App Store Keyword Research: Russia

Russia requires Cyrillic-script localisation — Latin-script keywords will not capture Russian search demand.

The Russian storefront has significant volume in productivity, navigation, and games categories with difficulty scores substantially below Western European equivalents.

Russia 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 Russian. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Russia 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 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 Russia. 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.

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

Writing Russian metadata for Russia 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 Russia is frequently open in the smaller markets on this list, and it costs nothing extra to rank there.