Apple App Store ASO Hack: How to Grow your Keyword List x2, 3 or 4

When working on App Store Optimization on the App Store, there is a limited amount of fields that are indexable and where you can work on keywords. Actually, there are three of them: the app name, the subtitle and the keyword field. It can be hard to decide which keywords you want to prioritize, and you can quickly feel limited. If that’s your case, we have something for you that you will like… keep on reading if you’re curious 😉

Apple App Store Keywords Hack – Duplicate / Triplicate / Quadruplicate your keyword list

Yes, you’ve read well. There’s a trick that you can use to double / triple / quadruple the keywords field and end up with 200, 300 or 400 characters available instead of 100. Interested? Let’s see together how you can do that.

To begin, let’s review together what it is important to do first to optimize best these 100 characters initially available:

• Make sure you do not leave ANY space when separating keywords – you just need to insert a comma between each word.
• Avoid using plural forms there as it will make you lose space.
• Don’t add prepositions, conjunctions or any of these small words that you do not need to rank for.

When you’ve made sure of this, you can now have a look at our super hack to get more space within the keywords field.

This trick is linked to your listing localization. The thing is that each locale does not necessarily rank for the proper language of this territory only, but it is possible that locales rank for 2, 3 or 4 languages. It depends on each locale, so when working on one in particular, you need to know if it only ranks for its languages or if it does for one, two or three other ones. If it does, you can then make good use of “extra” localizations and add keywords.

Find right below which regions are ranking for each locale (source: Phiture):

*Spanish speaking LATAM = Argentina, Bolivia, Belize, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela

Want to see how this applies to reality with a real experiment?

At PICKASO, our app marketing agency (and the very first origins of TheTool), we’ve run some tests to see what evolution we could see thanks to this hack. And, spoiler alert, we’ve seen some great results.

We took an app that was available in Spanish only and localized it in Catalan. The whole listing was translated to Catalan, but the keywords field was filled with Spanish keywords.
This way, all the users having their device in Catalan could see the listing totally in Spanish, but the keywords field, not visible from the users, was full of Spanish keywords that have a bigger search volume. This means that any user searching on the Spanish territory will be able to find the app thanks to the keywords in the Spanish keywords field as well as the Catalan one. And the listing will be displayed in the language selected for his device, whether it is in Spanish or in Catalan.

In this chart, you can see all the monitored keywords for a mobile app. As you can see, there is a clear increase in ranked keywords after adding the additional Spanish keywords to the Catalan keywords field.

Keyword Hack on Apple App Store – In short

To sum up, this hack is really helpful to work on new keywords for a locale and make your app rank for more keywords there. If you are not using all the locals for which a territory ranks, you can use them to add more keywords for your app to rank. In the end, this great App Store tip enables you to rank for more keywords and increase your mobile app or game’s visibility in Search.