosses the threshold.