App Store Keyword Research: United States

The US storefront is the single most competitive App Store market — keyword difficulty scores routinely run 10–20 points higher than in comparable English-speaking markets.

Apple Search Ads popularity scores are calibrated to US search volume, so a US score of 60 represents real, substantial demand.

United States 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 English. Start from your existing English list, then add the terms competitors use in their United States 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 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 United States. 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 United States. 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 United States 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 United States is frequently open in the smaller markets on this list, and it costs nothing extra to rank there.