App Store Keyword Research: Albania

Albania is an emerging market with very low keyword difficulty — competition for any category is minimal.

English keywords also perform well given high English proficiency among younger Albanian users.

Albania is small enough that difficulty stops being the constraint. Most keyword slots are reachable; the work is finding the terms that are searched at all.

1. Build the candidate list in Albanian. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Albania App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because Albanian search habits rarely map word for word onto English ones.
2. Score for popularity in this storefront specifically. Popularity is calibrated per storefront, so scores here read lower than the US for the same term without meaning less. Judge candidates against each other in Albania, not against your home market, and treat 25 as the floor.
3. Check difficulty. Filter to difficulty below 40, though you will find much of the list sits far below that. In a market this size a new app can take top slots on terms that would be unreachable elsewhere.
4. Write the metadata for Albania. Albanian is used by this storefront alone, so this metadata does one job and can be tuned to it without trading anything off.

• App Name, 30 characters. Your brand plus the single highest-demand term you can defend in Albania. This field carries the most ranking weight of the three, so it takes the term you most want and can plausibly reach, not the one with the biggest popularity score.
• Subtitle, 30 characters. Two or three secondary terms in Albanian. It is indexed and it is also the line a searcher reads before deciding to tap, so it has to survive being read as a sentence by a Albanian speaker.
• Keyword field, 100 characters. Latin script, so the 100-character keyword field holds roughly 12 to 16 single words. Drop plurals and stop words: the algorithm matches word stems and builds phrases from the terms you supply, so every repeated word is a wasted character. Never repeat a word already used in the name or subtitle; those are indexed already, and the field is the one place where a wasted character is a term you could have had.

Most localisation decisions are made across a group of storefronts: one Spanish keyword field is indexed in fifteen markets, one Arabic field in fourteen. Albanian is not one of those. The work you do here earns its return in Albania alone, so the market has to justify the translation on its own.

In an emerging market that is a real question to sit with. The counter-argument is difficulty: keyword slots here are cheap enough that a modest localisation can take the top of a category outright, which is not on offer in any market where the language is shared.