Emerging market

App Store Keyword Research: Madagascar

French localisation from France covers the Francophone majority in Madagascar.

Market overview

Storefront code
MG
Market tier
Emerging market
Primary search language
French
Storefronts this metadata reaches
4 storefronts

What to know about this market

French localisation from France covers the Francophone majority in Madagascar.

Very low difficulty — negligible competition.

How to research keywords in Madagascar

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

Madagascar 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 French. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Madagascar App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because French 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 Madagascar, 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 Madagascar. The same French metadata is indexed in 4 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 Madagascar 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 Madagascar. 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 French. 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 French 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.

Where your French metadata also ranks

Apple indexes metadata by language, not by country. One French keyword field is live in 4 storefronts.

Writing French metadata for Madagascar is not a single-market decision. The same 100 characters are indexed in 3 other storefronts, where the same terms carry different demand and, more usefully, different difficulty. A term that is closed in Madagascar 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 Madagascar?
The primary search language in Madagascar is French. Keywords in French are needed to capture most of the search demand. English-only metadata will miss the majority of Madagascar App Store searches.
Is the Madagascar App Store worth targeting?
Madagascar 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 Madagascar keyword difficulty compare to the US?
Madagascar'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 French keyword field cover?
4. Apple indexes App Store metadata by language rather than by country, so a single French keyword field is live in Madagascar and 3 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 Madagascar

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

Research Madagascar App Store keywords now

Score keywords in the Madagascar storefront — popularity, difficulty, and competing apps count — across 109 markets in one workspace.

Start researching