Emerging market

App Store Keyword Research: Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is largely Russian-dominant in App Store search — Russian localisation covers it.

Market overview

Storefront code
KZ
Market tier
Emerging market
Primary search language
Russian
Storefronts this metadata reaches
6 storefronts

What to know about this market

Kazakhstan is largely Russian-dominant in App Store search — Russian localisation covers it.

Low difficulty for most categories.

How to research keywords in Kazakhstan

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

Kazakhstan 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 Russian. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Kazakhstan App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because Russian 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 Kazakhstan, 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 Kazakhstan. The same Russian metadata is indexed in 6 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 Kazakhstan 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 Kazakhstan. 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 Russian. 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 Russian speaker.
  • Keyword field, 100 characters. Cyrillic words average longer than their English equivalents, so the same 100-character field holds nearer 10 to 12 terms. Budget for that before translating a keyword list across from a Latin-script market. 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 Russian metadata also ranks

Apple indexes metadata by language, not by country. One Russian keyword field is live in 6 storefronts.

Writing Russian metadata for Kazakhstan is not a single-market decision. The same 100 characters are indexed in 5 other storefronts, where the same terms carry different demand and, more usefully, different difficulty. A term that is closed in Kazakhstan 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 Kazakhstan?
The primary search language in Kazakhstan is Russian. Keywords in Russian are needed to capture most of the search demand. English-only metadata will miss the majority of Kazakhstan App Store searches.
Is the Kazakhstan App Store worth targeting?
Kazakhstan is an emerging market with very low keyword difficulty for most categories. The user base is smaller, but competition is minimal — useful for testing keyword strategies with low cost.
How does Kazakhstan keyword difficulty compare to the US?
Kazakhstan'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 Russian keyword field cover?
6. Apple indexes App Store metadata by language rather than by country, so a single Russian keyword field is live in Kazakhstan and 5 other storefronts. 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 Kazakhstan

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

Research Kazakhstan App Store keywords now

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