App Store Keyword Research: Tajikistan

Russian is the dominant language for App Store search in Tajikistan.

Near-zero difficulty.

Tajikistan 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 Tajikistan 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 Tajikistan, 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 Tajikistan. 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 Tajikistan. 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 Tajikistan 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 Tajikistan is frequently open in the smaller markets on this list, and it costs nothing extra to rank there.