Mid-tier market

App Store Keyword Research: Belgium

Belgium has Dutch and French regions — Dutch metadata covers Flanders, French covers Wallonia.

Market overview

Storefront code
BE
Market tier
Mid-tier market
Primary search language
Dutch
Storefronts this metadata reaches
2 storefronts

What to know about this market

Belgium has Dutch and French regions — Dutch metadata covers Flanders, French covers Wallonia.

Dutch difficulty scores for Belgium are lower than the Netherlands for the same terms.

How to research keywords in Belgium

Search here happens in Dutch, so the candidate list has to be built in that language, not translated from an English one.

Belgium rewards a second pass. Volume is real but competition has not caught up with it, so terms that are locked in the major storefronts are often still open here.

  1. Build the candidate list in Dutch. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Belgium App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because Dutch 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 Belgium, not against your home market, and treat 25 as the floor.
  3. Check difficulty. Filter to difficulty below 50. This market carries meaningful volume with consistently less competition than the major storefronts, which is the whole reason to work it.
  4. Write the metadata for Belgium. The same Dutch metadata is indexed in 2 storefronts, so a term you add here is working in all of them. Score your list in the largest of those before you commit the 100 characters.

Metadata allocation for the Belgium storefront

Three indexable fields, 160 characters between them, and the writing system decides how far they stretch.

  • App Name, 30 characters. Your brand plus the single highest-demand term you can defend in Belgium. 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 Dutch. 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 Dutch 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.

Where your Dutch metadata also ranks

Apple indexes metadata by language, not by country. One Dutch keyword field is live in 2 storefronts.

Writing Dutch metadata for Belgium is not a single-market decision. The same 100 characters are indexed in 1 other storefront, where the same terms carry different demand and, more usefully, different difficulty. A term that is closed in Belgium is frequently open in the smaller markets on this list, and it costs nothing extra to rank there.

Frequently asked questions

What language should I use for App Store keywords in Belgium?
The primary search language in Belgium is Dutch. Keywords in Dutch are needed to capture most of the search demand. English-only metadata will miss the majority of Belgium App Store searches.
Is the Belgium App Store worth targeting?
Belgium is a worthwhile secondary target. Keyword difficulty tends to be lower than the major markets for the same search intent, making it a good expansion market.
How does Belgium keyword difficulty compare to the US?
Belgium's keyword difficulty is substantially below major markets for most categories. This makes it a low-effort way to capture App Store users in an underserved market.
How many storefronts does one Dutch keyword field cover?
2. Apple indexes App Store metadata by language rather than by country, so a single Dutch keyword field is live in Belgium and 1 other storefront. Score your candidate list in each of them before committing the 100 characters, because difficulty varies between them even though the metadata does not.

Storefronts to compare with Belgium

Markets that search in Dutch come first, then neighbours in the same region.

Research Belgium App Store keywords now

Score keywords in the Belgium storefront — popularity, difficulty, and competing apps count — across 109 markets in one workspace.

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