App Store Keywords for Health & Fitness Apps: Long Names, Hard Head Terms

Estimated volume / estimated difficulty, 0-100. All phrases are English, including in DE, JP, FR and BR.

"Running" is the category's head term: difficulty 47 to 82 in every storefront and volume of 64 to 84. The other five phrases are specific activities or tracked measures, and they behave like long-tail terms in the smaller storefronts: "intermittent fasting" is 8 in difficulty in Japan, and "blood pressure" is 1 in Brazil. "Period tracker" shows the widest spread among the mid-tier phrases, from 76 in the US to 20 in Japan.

The size of the market is shown by the US median of about 70,000 ratings versus 1,245 in Japan. The names are the interesting part: long names and a near-median exact-title share (45%) together mean most top-10 names carry the brand plus extra words that are not just the query. In an app name limited to 30 characters, those extra words are keywords; their position next to the brand is the visible strategy of this category. We cannot tell from public data whether these words cause ranking or simply reflect what each team chose to write.

The genre match is high (90.0% of US results), and the part that is not Health & Fitness is mostly Medical (8.3%). Symptom, medication and measurement phrases may sit in either category; see Medical for how those behave.

• Treat the 30-character name as scarce. If competitors fill 25 to 30 characters, ask what words your name can carry that your subtitle cannot. Walk through the byte and character arithmetic in using every byte of the keyword field.
• Do not spend bytes on the category word. Apple advises against repeating words from your name, subtitle or category in the keyword field, and both the primary and the secondary category are indexed. Use the freed space for activity words.
• Rank phrases on volume and difficulty together. "Water reminder" (47.7 volume, 29.3 difficulty) offers a better ratio than "running" (69.7, 57.5) for a small team. Prioritising keywords by volume and difficulty gives a method.
• Check the neighbours. Fasting and nutrition apps are close to Food & Drink, and team-sport and live-score terms belong with Sports.

For every category we picked six English phrases and queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, analysing the top 10 results per query: 36 queries and 360 slots for Health & Fitness, fetched 2026-11-01. See the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV.

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