App Store Keyword Research: Japan

Japan is among the top-3 App Store revenue markets globally and is worth treating as a first-tier target, not an afterthought.

Japanese users search in Japanese (hiragana/katakana/kanji) — English keywords will not capture Japanese demand. Localisation requires native-speaker metadata.

Japan is one of the storefronts where difficulty does the deciding. Demand is deep enough that almost any sensible term returns volume, and the question is which of them you can realistically reach.

1. Build the candidate list in Japanese. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Japan App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because Japanese search habits rarely map word for word onto English ones.
2. Score for popularity in this storefront specifically. Popularity is calibrated per storefront, so a term that scores 60 here is genuinely deep demand. Above 25 is the floor worth spending characters on.
3. Check difficulty. Filter to difficulty below 60 for an established app and below 45 for a new one. In a market this size the top slots are held by apps with years of install history behind them.
4. Write the metadata for Japan. Japanese 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 Japan. 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 Japanese. 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 Japanese speaker.
• Keyword field, 100 characters. Japanese mixes kanji, hiragana and katakana, and users search in all three for the same concept. Cover the katakana form of loanwords as well as the kanji, and expect 20 to 30 terms in 100 characters. 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. Japanese is not one of those. The work you do here earns its return in Japan 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.