After putting in a ton of work to develop your iOS app, one of the most important tasks to do is to choose great app keywords. .Conditions in the Apple App Store are always changing and you need to continually monitor and tweak your keywords to get the best possible performance.

So let’s work on your keywords. This post will show you where to get started and give you specific tips for choosing the right keywords.

Find Out Where You Stand

Generally, the first set of keywords that you choose without using any research tools is not going to be very good. This is because the first words that come to your mind are usually going to be the most common and competitive keywords. But who knows, you may have picked a couple of great keywords too.

So before you go on, you need to know exactly where you rank for each of your keywords. This will allow you to remove the ones that are not working for you and replace them with keywords that can help you get more downloads.

Use a Search Rankings tool to track all the keywords you are using. Once you have this information, you can then move on to the next section on how to choose your keywords.

Choose The Right Keywords

This is the most important section in this post. After you learn this information, you will know more about App Store Keyword Optimization than a lot of your fellow indie developers and more than even some mobile app managers at large companies.

Let’s start with the big picture. Your goal is to rank in the top 10 for all your keywords and there are basically three parts to choosing the right keywords.

The first and most important criteria for choosing keywords is that they have to be highly relevant to your app. It doesn’t help if you rank #1 for the keyword “cats” if you have a game about aliens. Be sure that you put a lot of thought into what people might type in when they search for an app like yours.

The second thing to look at when choosing keywords is the Difficulty Score. This is a measure of how difficult it will be to rank for a keyword, on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most difficult.

Many developers make the mistake of looking for traffic first, then ranking difficulty second. However, it doesn’t matter if a keyword gets a ton of traffic, if you rank #1,252. Nobody is going to scroll far enough to find your app.

The key is to figure out the approximate Difficulty Score that will allow your app to rank in the top 10.

For example, after examining your existing keywords, you might find that your app ranks in the top 10 for a couple of keywords that have a Difficulty Score of 2.1 or lower. Therefore, whenever you choose new keywords, you should be looking for keywords with a Difficulty Score of 2.1 or less. This is just a rule of thumb and you will have to do some testing, but looking at the Difficulty Score is a huge help in quantifying the keyword selection process.

Finally, if the first two criteria above are equal, then choose keywords with the highest Traffic Scores. The Traffic Score is also measured on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest. It shows approximately how many times people are searching for a particular keyword.

The only time that you would completely disqualify a keyword is if it has a Traffic Score of 0. Otherwise, consider any keyword that has at least some traffic, but remember to prioritize relevance and Difficulty Score before Traffic Score.

Where To Get New Keyword Ideas

There are many resources that you can tap to get new keyword ideas. You have probably already heard about the common ones, but here is one of our favorites that not many people talk about. We think you will like it too because app users literally do the work for you.

We call this technique Review Mining and it is simply the process of looking through your app’s user reviews to find new keyword ideas. Anyone can do it for free, here’s how.

First, open iTunes, then look at the profile page for your app. Then look a the Ratings and Reviews for your app, then sort them by Most Favorable. Here is what it would look like for Clash of Clans.

You want to sort by the reviews with the highest ratings (most stars) because you want to get ideas for positive keywords, or keywords that are associated with features that users like about the app. People are more likely to search for those keywords when looking for an app like yours.

Reviews with low ratings will have keywords that people don’t like about the app. Common words that we see are things like: “crash” or “slow.” So the ratings act as a great filter for finding the right keywords for your app.

Now start looking through the reviews and write down any interesting keywords that you find. Be sure to have a notebook or spreadsheet open before you start this process.

Yes, this is a tedious process and since you have a new app, you will not have too many reviews, which will not yield many keywords.

Not to worry, we have the solution to both of these problems.

Our Review Analysis tool can mine the reviews of any app and display the most app-specific keywords at the top, along with the user sentiment associated with that keyword.

This is very helpful because certain words may come up in the reviews for your app, but some of them may be generic terms that appear in the reviews of all apps. So we do some major data crunching and compare how often a keyword appears for your app compared to how often it appears in the reviews of all other apps.

The keywords that are most specific to your app are displayed first. Here is an example of the top results for Clash of Clans. As you can see, there are some great ideas to start researching. These keywords can also lead you to other keyword ideas that you may not have thought of.

Since your app might not have enough reviews to make this method effective yet, just examine the reviews for apps that are similar to yours. Your can now put your competitor’s users to work to help you brainstorm new keyword ideas.

Regardless if you use our tool or do it manually in iTunes, we hope that was helpful and gave you a new idea for where to find more keywords.

Overcome Title Vanity

Before I let you get to work on your keywords, I have one more tip for you. Putting a few of your keywords in the title of your app can help you rank higher for those keywords.

Some developers are against putting keywords in the title of their app because it doesn’t look as pretty. But if it helps you gain an advantage, why not give it a try? You can always change it back later.

If you don’t believe me, let’s take a look at the Facebook app. You would think that since this app gets millions of downloads, it would dominate all of its keywords. But if we spy on the keyword rankings for the app, we find that it doesn’t rank #1 for all of its keywords.

It still does very well, but we can definitely see that there is an advantage to having keywords in the title of your app. For example, for the keyword “post” the Facebook app currently ranks #5 on the iPhone. As you can see, all of the apps that outrank the Facebook app for this keyword have the keyword in their titles.

Just be sure that the keywords you add to your title form a sentence or phrase that makes sense when people read it. If you just add keywords randomly, your app will be rejected by the App Store reviewers.

Conclusion

As you can see, improving your keywords is not a difficult process. However, it requires continual testing and ongoing maintenance to stay on top of your keyword rankings.

Many developers do not achieve the organic download results that they are looking for simply because they give up too soon. Stick with it, keep testing, and you will start to see results.

If you are ranking well for all of your keywords and are looking to get even more downloads, look at improving your icon and screenshots. Test your app icon and screenshots to find out if you can improve them.

Want more app development tips & advice? Book a call with an app consultant today.

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