Mac App Store Keyword Research: What Is the Same and What to Check

Apple's App Store Connect reference says name and subtitle live under App Information, which is shared across platforms, and each is localized per language. Version-specific fields, including description, keywords, promotional text and What's New, live under the platform version. In practice:

If you ship iOS and Mac under one app record, you set the name and subtitle once. Choose them to work for both audiences; keywords can differ.

For macOS apps the category is also set in Xcode, and the primary category in App Store Connect should match it. Apple indexes the primary and optional secondary category in search (Apple: App Store search), so a wrong category is a relevance risk. See the primary category glossary entry.

People search for Mac software with different words: "menu bar", "shortcut", "markdown editor", "window manager" and file types. These phrases may not appear in iPhone research at all. Apple states search results depend on text relevance and on user behavior (Apple), and does not document separate Mac ranking rules. Verify with your own results.

1. List Mac-specific vocabulary. Menu bar, keyboard shortcut, drag and drop, export formats, integrations with other Mac apps.
2. Search each phrase in the Mac App Store and read the top 10. If it shows iPhone apps, the phrase is not a Mac search.
3. Check rating counts of the Mac apps in the top 10. Whether specific phrases are easier to reach than on iPhone is something to confirm from those numbers, not to assume.
4. Fill the fields: subtitle for the audience, keyword field for the rest. See what to put in the keyword field.
5. Track rank for the same set daily, as in tracking keyword rankings.

Apple documents the iTunes Search API with entities for software, iPadSoftware and desktopSoftware. The desktopSoftware entity is the one for Mac apps, which helps if you build your own script; see free keyword research.

Apple publishes no Mac search volume. Estimates, whoever provides them, come from public search results. Check each storefront separately, and see ranking by country.

A hypothetical menu bar clipboard manager called Cliply lists menu bar, clipboard, shortcut and paste history as candidates. Searching each in the Mac App Store, menu bar might return mostly utilities, clipboard managers of every size and paste history a short list of focused apps. In that case the third phrase is the best starting point and the first two stay as supporting words. All four are longer than two characters. The keyword field menu bar,shortcut,paste history,snippets is 40 bytes. The name and subtitle carry clipboard.

LocalASO itself is a Mac app for macOS 14 or later, used to research Apple App Store keywords for any app you add by name, link or ID. Add your Mac app by its App Store link and confirm the board finds it before you rely on rank; see add your first app and the keyword research docs.