Find Keyword Ideas in App Store Reviews

Apple advises choosing keywords based on words your audience would use to find an app like yours and being specific about features (Apple: product page). Reviews are the largest free source of those words. Apple also says ratings and reviews can influence how an app ranks, so reading them has a second use: the issues people complain about are the ones competitors are weak on.

Copy 100 to 200 recent reviews per app into a spreadsheet: your own and three competitors. Include the 2, 3 and 4 star reviews; they tend to describe specific needs, while 1 and 5 star reviews are often short.

The excerpts above are invented examples, not real reviews.

People write sentences and search for two or three words. From the examples: "keep me on track" becomes daily routine, "lock screen widget" becomes widget, "ADHD brain" becomes adhd. Each result is three or more characters, which Apple requires for every keyword.

Count how many reviews use each phrase, across your app and the competitors. A phrase that appears in 12 reviews beats one that appears in 1. Do not read the count as search volume: it measures how often a user wrote a word in a review, not how often anyone searched it. Check demand by searching the phrase and reading the top 10; see choosing keywords you can rank for.

Delete anything with a competitor name or a trademark. Apple states that names of other apps or companies are not allowed in the keyword list, and prohibits unauthorized trademarked terms and competing app names. See competitor names in keywords. Also drop claims you cannot support, such as "best" or "number one".

Put the best phrases in the name or subtitle and the rest in the keyword field. See what to put in the keyword field and subtitle keyword strategy.

From 150 invented reviews of habit apps, the sorted counts might show: widget 14, adhd 12, daily routine 9, reminders 8, streak 7. The first two are specific and worth a top 10 check; reminders is broad and probably crowded. The ranked list is a to-do list for step 4, not a final answer.

Reviews come from the people who write them, who are not all your users, and they are written in one language per storefront. Mine each storefront's own reviews for its own language instead of translating English phrases; the localization guide explains why.

Paste the phrases into Brainstorm or the board, and LocalASO checks estimated demand, difficulty and your rank in the countries you select. Numbers are estimates from rating counts. See Suggestions and the keyword research docs.