App Store Keyword Research: Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is an English-dominant market in South Asia — no localisation required.

Very low difficulty across all categories.

Sri Lanka 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 English. Start from your existing English list, then add the terms competitors use in their Sri Lanka subtitle. Regional word choice matters more than spelling: the algorithm treats British and American spellings alike, but it will not connect two different words for the same thing.
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 Sri Lanka, 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 Sri Lanka. The same English metadata is indexed in 25 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.

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

Writing English metadata for Sri Lanka is not a single-market decision. The same 100 characters are indexed in 24 other storefronts, where the same terms carry different demand and, more usefully, different difficulty. A term that is closed in Sri Lanka is frequently open in the smaller markets on this list, and it costs nothing extra to rank there.