How to write App Store keywords that actually rank in 2026

You have three fields in App Store Connect that drive App Store search:

• Title — 30 characters, indexed with the highest weight.
• Subtitle — 30 characters, weighted slightly lower than Title but higher than Keywords.
• Keywords — 100 characters, comma-separated, hidden from users.

All three are searchable. But Apple uses different weights, and ranking duplicates across fields wastes your budget. This guide walks through the modern ASO workflow.

1. Don't optimize for volume alone

Search volume is the most common signal people optimize for. It's also the most misleading. A keyword with volume = 80 and difficulty = 90 is unrankable for a new app. A keyword with volume = 35 and difficulty = 12 can put you in the top 10 within a week.

The right metric is opportunity score:

opportunity = volume × (1 − difficulty / 100) × confidence

Where confidence accounts for whether you have any chance of ranking (do you have a few reviews? Is your category competitive? Is the keyword commercial-intent or browse-intent?).

2. Get your 50 ground-truth keywords first

Before writing a single ASC field, build a list of 50 ground-truth keywords. These are the terms a user might actually type to find your app. Sources:

1. Competitor mining — every keyword your top-5 competitors rank for.
2. App Store autocomplete — what does Apple suggest when you type "habit"? Those are real searches.
3. Apple Search Ads recommendations — even on a $5 ASA budget, Apple's suggested keywords are gold.
4. AppTweak / SerpWatch / SensorTower — paid tools that aggregate volume from many sources.
5. Reddit, Quora, App Store reviews — qualitative language ("makes me less anxious", "wakes me up gently") that maps to long-tail keywords.

The goal: a spreadsheet with 50 keywords, each scored by volume and difficulty, sortable.

3. Don't repeat keywords across fields

This is the single most common mistake. If "habit tracker" is in your Title, putting it in Keywords too wastes 14 characters. Apple already indexes it.

The rule: treat the three fields as one big 160-character keyword budget. Title gets the highest-priority keywords. Subtitle gets the second tier. Keywords field gets everything else — atomized into single words separated by commas (no spaces, no phrases).

Example breakdown

For a habit tracker app:

• Title (30): Habit Tracker: Daily Streaks
• Subtitle (30): Focus, routine, productivity
• Keywords (100): goals,calendar,planner,morning,reminder,build,break,journal,checklist,today,timer

Notice: "habit", "tracker", "daily", "streaks", "focus", "routine", "productivity" — all of these are already indexed via Title + Subtitle. They don't need to be in Keywords.

4. Localize, don't translate

Spanish for "habit tracker" is "rastreador de hábitos". Nobody searches that. Real Spanish-speaking users search "app de hábitos" or "rutina diaria".

Run keyword research per storefront, not once. Each App Store country has its own search behavior, and per-market volume can be 10× different.

5. Measure coverage, not just rank

The metric most teams ignore: what percentage of your 50 ground-truth keywords are actually in your indexed copy? If you have 50 ranked-by-volume keywords and your ASC fields contain only 15 of them, you're indexing for only 30% of the demand.

Coverage is the leading indicator. Rank is the trailing indicator. Optimize coverage; rank follows.

What's next

Once your ASC fields are dialed in, the next compounding factor is conversion rate — screenshots, icon, and the first three lines of your description. We'll cover that in the next post.