ASO for indie game developers: keywords when the genre is crowded

You make small games for iPhone, iPad or Mac, with a small audience and no marketing budget. Your listing has to do the work that a publisher's ad spend does for bigger titles.

• Crowded genres. Difficulty is built from the median and mean log rating counts of the top 10 and the share of apps with at least 50,000 ratings, so a genre led by large titles scores high.
• Name-first thinking. Games are named for the brand, so the name carries few search words.
• Wasted words. Apple advises against repeating words from the name, subtitle or category in the keyword field, and against generic terms like "game".
• Few markets covered. A game with little text still sells in other languages if its listing is found.

1. Add your game and two or three games your players also download as Competitor.
2. Use Brainstorm: describe the game in one sentence, such as "a cozy puzzle game about growing bonsai trees". The AI proposes keywords, then LocalASO checks demand and difficulty in the countries you select.
3. Read the verdicts on the board. Hard keywords can wait. Push keywords, where you rank 4 to 20 with difficulty under 80, are where small changes pay off. Swap and Dead keywords free up space.
4. Remember that the primary category and secondary category are indexed by search, so you do not need to spend keyword bytes repeating them. The title and subtitle guide covers the 30-character limits.
5. Run Optimize per language, then pack the field with the keyword field packer.

• No creative testing. Screenshots, previews and icon tests happen in App Store Connect; see the product page optimization glossary entry.
• No ad data. Apple Ads keywords and bids are outside the app.
• No Google Play. LocalASO works with Apple's App Store only, so an Android release needs another tool.
• No install or revenue numbers. Volume and difficulty are estimates from rating counts, not Apple search counts, and they ignore seasonality such as holiday spikes.

If your game name is already known, compare the Keep brand strategy in Optimize with Max reach and read the stated reasons for each change.

Pick one market you can support in the game's language and run the board there first. Download the app or read pricing. For other app types, see utility apps and subscription apps.