App Store Keyword Research: Netherlands

Dutch users frequently search in English for international apps — English metadata can capture Dutch demand without a full localisation.

Keyword difficulty in the Netherlands is consistently lower than Germany and France for the same category terms.

Netherlands rewards a second pass. Volume is real but competition has not caught up with it, so terms that are locked in the major storefronts are often still open here.

1. Build the candidate list in Dutch. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Netherlands App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because Dutch 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 Netherlands, not against your home market, and treat 25 as the floor.
3. Check difficulty. Filter to difficulty below 50. This market carries meaningful volume with consistently less competition than the major storefronts, which is the whole reason to work it.
4. Write the metadata for Netherlands. The same Dutch metadata is indexed in 2 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 Netherlands. 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 Dutch. 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 Dutch 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.

Writing Dutch metadata for Netherlands is not a single-market decision. The same 100 characters are indexed in 1 other storefront, where the same terms carry different demand and, more usefully, different difficulty. A term that is closed in Netherlands is frequently open in the smaller markets on this list, and it costs nothing extra to rank there.