Effective keyword optimisation plays a pivotal role in enhancing your app’s visibility within app stores, driving impressions and user engagement.
With millions of apps competing for attention, standing out in search results is crucial. By fine-tuning your keyword strategy, you can significantly increase your app’s chances of being discovered by the right audience.
This blog covers several key aspects of keyword optimisation on iOS, like best practices for metadata optimisation, keyword cannibalisation, and adapting your strategy through localisation to reach a global audience.
Implementing these keyword optimisation techniques will allow your app to thrive in competitive app store environments, resulting in greater visibility and higher engagement levels.
Let’s explore different approaches that can be used for the best App Store results.
How to increase app visibility through metadata optimisation
Let’s begin by defining metadata.
In the context of mobile apps, metadata refers to the key information and details (text and visual) that describe your app. For text metadata, this includes:
iOS: The title, subtitle, description, and keyword field.
Android: The title, short description and long description.
For visual metadata, this includes icons, screenshots and short videos that showcase the app’s functionality.
Metadata plays a crucial role in helping app store algorithms understand what your app is about and which keywords it should rank for. When properly optimised, it can significantly boost your app’s discoverability within the app stores, leading to a higher ranking in search results.
What happens if you don’t optimise your app metadata?
Poor metadata practices can undermine your keyword optimisation efforts.
Issues like keyword cannibalisation (we will expand on this further), where the same keyword is repeated in multiple fields, can harm your app’s search performance. This reduces the effectiveness of your target keywords and limits the impressions your app can generate.
So, it’s crucial to follow metadata optimisation best practices to give your app the best chance possible at higher visibility.
Keyword optimisation tricks for optimising app metadata on iOS
- Removing unnecessary spaces in the keyword field: The character limit for this section is only 100 characters (including spaces). However, the algorithm doesn’t rely on human-like readability, so spaces between keywords are not required. By eliminating spaces and using commas to separate each keyword, you can free up valuable character space, allowing you to include more keywords in your field and target a wider range of search terms.
- Capitalising on Apple’s free keywords: Keywords like “app,” “free,” or your brand name are often already associated with your app and don’t need to be included in your keyword field. This allows you to focus on other high-value keywords that are more specific to your app’s niche or target audience.
- Regularly testing new keywords: As search trends evolve, seasonal holidays pass and algorithms change, revisiting and experimenting with different keyword combinations is essential for maintaining relevance and maximising impressions. This ongoing process helps refine your keyword positioning, ensuring that your app stays competitive in the search rankings. We would recommend that app developers update their metadata every 4-6 weeks, giving the algorithm enough time to index any changes and see any growth emanating from those changes.
Metadata practices like these will improve your keyword optimisation efforts, and increase your app’s discoverability and visibility, which, in turn, will boost its impressions and reach your target audience more effectively.
What is keyword cannibalisation?
Building on the importance of correctly inputting your metadata, one challenge in keyword optimisation is keyword cannibalisation.
While repeatedly using a high-value keyword might seem beneficial, this will generally harm your iOS app’s rankings and visibility.
Keyword cannibalisation happens when multiple sections of your app’s metadata—such as the title, subtitle, or keyword field—target the same keyword, causing your app to compete against itself in search rankings.
Cannibalisation dilutes the potential impact of your keywords by spreading its influence too thinly across different parts of your metadata. This can negatively affect your ASO efforts, by reducing impressions and hindering visibility in search results. For example, if the same keyword appears in your title and subtitle, your app will compete for the same search term twice, weakening your overall performance.
Also, Apple’s search algorithm concatenates the keywords in the title, subtitle, and keyword field into one long list when reading your metadata. The algorithm reads this list left to right and only takes into account the last instance of a keyword it encounters. This means that if a keyword appears in both the title and subtitle, the algorithm ignores earlier instances of its use, only recognising the last time it encounters that keyword (in this instance – the subtitle).
The result? Your keywords in high-value areas like the title, which should carry the most weight, lose their impact and your keyword optimisation efforts are weakened.
An example of keyword cannibalisation
If we take the example of the app Simply Draw, they include the keyword “draw” three times—twice in their title and once in their subtitle.
As a result, the algorithm reads their metadata as follows:
Simply, Learn, To, Draw, Your, Own, Way
This setup leads to several problems. First, all the keyword weight associated with “learn to draw” is eliminated from the title, and they only benefit from subtitle weighting.
Second, consider the fact that metadata space is incredibly valuable. iOS developers are limited to just 60 characters for their combined title and subtitles, so it’s essential to prioritise high-impact keywords and concise, engaging language that clearly conveys the app’s core value. By cannibalising the keyword “draw,” Simply Draw utilises only 33 of those 60 characters (second red flag).
What does this mean for their search visibility? Let’s examine the top three apps for the search term “draw.”
The top-ranking app, Sketchbook uses “draw” once in its subtitle, the second-highest app, Ibis Paint X likely includes “draw” in its keyword field, and the third, Whiteboard, has “draw” in its title.
