CaddieOpen in CaddieDownload for Mac

Keyword Research Tools for App Store Optimization

Shared by Caddie Library · Updated
App Masters10:09Open on YouTube
Chapters show their main points

The bottom line

Good app keywords come from copying competitors' keywords into a big list with free tools, then filtering that list by popularity and difficulty scores. Pick keywords with high enough traffic and low enough difficulty, and put the best ones in your title and subtitle.

Key takeaways

  • Keywords in the title, subtitle and keyword field drive downloads. 0:15
    • ASO is app store SEO. The most relevant, high traffic keywords belong in the most prominent places, like the app title, the Google Play short description and the iOS subtitle.
  • Competitor apps are the best source of keyword ideas. 0:56
    • App Annie lists every keyword an app ranks well for, so a competitor like Relaxed Melodies gives you a ready pool.
    • AppFollow shows the exact keywords Apple Search Ads suggests for that app. It surfaced misspellings with low difficulty and high traffic, and tripled downloads for clients.
  • A reverse dictionary adds ideas that competitors miss. 4:45
    • Searching "sleep" on OneLook gives words like slumber, nap and hibernate, for keywords or app names.
    • Slumber is a strong name because it sits close to the target keyword "sleep".
  • Popularity and difficulty scores decide which keywords to target. 6:22
    • A list of 100 or more keywords is the starting point, then App Radar adds scores. It costs $39 a month, against $50 to $80 for similar tools.
    • Apple's popularity score tops out at 100 for giants like Instagram, and about 20 and above is worth pursuing.
  • The best keywords for a new app have popularity of 20 to 50 and difficulty of 30 or lower. 8:25
    • Sound sleeper has difficulty 35 and sound machine has popularity 48, while a difficulty of 57 to 60 is too hard.
    • A high difficulty score with few apps ranking can mean the keyword is easier than it looks.

Put your competitor's app into these very different tools, maybe a few keywords that you already have ideas for, and let the tools tell you what keywords you should go after.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Build a big keyword pool from App Annie

Keyword research starts with a wide, unfiltered list, and App Annie supplies it from apps that already rank.

  • Gather first, analyze later. 1:31
    • App Annie shows what an app already ranks for. Other ASO tools need you to type in keywords first.
    • Search an app, scroll to the ASO keywords field and click it.
    • The speaker's own app, Rain Sounds, shows keywords it ranks well for and ones it wants but misses.
    • The step is meant to inspire a list, with no data pulled yet.
  • Export competitor keywords into a spreadsheet. 2:20
    • Relaxed Melodies ranks for sleep sounds, relaxing sounds and sound machine.
    • Copy them into a spreadsheet and add data later.
    • The app also ranks for "clam", which is "calm" spelled backwards.

2:50 Get popularity scores with AppFollow, then add names

AppFollow adds the first real data to the list, and OneLook widens it with word ideas.

  • Popularity scores replace search volume. 3:53
    • Apple's score is the only search measure, and a free AppFollow plan shows it.
    • Copy each keyword into the spreadsheet and add more competitors.
    • Google's SEO tools give searches per month. Apple gives no such figure.
    • The goal is a no-brainer step that anyone can follow without guessing keywords.
  • OneLook helps with app names, not ASO data. 4:45
    • Type the target keyword, sleep, into the reverse dictionary.
    • The speaker uses it for app names, which an earlier video said should be short and sweet.

5:05 Filling gaps and getting scores

A reverse dictionary fills the gaps the competitor tools leave, and a list of 100+ keywords then needs difficulty data.

  • OneLook is a backup for keywords the other tools missed. 5:27
    • Slumber was a past client's app, and its name came from this kind of search.
    • Results such as dormancy are inspiration for an app name or a keyword.
    • Some of the words are unfamiliar to the speaker, so they are ideas to check, not final picks.
    • Use it only after App Annie and AppFollow, to cover what they did not return.
  • A good list has 100+ keywords before any scoring starts. 5:55
    • AppFollow gave popularity scores only, so difficulty is still missing.
    • The goal is generic, relevant keywords with high traffic and low difficulty.
    • About 100 keywords is the usual list size for client ASO work.

6:22 Scoring and placing keywords in App Radar

Difficulty is the main score, and the lowest-difficulty keywords go in the app name first.

