App Store Keyword Research: Yemen

Yemen is an emerging Arabic-language market — Arabic localisation from Saudi Arabia covers it.

Near-zero difficulty.

Yemen 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 Arabic. Translating an English list is the common mistake. Pull the terms from Yemen App Store listings and from what competitors put in their subtitle, because Arabic 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 Yemen, 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 Yemen. The same Arabic metadata is indexed in 14 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 Yemen. 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 Arabic. 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 Arabic speaker.
• Keyword field, 100 characters. Arabic is right-to-left and heavily inflected, and search queries are typically shorter than the Latin-script equivalent. Enter unvocalised forms, since that is what people type, and expect 12 to 14 terms in the field. 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 Arabic metadata for Yemen is not a single-market decision. The same 100 characters are indexed in 13 other storefronts, where the same terms carry different demand and, more usefully, different difficulty. A term that is closed in Yemen is frequently open in the smaller markets on this list, and it costs nothing extra to rank there.