App Store Keywords for News Apps: A US Market and Everyone Else

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

The columns tell two stories. In the US and Great Britain, every phrase has difficulty between 27 and 80. In Brazil, all six phrases are 16 or lower. It is tempting to read the Brazilian figures as an opening, but they come from an English test in a Portuguese-speaking market. They mostly say that English news phrases are not what Brazilian users or publishers optimise for, and the real comparison is with Portuguese phrases.

Name structure is the distinctive feature. With 68% of names containing a separator (a dash, colon, pipe or similar) and 69% using 25 to 30 characters, the typical top-10 News name is a publisher or brand followed by a descriptor that fills most of the 30-character limit. At the same time the full phrase appears in only 28% of names (33% in the US, 20% in Germany and France). So the descriptor exists, but it is not simply the query. Whether the descriptor causes the ranking cannot be read off this data.

1. Write the second half of the name deliberately. If your name has a brand and a descriptor, the descriptor deserves the same testing as a subtitle. Subtitle keyword strategy covers the limits and the trade between name and subtitle.
2. Treat the US as its own project. A median of about 150,700 ratings in the top 10 for US news phrases means a new entrant would be measured against very large apps. If you publish in German, Japanese or Brazilian markets, read ASO for small storefronts and re-run the research in that language.
3. Specialise by topic or place. "Local news" averages 27.2 and "financial news" 29.3 against 39.3 for "news headlines". A topic or region is often cheaper than the head term, though local news is still 65 in the US.
4. Check neighbours. Magazine-style reading belongs with Magazines & Newspapers; alerts about storms are often compared with Weather; and video clips may sit closer to Entertainment. Note that 6.7% of US results for these phrases were Finance apps, which fits "financial news".

The study covers 26 categories with six generic English phrases each, queried through the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, with the top 10 results per query analysed: 36 queries and 360 slots for News. See the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV.

LocalASO is a Mac app that estimates volume and difficulty in 52 storefronts using local-language keywords. It is $29 one time; the download is free but the app needs a license key. See pricing.