Expanding to Latin America: one language, many storefronts

You have an English or Spanish listing and you see interest from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile or neighbors. You want to decide which countries to invest in first.

• One language, many markets. Words differ by country, and competitors differ too. Use the countries listed on the Mexico keywords page and Brazil keywords page as starting points and check the rest in the app.
• Portuguese is separate. Brazil needs its own phrases, not a Spanish list.
• A long list of countries. Checking everything at once is slow because Apple limits public search to about 20 to 30 searches per minute per IP address.
• Slang and regional words. An AI adapts a phrase; it cannot be sure which regional word fits your audience.

1. Add your app and the best-known local rivals in each country as Competitor.
2. In localization, select the Latin American storefronts you can support. LocalASO adapts each keyword for each country and checks it in that store, and it caches localizations so a keyword and country pair is never translated twice.
3. Run the sweep in two steps. Start with the main country plus five key ones, then widen. A sweep of 15 keywords across 30 countries takes about 15 to 20 minutes, and the cells you are looking at are checked first.
4. Read the board across columns. A keyword that is Push in Mexico and Hard in Argentina tells you where to put effort first.
5. In Optimize, generate listings only for the languages you will keep up. The localization guide explains what to translate first.
6. Export the text, have a native reader check regional wording, then paste or upload as a draft.

The ranking by country guide explains why the same keyword can have different ranks in neighboring storefronts.

• No native review of slang or tone.
• No local payment, tax or support setup. Those are App Store Connect and business tasks.
• No true search counts. Volume and difficulty are estimates from rating counts.
• Apple App Store only. Android is a large share of some Latin American markets, and LocalASO does not cover it.

Start with the largest storefront you can support in support and billing terms, usually where you already have installs. Run its sweep, change the listing, then add the next country when ranks have settled. Repeating this twice teaches you more about your category than one big sweep, because each round shows how much a text change moves rank in practice.

Choose two countries, not twelve, and compare them. Download LocalASO or see pricing. Related: the European expansion routine and a marketer's research workflow.