App Store Keywords for Food & Drink Apps: A Mid-Difficulty Category

Estimated volume / estimated difficulty, 0-100, English phrases in every storefront.

Look at "coffee": it moves from a US score of 83 / 79 to 34 / 13 in France and 30 / 10 in Japan. The phrase is the same, the product is the same, and the top-10 apps are different, which is the point of measuring per storefront. "Food delivery" is the closest the category comes to a closed head term (100 / 100 in the US) but it falls to 43 in Brazil and France. At the other end, "wine" has a difficulty of 1 in Germany and 0 in Japan, so those storefronts treat it as a niche word.

Every line is within a couple of points of the median except name length, where the category is about a character shorter. Of the US results that were not Food & Drink, 11.7% were Productivity apps (which suits "meal planner" and "grocery list") and 5.0% Shopping apps. The phrase-to-category mapping in this study is approximate, so some of those are really list and planning tools that sit next door.

• Check how local the phrase is. "Meal planner" is 45 in the US and 0 in Japan. If the planning behaviour does not exist locally, the score drops because there is nothing to rank against, not because the market is open. See long-tail App Store keywords for how to read low scores.
• Compare a phrase with your direct rivals, not the category. Because Food & Drink is so average, the range inside it matters more than the mean. Pick the one or two competitors you actually fight and use keyword gaps against competitors.
• Do not repeat the category word. Apple advises not repeating words from the app name, subtitle or category in the keyword field, so skip "food" and "drink" as stand-alone keywords unless they are in a phrase you have tested.
• Look sideways. Weight and recipe tools can sit in Health & Fitness; list and offer tools belong with Shopping; and a dining app for trips overlaps with Travel.

The study took 26 categories, six generic English phrases each, and queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, analysing the top 10 results of each query; Food & Drink is 36 queries and 360 slots. Read the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV.

LocalASO is a Mac app that estimates keyword volume and difficulty for 52 storefronts, researching each in its own language. It costs $29 one time; the download is free but the app needs a license key to run. See pricing.