  • Load the whole list into App Radar's trackings to see every score. 7:00
    • A free trial is available.
    • The demo uses only a few keywords to show what you might find.
  • Difficulty matters more than popularity. 7:41
    • A popularity of about 13 is too little traffic to pursue.
    • If a 48 is out of reach, a 14 with low enough difficulty is the fallback.
    • Around 30 and under is where a top 10 rank looks realistic.
  • The easiest strong keyword goes into the app name. 8:10
    • For the app Brain Cells, "sound sleeper" has decent traffic and a difficulty of 29, lower than the other keywords.
    • When relying only on ASO with little paid acquisition, a few lower-popularity keywords are fine.
    • The number one app for each keyword is another thing to check.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters, app marketing agency. A walkthrough of a free-tool workflow for app store keyword research: build a list of 100+ keywords from competitors and Apple suggestions, then filter by popularity and difficulty scores. It gives concrete thresholds (popularity 20+, difficulty 30 or under) and reports tripling client downloads by finding low-difficulty misspellings.

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript183 lines
0:00

What is up App nation. It is Steve P, young founder of appmasters.com the place you go when you want action back content in the app business. And today I want to share with you my favorite free ASO tools to help you with keyword research. Now, if you're not familiar with them. ASO App Store Optimization. All it means is app store SEO. Oh. It's how do you provide the right keywords in your app title, your subtitle, your keyword field, or your long description on Google play to get more downloads.

0:32

And one of the most critical parts of ASO is making sure you have the most relevant. High traffic keywords in the most prominent places, such as your app title, your short description on Google play, and your subtitle on iOS. And in this video, I want to share three of my favorite tools to help you do. Just that. Let's get to it. All right. The first tool I'm going to share is app Annie. These are all free and I'll tell you when I get to a paid ASO tool, but these are all free.

1:04

Now I have my app rain sounds in here, and what I like about app Manny is if you put your app, just search for your app right here. And then if you scroll all the way down to the keyword ASO keywords field, click that. What app Annie will tell you is all the keywords that a certain app ranks really well for. So unlike other ASO tools, you generally have to give an input on the keywords to figure out all the other keyword research.

1:31

So what I like to do when I'm starting ASO is really have a big pool of keywords that I can pull the data from. And then make an analysis of which keywords to actually go after. Here you can see all the different keywords that I rank really well for and the ones I really want to rank for. I'm not doing so well because I need to do better. Okay. The other thing I like to do is put some of my competitors in there so I have relaxed melodies.

1:56

These guys are crushing it in the app store, and I have their app with an app. Annie, I went to their ASO keyword field and I looked up all the different keywords that they're ranking well for. So sleep sounds relaxed melodies, they're just crushing it. They're doing great. Clam. Clam. I'll tell you how they came up with that one, but it's sort of calm but backwards. Relaxing sounds, sound machine. So they're doing really well.

2:20

And now I'm going to export and copy and paste these keywords and I'll tell you what to do with these keywords, but right now we're just going to copy all these keywords into a spreadsheet and we're going to then put these keywords because we don't have data yet. We just have a keyword field and we're just doing research, right? We want to get data on these keywords, so we're just going to copy and paste all these keywords into a spreadsheet and then pull the data on them.

2:40

So right now, all I'm doing is pretty much copy and pasting into a spreadsheet, but these allow me to get inspiration for the keywords that I should be targeting. All right. The next tool I will share with you guys is at Appfollow. Yeah. Their website is appfollow.io and here what I've done is I've gone to their dashboard. This is a free plan that I'm on. I've gone into the traffic score section and I've input my competitor relaxed melodies here.

3:05

And what app follow does is the Apple search ads recommendations. So within Apple search ads, when you've put an app in there. Obviously Apple is going to recommend some keywords that you should target because they want you to bid on these particular keywords. And what app follow does is provide you a list of keywords, exactly the same keywords that Apple is suggesting you bid on. So it's a great way to discover some keywords.

3:30

I personally have found misspellings of certain popular keywords that have low difficulty and high traffic, and we've been able to triple downloads for clients just using this particular tool. And what I like about app follow is now on like app Annie, you're starting to get some data. So this is, this popularity score is the search score that Apple has. Now, unlike Google, if you're familiar with SEO, unlike Google, where they give you the volume of searches per month for a particular keyword, Apple doesn't do that.

