App Store Keyword Research: Indonesia

Indonesia is one of the largest mobile markets by user count and is growing rapidly in App Store revenue.

Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is linguistically accessible — many common app-category terms are close to English cognates.

Indonesia 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 Indonesian. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Indonesia App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because Indonesian 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 Indonesia, 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 Indonesia. Indonesian 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 Indonesia. 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 Indonesian. 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 Indonesian 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. Indonesian is not one of those. The work you do here earns its return in Indonesia alone, so the market has to justify the translation on its own.

It usually does. Difficulty is measured against the apps that bothered to localise, and in a single-language market that set stays small, so the terms stay reachable for longer than volume alone would suggest.