App Store Connect's keyword field is just 100 characters wide. That tiny text box is, in my experience, the single most underused marketing surface available to indie developers. I've watched my own apps double their organic installs after a single keyword rewrite — not because the apps got better, but because the right people could finally find them.
What's strange is that most solo developers will spend hours polishing screenshots and rewriting their description, then fill out the keyword field in five minutes. If you've shipped a Rork-built app and you're not happy with downloads, this is the cheapest place to look first.
Why The Keyword Field Alone Can Move Rankings
Apple's search ranking is a blend of factors: app name, subtitle, keyword field, description, category, downloads, and review scores. The keyword field is the only place where you explicitly tell the algorithm "treat these words as searchable terms for my app." Words that don't appear in your name, subtitle, or keyword field essentially aren't searchable.
For indie developers without ad budget, this is everything. Organic search is often our only acquisition channel, and the keyword field is the highest-leverage piece of it. A hundred characters of free, targeted distribution.
There's another quiet benefit too. Because the keyword field is hidden from end users (unlike your name and subtitle), you can stuff it with utilitarian, ugly-looking words that you'd never put in marketing copy. "Tracker," "checklist," "log," "organizer" — these aren't beautiful in a tagline, but they're exactly what people type into the search bar.
How Those 100 Characters Are Actually Counted
There are some specific rules about what counts as a character in this field, and they trip people up:
- Commas count as one character each
- A space before or after a comma also counts — that's a wasted character
- All characters are counted equally, including non-Latin scripts
- Line breaks aren't allowed
- Singular and plural are treated as different terms (so don't include both unless you really want to)
This means the difference between recipes, vegan, dinner and recipes,vegan,dinner is two characters. Across a fully packed keyword field, those two characters are an entire extra short keyword you could be ranking for. Don't be sloppy with spaces.
NG: recipes, vegan, dinner, easy, quick (32 chars, 5 keywords)
OK: recipes,vegan,dinner,easy,quick (28 chars, 5 keywords)
Don't Repeat Words That Are Already In Your Name or Subtitle
This is the single biggest mistake I see in indie ASO. Words that appear in your app name and subtitle are already searchable, and they're weighted more heavily than keyword-field entries. Putting them in the keyword field too just wastes characters.
A useful way to think about your three text fields:
- App name (30 chars): Your single biggest keyword plus a memorable hook
- Subtitle (30 chars): The next-strongest keyword plus a hint of audience or differentiator
- Keyword field (100 chars): Everything else that someone might plausibly type
If your app name is "Bento — Meal Planner" and your subtitle is "Weekly recipes for busy families," then "meal," "planner," "weekly," "recipes," "family," and "busy" are already covered. Your keyword field should be filled with adjacent words you don't have room for elsewhere — things like "groceries," "lunchbox," "kids," "vegetarian," "shopping list," and so on. Walking through your existing copy and crossing out duplicates before you write your keyword list is half the battle.
Choosing Keywords That Actually Move The Needle
After shipping a few dozen small apps myself, here's the keyword-selection thinking I keep coming back to.
Mine the App Store search bar for suggestions
The App Store's autocomplete reflects what people are actually typing. Open the App Store, search for the category your app belongs to, and write down every suggestion. Those are real queries with real volume. Most of them aren't ones you'd think of from your desk. Repeat the exercise on both iPhone and iPad if your app supports both, because the suggestions can differ slightly.
Include synonyms and adjacent intent words
If your app helps with budgeting, don't just list "budget." Include "spending," "expenses," "money," "savings," "financial," "tracker." People search with whatever word comes to mind first, and you want to catch all of those mental models. Apple's search engine is not as forgiving with synonyms as Google's, so explicit coverage matters.
Consider including English keywords if your audience is bilingual
In any non-English market, there's always a slice of the audience who searches in English — expats, technical users, second-language users. If you're shipping a Japanese-market app, including a couple of English keywords like "expense tracker" or "habit tracker" can quietly add a steady trickle of installs from international students, residents, and professionals living abroad.
Never include competitor app names
Apple's guidelines explicitly forbid using competitor names as keywords. The short-term boost isn't worth the long-term risk of rejection or, worse, account suspension. Same goes for trademarked product names that aren't yours.
Localize the keyword field per region
This is one of the most overlooked moves. App Store Connect lets you set a different keyword field for every locale your app supports. The Spanish keyword field for Spain is a separate text box from the Spanish keyword field for Latin America, and both are separate from your English keyword field. Each one is its own 100-character canvas. If you're already shipping a localized app, leaving these blank or copying the English field into them is a waste.
A Five-Step Workflow For Designing Your Keyword Field
Here's the actual sequence I run when I'm designing or revising a keyword field for a Rork-built app.
- Pick the core verb. What do users do with your app? "Track," "edit," "plan," "discover," "learn." Just one word.
- List 5 to 10 nouns attached to that verb. What's being tracked, edited, planned? Be specific.
- Pull 10 to 15 related terms from App Store search suggestions. Type each of your nouns into the App Store search bar and write down what appears.
- Strike out anything that's already in your app name or subtitle. Wasted characters.
- Pack what's left into the field, comma-separated, no spaces, until you hit 100 characters.
For a hypothetical recipe app aimed at busy parents, the result might look like this:
groceries,lunchbox,kids,vegetarian,shopping,dinner,easy,quick,family,weekly,planner,bento
That's 92 characters of pure searchable surface area, none of which duplicates a hypothetical app name like "Bento — Meal Planner." The remaining eight characters can hold one more carefully chosen short keyword, depending on what shows up in your suggestion research.
What To Do After You Update The Field
Changing the keyword field in App Store Connect doesn't immediately affect your ranking. The change takes effect when you submit a new version of the app. So the order of operations matters:
- Edit the keyword field as part of preparing a new version, then submit that version for review
- Watch impressions and unit conversions in App Store Connect Analytics for the next one to two weeks
- Save your before/after keyword lists in a spreadsheet so you can see what worked across multiple iterations
App Store ranking signals shift gradually, so revisit your keyword field every three to six months. You're not chasing perfection — you're just trying to make this iteration slightly better than the last one. Personally, I treat keyword tuning as something I do alongside every minor version bump that already needed a review submission anyway, which keeps the overhead near zero.
What To Do In The Next Thirty Minutes
Tonight, before bed, open your App Store Connect listing and look at your keyword field. Find any words that already appear in your app name or subtitle and delete them. With the freed-up characters, add one or two of the autocomplete suggestions from the App Store search bar. That alone is often enough to move the needle.
The keyword field is the highest-ROI piece of marketing work available to a solo developer. Now that Rork has shrunk how long it takes to build an app, you finally have the time to spend on this kind of small, compounding optimization. Start with one app this week.
If you want to take ASO further, the Rork × ASO Beginner's Guide covers the broader picture, and Going Global with Rork: A 16-Language ASO Strategy extends the same thinking to international markets. For the post-launch growth phase, Getting Your First 100 Users for a Rork App picks up where keyword design leaves off.