4:03

So the highest that any keyword has is a hundred and that's for like the big guys like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and such. Again, here's what you're going to do. You're going to go through these keywords, you're going to hit this little 100 click to copy, and then you caught it copied, and then you can put it into your spreadsheet. Again, we're building this really long list of keywords. You can put any other competitors' apps in here if you want, and it will do the same thing.

4:32

So it's a great way for me to just get some inspiration. Keywords, that's all I want to do. I wanted to make it a no brainer type of step where anything anybody can do it and not have to think about the keywords that you should be targeting. All right. The last one, and this is not an ASO tool because these are all been mobile tools, is one of my favorite tools I use all the time. It's called one look.com reverse dictionary.

4:54

Again, I put in sleep because that's sort of the keyword that I want to go for. Now, I'd like to use this to think of. Inspirations for app names. Cause in my earlier video I said app names that are short, sweet, and are very similar to the main keyword that you want to go after. So for example, like slumber is a past client of ours and they're very related to sleep. It's a great brand name because it's going to help you with the keyword for ASO keyword ranking because you're very similar with.

5:23

Sleep already and it's a great brand name slumber, like I love that, right? So this is what I use this tool for it. Like if there were keywords that I didn't get through app Annie or throughout follow, well one look can give me some keywords that I might be able to target. So slumber, KIPP nap, hibernate. Dormancy. Some of these I don't know about, but these give you inspiration for either an app name or keywords that you can potentially target.

5:55

Now that you have hopefully a list of a hundred plus keywords. And that's generally the type of list that we'd like to have when we're doing ASO for clients about a hundred plus keywords we wanted then get the data from them. Cause right now. Only at follow has given us the popularity scores, but we also want the difficulty scores because we want to try to find keywords that are generic, relevant, have high traffic and low difficulty.

6:22

Now, the most affordable ASO tool that I found has been app radar.com dot com full disclosure, they are a sponsor of the podcast, but they aren't sponsoring anything related to this video. So I'm gonna give you a very objective view of this tool. They're only $39 most ASO tools will charge you anywhere from 50 60 $70 $80 per month, just to get access to the same type. Of data that app radar is providing for you. So within this long list of keywords, you sign up for their platform and you can sign up for a free trial if you want.

7:00

Then what you're going to do is input these keywords into app radar. Okay? So I'm going to go into trackings and here you find all the keywords that we have. So this is a great way, and I only input a few just to give you a sense of what you might discover. But right now, sound machine has a popularity score of 48 which is good. So anything I would say 20 and above is good. Around 13 it just isn't a high enough traffic volume for you to go after.

7:31

Now, if you're unable to rank at all for some of these. Higher traffic keywords like 48 then maybe go after 14 if the difficulty score is low enough. So this is the main score that we want to go after is difficulty. Now, some of these are really difficult. 60 57 it's pretty difficult. Sound sleeper, 35 not so difficult. So here you want to find, I want to get it a little bit lower, but the lower the score, the better.

7:56

So about 30 and under is where I like to be, where I've found that, Hey, this is a good keyword that potentially I can rank for it and be in the top 10. Four so you want to input all this and then start deciding where certain keywords should be. So for my app brain cells, maybe I'll put be a sound sleeper, and that becomes a keyword that I have in my app name because I found that as decent traffic, 29 and lower difficulty than any of the other keywords.

8:21

If you're just starting out, you want, and you're not going to pay much. For paid acquisition, you really want to find keywords that have this, I would say 20 to 50 keyword popularity score and 30 and under in terms of difficulty, and if you have to have a few that are lower and popularity, go for it, but you really want to find the low traffic keywords if you're solely relying on ASO to drive downloads for your app.

8:46

The other thing I'll mention is the quilting I like about this. Is owner, which is the number one app that rings for this particular keyword. So you can check that out here. The number of apps. Now, generally this is if a difficulty score is pretty high, but there's only a small number of apps showing up. It might be that it's a branding, but it also is an indication that it has lower difficulty too. So it becomes one of the variables that you look at to see if a keyword is worth going after.

9:14

That's it, guys. Simple tools to help you do keyword research and not really use your brain, but your competitor's app into these very different tools. Maybe a few keywords that you already have ideas for and let the tools tell you. What keywords you should go after. I guess that's it. Leave in the comments below what you found to be the most valuable tool. If you've got other recommendations for tools or content that you want to see from us, please be sure to leave a comment below and as always, don't forget to subscribe.

9:47

All right guys, be safe, especially during times like these. Be safe. Be kind, and I'll see you next time. Bye.