ASO Keyword Research Without Paid Tools

Paid ASO platforms are useful at scale. For a first or second app they are not necessary. The stores give away most of what those tools resell.

Start with autocomplete

Type a category word into App Store search and read the suggestions.

Those suggestions are ordered by real search volume. That is a volume ranking, free, updated continuously, straight from the source.

Try several entry points: the problem your app solves, the action a user takes, the category name, and the name of a well known competitor.

Write down everything that appears. You are looking for phrases with intent, not single generic nouns.

Read your own search terms

Play Console has a search terms report showing which queries brought people to your listing and how those queries converted.

This is the most valuable data you have, because it reflects your actual app rather than a category average. You will usually find phrases you already rank for by accident, which are the cheapest ones to double down on.

App Store Connect provides a similar view under app analytics for the terms that led to impressions.

Study competitor metadata

Look at the titles and subtitles of apps ranking above you. Those fields are heavily weighted, so whatever they placed there was deliberate.

You are not copying. You are learning which phrases people in your category consider worth their thirty characters.

Score what you found

For each candidate phrase judge three things:

Relevance. Would someone searching this be happy to find your app? Ranking for an irrelevant phrase produces installs that uninstall, which hurts you.

Volume. Did it appear high in autocomplete? Roughly is enough.

Competition. Search it. If the top results are large, well established apps, that phrase will take a long time.

The phrases worth chasing first are specific, moderately searched and thinly contested. "budget app" is a wall. "split bills with roommates" is winnable.

Place them correctly

App Store. Name and subtitle carry the most weight, then the keyword field. Do not repeat a word across fields; the algorithm already combines them. Skip spaces after commas in the keyword field, they cost characters.

Google Play. Title and short description matter most, and the long description is indexed too. Three to five natural mentions of your main phrase is plenty.

Then wait, and measure

Ranking changes take one to two weeks to settle after a metadata update. Changing things again before that means you never learn what worked.

Track impressions and conversion rate, not just installs. Rising impressions with falling conversion usually means you started ranking for something irrelevant.

The part people skip

Ranking is only half of it. If your listing converts at two percent, doubling traffic is worth less than fixing the page.

Once the keywords bring people in, the icon and the first three screenshots decide what happens next. That side is usually the bigger and faster win, and it is entirely under your control. buffmy.app exists to make iterating on it quick.