App Store Optimization for iPhone Apps

Apple searches three fields you write

App Store optimization, ASO for short, is everything that helps people find your app inside the App Store and pick it once they see it. Most of the finding part rests on a few fields in App Store Connect.

• The name. Up to 30 characters. Apple counts it in search, and it is what people see first.
• The subtitle. Also up to 30 characters, shown under the name across the store.
• The keyword field. 100 characters in total (bytes, in App Store Connect), with terms separated by commas and no spaces between them.

Apple’s search page names these three fields and your primary category as the text it matches, and says the category is indexed. Your company name is searchable too, which is why App Store Connect asks you not to repeat it, or the app name, in the keyword field. Promotional text, up to 170 characters above the description, is useful for news, but Apple says it does not affect search ranking.

Apple’s own page on the product page lists what wastes space in the keyword field: plurals of words you already have in the singular, category names, the word app, repeated words and special characters, unless they are part of your brand. It also lists what is not allowed: names of competing apps, trademarked terms you have no right to, celebrity names and terms that have nothing to do with the app. Apple says improper use of keywords is a common reason for rejection, so treat the second list as hard limits rather than tips.

The other half of ASO is the page itself: screenshots that show the app working, a description whose first lines say what it does, ratings, and versions in the languages of the countries you sell in. Search gets people to the page. The page decides whether they install.

Top-ranked apps tend to name what they do

AppTierList tracks 6,308 App Store search terms across 1,235 lists, and checks where each app sits for them in five countries. That lets us ask a simple question: does the app name contain one of the search terms of the list it ranks in?

Across ranked list entries, it does for 38.2% of S-tier entries. The share falls with each tier: 35.0% in A, 29.7% in B, 23.3% in C, 17.9% in D and 13.4% in F. Count the subtitle too and the S-tier share rises to 48.6%, against 31.6% in C. A tag after the brand, as in Finch: Self-Care Pet, the top app in our habit tracking list, is common at the top as well: 65.2% of S-tier names have one, against 53.5% of C-tier names.

Read this with care. The AppTierList score rests mostly on public App Store data, and search position is one of its parts, so an app that names its job well tends to score better partly by design. How we rank lists every part. Big brands also rank without a keyword in the name, because people already search for them by name. What the figures do show is that for most apps, a plain description of the job in the name and subtitle goes with being found.

Put a short keyword phrase after your name

In what we see, the single most useful ASO move for a new app is the tag: the short phrase after a colon in the name, as in Name: phrase. Your brand is not searched yet, so the tag is where a new app earns its first visits from search.

Write the tag as a use, not a slogan. A phrase people type, such as habit tracker or sleep sounds, does work. A line like your best day ever does none, because nobody searches for it. Keep the brand part distinctive, and keep the tag an accurate description of what the app does, never a string of keywords: Apple’s guidelines say not to pack any metadata with irrelevant phrases just to game the system.

Then use the subtitle for a second angle and the keyword field for the rest. Apple’s search page asks you not to repeat in the keyword field any word already in your name, subtitle or category, so a repeat takes space a new word could use. App Store Connect counts the field in bytes, so fewer accented or non-Latin letters fit.

Pick a keyword a new app can actually win

The common mistake is to aim at the head term of a category. A new role play game is unlikely to show near the top for roleplay or roleplay game, because large apps with years of ratings own those results. A new app needs a phrase where it can be one of the first results people scroll past.

In what we see, this test on your phone is a good way to make a first pick, before any keyword tool.

1. Open App Store search and type a candidate phrase exactly as a person would.
2. Count the apps that come back and look at how strong they are: their ratings and how recently they were updated.
3. Keep a phrase that returns a handful of apps, fewer than 10, most of them small. A new app has a real chance of sitting near the top there.
4. Drop a phrase that returns nothing. It is a sign that few people search for it.
5. Try narrower versions of a crowded phrase. For a role play game, AI roleplay is close; a still narrower phrase that returns only a few apps is the right first keyword.

The goal of that first keyword is not volume. It is the first steady downloads, because without downloads there are no ratings, and Apple names downloads, ratings and reviews among the things that shape search results. Once the small phrase works, try the next one up.

Then build ratings, then add countries

Words get you shown. Ratings get you chosen. In what we see, the first target is at least 50 ratings in each storefront you care about, and the counts are per country, so a strong US page does nothing for a reader in Germany. Our ratings guide covers how to ask with Apple’s prompt and when.

Next, localise. Each language you add in App Store Connect gets its own name, subtitle and keyword field, which means a new set of words to work with and a new market where the head terms may be less crowded. Do the phone test again in each language rather than translating your English keywords word for word.

Keep the app current while you do this. Our update study shows how fresh the versions of top-ranked apps are. And remember that App Store search is one door among several: our guide to promoting your app covers the others, and the GEO guide covers being named by AI assistants.

Claim your page, then use your words everywhere

The words you chose for the store are the words people and AI assistants should see about your app across the web. Your AppTierList page is the first place to reuse them:

1. Claim your page by adding the app with your email, or by finding it and tapping Claim. It is free, takes one email and needs no password.
2. Fill the page in with your website and the same plain description of the job your app does, written in your own words. Readers see it from the moment you are Verified.
3. Share your page with your users and on your own site.

Then repeat the phone test every few months. Results change as apps come and go, and a phrase that was crowded last season may have room now.