How I do App Store Keyword Research in 2025

Category: App Optimization

Tags: AppStoreASOKeywordsMarketingOptimization

Entities: App figuresAppleAstroFlowkeyPiano RunScooSensor Tower

Transcript

00:00

A lot has changed in the app store this year. In June, Apple released a new update to the way apps were ranked.

This changes everything. And then just a few weeks ago, Apple started reporting incorrect keyword popularity to every

00:15

single app store optimization tool. This changes everything again.

And this got me thinking, are tools like Astro and App figures still relevant for app store optimization in 2025? And the short answer is yes,

00:32

kind of. In this video, I'm going to explore how to do proper keyword research in 2025, the techniques I use to validate an idea, and test whether the keyword is actually a good keyword.

I've been building apps now for 5 years, and over that time, I've generated over

00:48

a million dollars in app store sales. I've tried marketing.

I've tried advertising. I've tried everything.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to the power of app store optimization. If you get your app ranking well, it generates an endless supply of new downloads, new users for the life of

01:05

your app, or at least until the next App Store algorithm change, or someone else takes your spot. I've been lucky enough not to be impacted by the recent app store changes and I put this down to my simple system to validate keywords and assess whether they're even viable in

01:21

the first place. First, let's talk about tools like Astro app figures and sensor tower.

All these tools do analysis on keywords to calculate the popularity and difficulty of each of the keywords. But here's the catch.

Apple are very

01:36

secretive. You may not realize this, but they don't actually share a lot of information with the outside world.

I know, shocking, right? And if Apple are not reporting on the search traffic of keywords, then how are ASO tools actually getting the data?

Well, it

01:53

turns out App Store Ads actually reports on the popularity of keywords, and that's where many of these tools are collecting data from. Great.

Fantastic. That's it.

Case closed. Not Not so fast.

You see, app store ads is actually reporting on how many people are bidding

02:08

on the specific keyword, not the volume of traffic of the keyword itself. I know it's a little bit confusing.

So, basically, these tools are all a great proxy, a market analysis of the cost of each keyword. So, the assumption is if

02:24

lots of people are targeting the same keyword in ads and the price of that keyword goes up, then it must be a good keyword, right? Right.

Well, not always. And later in this video, I'm going to show you how you can validate keywords using some sneaky detective skills.

But

02:40

first, there's something you need to know. In the past few weeks, App Store Ads has been reporting incorrect data.

If you use a tool like Astro, you might find some of your track keywords had dropped in popularity to five. This impacted tools like Astro and I think

02:56

app figures as well. The solution?

Well, Astro stopped getting live popularity stats from the app store and instead resorted to their own database. As of recording, the popularity of their keywords are being shown from their last archive, their database backup.

So, ASO

03:13

tools used to be a good proxy for the popularity of a keyword. Now, they're a good proxy of a proxy, which raises a good point.

Can we actually rely 100% on the popularity of a keyword as reported by these tools? And you can't even rely

03:30

on Apple's own reporting of keyword popularity even in app store ads anymore. So what do we do?

Well, there are two simple steps you can do to validate whether your validated keywords are valid. First, check the number of apps that target the exact match keyword

03:47

and the number of reviews that they have. This is kind of a manual process, but you really got to dig a little bit deeper so you don't waste your time and get led astray.

I do this in Astro. I add my keyword and tap on the apps in the ranking column.

Currently, I'm in

04:02

the process of optimizing Piano Run. It was originally designed as a learn piano app.

Then I gified it and leaned a bit too heavily into the game part. Now, I accidentally created a game and I've been wondering whether my original keyword, learn piano, is even relevant

04:18

anymore. One of the keywords that popped up on my radar was play piano.

For play piano, Astro reports a popularity of 26 and difficulty of 85. Not the highest in popularity, but I've had other apps rank well with this exact popularity and

04:34

generate pretty good revenue. And as it turns out, I've already started to rank for this keyword, ranking 98.

and I'm not even targeting it. Is it worthwhile switching keywords from learn piano to play piano?

It could be an easy win. To

04:50

check, I click apps in ranking. And to my surprise, there are only two other apps targeting the exact phrase play piano, which signals to me that the keyword may not be as competitive as being reported.

Okay, this kind of looks

05:06

promising. Next, I have to look at the number of reviews.

This helps to give an indication of how popular the keyword actually is. Wow.

Flowkey learn to play piano has 58,000 reviews and Scoo learn to play piano has 19,000 reviews. This

05:22

says to me that there's something here. But I'm a little bit concerned that the only apps ranking for this keyword are both targeting the keyword learn to play piano.

Not to mention both of these apps are run by mega big successful corporations. So, I pass it through a

05:39

second step. I validated the keyword using App Store Ads, but by running an exact match keyword campaign.

To make sure I'm showing up in search results, I bump my maximum bid to $10. I've done a whole video on how I set up these campaigns.

I'll put a link in the

05:55

description below. I'm looking out for two specific stats, the impressions and the TTR or taprough rate.

The number of impressions gives an indication of how many people actually search for this keyword. And the tap through rate shows how many people saw the app and actually

06:11

tapped on it. The aim is to inform me whether people are actually seeing the ad and how many people are actually wanting to download it.

And the results were actually quite surprising. Impressions were a lot lower than I thought.

Over a week, only 151 people

06:27

saw my ad. Comparatively, I have another campaign running that had over 12,000 impressions.

Now, it could be that my ad just wasn't being delivered. It wasn't being shown.

Like, it just wasn't showing up. Or simply put, the keyword actually doesn't get a whole lot of

06:44

traffic. I spent under $73 to run the experiment.

Within a week, I found out I probably don't actually want to target this keyword. Anyway, if I optimize my app, it would have taken 6 months for it to rank for that keyword.

Then, I probably would have come to the same

07:00

conclusion. Money well spent.

But there's a bit of a caveat here. This second filter is kind of only an option if you have your app on the app store already.

Otherwise, you can't run an experiment to test an app because your app doesn't even exist. I guess you can

07:16

run the app store ads campaign on another app in your portfolio, but you're not going to get the best results. The way to research your keywords in 2025 seems to be still heavily relying on ASO tools like Astro, but you kind of just need to do a little bit more extra digging in the search

07:33

results, then getting version 1.0 on the App Store as quickly as possible to test keyword variations even further with App Store ads. And I'm eager to know what other techniques are you using for keyword research in 2025.