How to Choose App Store Keywords You Can Actually Rank For

Apple says search results depend on text relevance (title, subtitle, keywords and primary category) and on user behavior such as downloads, ratings and reviews (Apple: App Store search). The first part you control. The second part is why an app with 500,000 ratings is hard to displace for a popular phrase. Apple frames the same trade-off: popular terms bring traffic but are highly competitive, less common terms bring less traffic and less competition (Apple: product page).

1. Relevance. Search the phrase. If the top 10 contains apps that do something different from yours, drop it. A phrase that brings the wrong users hurts conversion.
2. Top 10 strength. Look at rating counts. If most of the top 10 have tens of thousands of ratings, the phrase is guarded. If a few have under 1,000, there is room.
3. Difficulty. In LocalASO, difficulty combines the median and mean log rating counts of the top 10 with the share of top-10 apps that have at least 50,000 ratings. It is an estimate, not an Apple number. See keyword difficulty.
4. Your current rank. A keyword where you already sit at 4 to 20 is cheaper to move than one where you are at 150, because your app already shows up for the phrase and a small step can move it into the top 10.

A hypothetical habit tracker, Streakly, checking three phrases in one country. The numbers are illustrative, not measured.

The middle row is where most gains sit: mixed competition and a rank within reach.

LocalASO applies these rules in order: Swap when you rank in the top 10 for a phrase almost nobody searches, Dead when volume is very low, Hard when difficulty is 80 or more and you are not in the top 10, Push when you rank 4 to 20 with solid volume and difficulty below 80, and Maybe for everything else. Volume uses a rank-weighted mean of log rating counts over the top 10 plus a small bonus for result count. Both scores are estimates from public rating counts, so compare phrases with each other and do not read them as traffic.

• Push: make sure the phrase is in name, subtitle or keyword field exactly as typed, and check it weekly.
• Hard: keep at most one or two for brand and category reasons; the long tail guide shows how to find specific alternatives.
• Dead and Swap: replace them. The freed bytes go to phrases from your candidate list.
• Maybe: hold in reserve and recheck after your next release.

Rating counts lag behind current popularity, paid ads can sit above organic results and the estimate differs per storefront. Check the countries you target, not only the US, and test word forms with the singular or plural self-test; the ranking by country guide explains how.

The board shows rank, volume, difficulty and verdict for each keyword per country. The details are in the keyword research docs, and the search volume guide gives both formulas. If you are starting from nothing, begin with finding keywords for a new app.