App Store Keyword Research: Iceland

Iceland is a tiny but wealthy market with very high English proficiency — English keywords work well.

Very low difficulty for all categories.

Iceland 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 Icelandic. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Iceland App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because Icelandic 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 Iceland, 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 Iceland. Icelandic 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 Iceland. 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 Icelandic. 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 Icelandic 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. Icelandic is not one of those. The work you do here earns its return in Iceland 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.