None of these apps include keyword repetition, maximising their chances of achieving a higher ranking. Simply Draw currently sits in tenth place, but due to keyword cannibalisation, it’s missing an opportunity to rank higher. While several ranking factors may contribute to its lower position for this search term, a simple fix—removing the keyword “draw” from the subtitle—could help boost Simply Draw’s ranking and significantly increase its visibility.
This example highlights the pitfalls of keyword cannibalisation and underscores the importance of strategically placing keywords to maximise discoverability in the app store. Spreading your keywords strategically across different metadata fields allows each to contribute individually to your app’s search presence.
What is metadata hierarchy and how can it impact your app store ranking?
As mentioned above, both app stores assign different weights to keywords based on their placement. By following metadata hierarchy on iOS, you can avoid keyword cannibalisation and increase your app’s ranking. Here are some principles to follow:
- Your high-value, most relevant keywords should be placed within your app’s title. Algorithmically, this field carries the most weight, meaning that the algorithm will prioritise these words when indexing your metadata.
- Your subtitle carries the second highest weighting.
- The keyword field carries the least weight.
This means that on iOS, your high-value (most relevant) keywords should be placed within your title and subtitle, while your secondary keywords (search terms and phrases that complement your primary keywords) should be added to the keyword field to improve the likelihood of your app appearing in relevant searches.
While the app description is not indexed for search in the Apple App Store, it still plays a role in conversion by explaining features and benefits to users once they land on the app’s page. So, it’s best to use the description to engage users and highlight why the app meets their needs rather than for keyword optimisation on iOS.
Leveraging metadata hierarchy to prevent keyword cannibalisation
Understanding this hierarchy is crucial for effective keyword optimisation, as it allows you to prioritise high-value keywords in key locations like the title, while secondary keywords can be positioned in less prominent fields, like your keyword field.
An example of an app that does this well is Duolingo. Let’s take a look at the top three apps for the search term “learn languages”.
Duolingo has this keyword prominently within its subtitle, giving it the second-highest weighting (just behind the weighting of the title).
While Babbel and HelloTalk include the keyword ‘language’ in their titles (which the algorithm is likely to pluralise as ‘languages’), the term ‘learning’ is more nuanced. The algorithm may not automatically convert ‘learning’ into the keyword ‘learn.’ Although we can’t see the exact keywords used by these apps, it’s probable that ‘learn’ appears in their keyword fields. However, it won’t carry the same weight as it would if placed in the subtitle.
Although using the right keywords in the title and subtitle isn’t the only factor influencing keyword rankings—since the algorithm also considers other elements like ratings, conversion rates, and more—this is one key strategy app developers can use to optimise their listings for specific keywords.
ProTip: If you fear you’re at risk of keyword cannibalisation, you can also perform a thorough metadata audit. It helps to evaluate and optimise the metadata to boost the app’s visibility and performance. A well-executed audit should involve keyword analysis and optimisation, review and evaluation of all text and visual elements of the app store listing, competitor benchmarking and KPIs analysis. An experienced app marketing agency can leverage the findings and develop a targeted ASO strategy, so if you’re looking for support, don’t hesitate to contact our growth team.
Adapting your keyword optimisation strategy for local markets
A powerful tactic that can be used to improve your keyword optimisation is keyword localisation. If your app is available globally, relying solely on English keywords can severely limit your app’s reach.
The App Store supports 40 different locales. This means that app metadata can be displayed in 40 different languages and regions. This includes major languages like English, Chinese, Spanish, French, and German, as well as many other languages spoken around the world.
To improve impressions in other regions, it’s essential to localise your keyword strategy by translating and adapting keywords to suit different languages and cultural contexts. This involves a literal translation and a deeper understanding of regional search behaviours and user preferences (check out our comprehensive guide on app store localisation for more details).
A popular keyword in one country may have little relevance in another, so optimising for local terminology can make a huge difference in visibility. For example, the language learning app Babbel targets different keywords in English-speaking and Spanish-speaking countries based on user search behaviours, see the example below.
The UK audience might search for “learning” when looking for mobile solutions, while Spanish users could search for “cursos”, which translates to “courses” to find structured course options.
This demonstrates how understanding the audience’s search intent in their respective cultures helps Babbel refine its ASO strategy effectively.
Boosting impressions with keyword optimisation
Mastering the art of keyword optimisation is essential for any app looking to succeed in today’s highly competitive app stores. You can significantly boost your app’s visibility and impressions with metadata best practices by avoiding common issues like keyword cannibalisation and capitalising on localising keywords for different regions. These techniques ensure that your app not only ranks higher in search results but also reaches a broader, more diverse audience. With a well-executed keyword strategy, your app is more likely to attract and retain users, resulting in increased engagement and long-term growth.
If you want to read more about app growth strategies like these, read our app marketing blog here.
