How to Find App Store Keywords for a New App

Apple tells you to choose keywords based on words your audience would use to find an app like yours, and to be specific about features and functionality (Apple: product page). Skip your internal product vocabulary. For Streakly, "habit formation platform" is a pitch; "habit tracker", "daily streak" and "morning routine" are searches.

Produce 30 to 60 raw phrases from four places:

• The problem ("stop skipping workouts", "build a routine")
• The solution type ("tracker", "planner", "checklist")
• The feature ("streak", "reminder", "widget")
• The user ("adhd", "students", "parents")

Apple states that search hints appear once someone types into the search bar, and that people can search in natural, everyday language (Apple: App Store search). Type each seed word and one letter after it, and write down every hint. Hints show real phrasing, but Apple does not publish how often each is searched, so treat them as ideas, not as volume.

Search each phrase in the App Store. For the top 10, check two things:

1. Is it the same kind of app? If "streak" returns games, the phrase means something else. Drop it.
2. How many ratings do the apps have? Ten apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings mean a hard phrase. A mix with several small apps means an opening. This is the idea behind keyword difficulty.

Apple lists text relevance and user behavior as the search factors (Apple). You control only the text before launch, which is why a precise phrase beats a broad one for a new app. Apple's own advice matches: popular terms bring traffic but are highly competitive, less common terms bring less traffic and less competition (Apple).

Keep a handful of broad phrases for the long run and many specific ones that can bring the first downloads. The long tail guide explains how to find the specific ones.

Fill the fields in order of importance to your app. In the hypothetical listing:

• Name (30 characters, Apple): Streakly: Habit Tracker is 23 characters.
• Subtitle: Daily Routine & Goals is 21 characters.
• Keyword field: streak,checklist,reminder,self care,planner,journal,morning is 59 bytes of the 100 allowed.

The keyword field does not repeat "habit", "tracker", "daily" or "routine", because those words are already in the name and subtitle; see what to put in the keyword field. The free keyword field checker counts bytes and finds repeats.

Your first list is a hypothesis. After release you get real rank data, and you can tell which phrases moved the app and which did nothing. The guide to spotting dead keywords covers that second pass.

Add your app, then use Brainstorm to describe it in a sentence; LocalASO checks demand and difficulty for the proposals in the countries you select. Volume and difficulty are estimates from rating counts, not Apple search counts. See Suggestions and the keyword research board.