ASO Keywords: Where They Go, How to Find Them, and What Actually Ranks

The fields that actually rank, with their real limits

Most ASO advice says "use keywords" without saying where. The stores index specific fields with specific limits, and wasting characters in the wrong one is the most common listing mistake I see in BrightAppData accounts.

Field	Limit	Indexed?	Weight
App Store: title	30 chars	Yes	Heaviest
App Store: subtitle	30 chars	Yes	Strong
App Store: keyword field	100 chars	Yes	Strong (invisible to users)
App Store: description	4,000 chars	No — conversion only	—
Play: title	30 chars	Yes	Heaviest
Play: short description	80 chars	Yes	Strong
Play: long description	4,000 chars	Yes	Moderate

Two store-specific consequences most founders miss. On Apple, the description does not rank at all — it exists to convert, so writing it "for SEO" wastes it; the invisible 100-character keyword field is where your extra terms belong (comma-separated, no spaces, no words already in your title — Apple deduplicates). On Google, the long description does rank, so your terms need to appear there naturally — which is why keyword-stuffed Play descriptions read so badly and still get written.

Apple documents its fields in the product page guide; Google's live in the Play Console.

How to find keywords worth those characters

The process I run — and built a tool around — is three steps:

1. Harvest the language. List every phrase a stranger would type to find an app like yours. Then steal vocabulary from three places: competitor titles and subtitles, competitor reviews (users describing the app in their own words — the richest source there is), and store autocomplete.

2. Score volume against competition. In BrightAppData — free, no trial games — check each phrase's search volume and who currently ranks. What you want is the ASO version of low-hanging fruit: real volume, weak incumbents. A term where the top results are abandoned apps with three reviews is winnable in weeks; a term owned by apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings is a year-long fight.

3. Assign each keyword a slot. Your single strongest phrase goes in the title after your brand ("Brand: strongest phrase"). Next tier: subtitle (Apple) / short description (Play). The rest: keyword field (Apple) / woven into the long description (Play). One keyword, one slot — repeating a word across Apple fields buys nothing, because Apple deduplicates across them.

The long-tail rule that new apps ignore

A new app cannot rank for "photo editor" — the incumbents have millions of ratings and that momentum is the ranking factor you don't have yet. It can rank for "photo editor for ebay sellers". The pattern that works: launch on narrow phrases where you can win, convert those installs into ratings, and let the accumulated history make broader terms reachable later. This is the same validation logic as checking store demand before you build — the keyword data tells you which niche is winnable before you commit to it.

Iteration: ASO keywords are never done

Metadata changes ship with each store update and re-rank over the following weeks. The loop that compounds: change one field group per release, wait two weeks, compare rankings, keep the winner. Apps that run this loop quarterly pull steadily away from apps that wrote the listing once on launch day and moved on.

If you'd rather have the research done and the slots filled for you, that's exactly the ASO service I offer — built on the same free tool, so every recommendation is one you can verify yourself.