ASO Keyword Research Without an Agency: A Five-Step Guide for Indie Developers

Yes — you can do real ASO keyword research yourself, without an agency and without an enterprise tool. The stores give you almost everything you need for free: Apple and Google both document exactly which text fields they index, the App Store's own search bar will hand you autocomplete suggestions all day, and an Apple Ads account (no spend required) shows you a popularity signal for any keyword you type. What an agency mostly sells is process. This guide gives you that process in five steps, sized for one person with a spare afternoon a month.

First, know what you're actually optimizing

Keyword research only pays off if the words end up somewhere the stores index. The two stores work differently, and mixing them up is the most common self-serve mistake.

On the App Store: three small fields

Apple indexes your app name (up to 30 characters), your subtitle (up to 30 characters), and a hidden keyword field of up to 100 characters, per Apple's own App Store search documentation. That's roughly 160 characters of searchable text — every one matters.

Apple's guidance on that page is worth following literally: skip filler words like "app," don't waste characters repeating a word that already appears in your name or subtitle, and separate keywords with commas. Practitioner guides such as MobileAction's keyword field walkthrough add the mechanics: no spaces after the commas, single words over phrases (the algorithm combines terms across fields), and no need to repeat a word in singular and plural.

On Google Play: no keyword field at all

Google Play has no keyword box. Instead, it indexes the text users can see: your title (up to 30 characters), short description (up to 80), and full description (up to 4,000), limits that come straight from Google's Play Console help on store listings. Because the description itself is indexed, Play rewards naturally written text that uses your target terms a few times in context — SplitMetrics' guide to Play descriptions covers how the short and long description each contribute. Keyword-stuffing reads badly to humans and to Google's policy reviewers alike, so write for the reader first.

The five-step process agencies charge for

Step 1: Build a seed list from how people describe the problem

Open a blank sheet and write 20–40 terms in three buckets: what your app does ("habit tracker"), the problem it solves ("stop procrastinating"), and the category words users already know ("to-do list"). Don't judge them yet. If you have any reviews, mine them — the exact nouns and verbs your users type in reviews are the same ones they type into search.

Step 2: Expand with the store's own autocomplete

Type each seed term into App Store and Play search on a real device and write down every suggestion. Autocomplete is drawn from real query behavior, which makes it the cheapest honest signal available — if the store suggests it, people search it. Ten seeds usually become fifty candidates this way.

Step 3: Read your competitors' metadata

Search your seed terms and open the top five apps that appear. Their titles and subtitles are public keyword research they already paid for. You're not copying — you're mapping which terms the winners considered worth their 30 characters, and more usefully, spotting the relevant terms none of them use. Those gaps are where a small app can actually rank.

Step 4: Check demand with Apple's free popularity signal

Create an Apple Ads account — you don't have to run a campaign — and use the keyword planning tools when setting up a draft search results campaign. Apple shows a search popularity indicator for each keyword, which is the closest thing to first-party volume data an indie can get for free.

Be honest with yourself about its limits, though: the score is coarse, and ASO practitioners have documented cases where it diverges from real download outcomes — RespectASO's analysis of the popularity score is a fair, skeptical read before you bet your subtitle on a single number. Treat it as a way to sort candidates into rough tiers (searched a lot / some / barely), not as precise volume. This is also the honest case for paid tools: services like AppTweak, Mobile Action, or Asodesk exist because they add competition estimates and rank tracking that the free signal lacks. If you're doing ASO monthly, the free stack is enough; if it becomes weekly work, a paid tool earns its fee.

Step 5: Place, wait, measure, repeat

Score each candidate on two axes: relevance (would a person searching this be happy to find your app?) and demand (its popularity tier). Relevance wins every tiebreak — ranking #1 for a term nobody converts on is a vanity metric. Then place them: your one or two most important terms in the App Store name and Play title, the next tier in the subtitle and short description, the rest packed into the 100-character field and woven into the Play description.

Then wait two to four weeks and measure. App Store Connect and the Play Console both show you impressions and conversion by traffic source. Swap out terms that show no impressions, keep the ones climbing, and re-run steps 2–4 quarterly. ASO is a loop, not a launch task.

What you give up by not hiring anyone

An honest accounting: agencies and enterprise suites bring historical keyword databases, competitor download estimates, and someone who has seen a hundred category battles. If you're spending real money on user acquisition, that context has value. What they can't bring is your knowledge of your own users' vocabulary — which is, on both stores, the raw material everything else is built from.

At Kintsu (currently in private beta, built for indie developers) this DIY loop is the workflow we design around, so we're biased toward believing solo devs can do this well — because we watch them do it.

FAQ

How many keywords should I target at once? Fewer than you think. On iOS you have ~160 indexed characters total, so a realistic set is one primary term plus 8–15 supporting ones. On Play, pick 3–5 terms to use naturally in the description rather than trying to cover everything.

How long until keyword changes show results? Apple applies metadata changes when your next app version is approved; Play listing edits go live after review without a release. Give any change two to four weeks of App Store Connect or Play Console data before judging it.

Do the same keywords work on both stores? The intent research transfers; the placement doesn't. The App Store wants comma-separated terms in a hidden field per Apple's documentation, while Play wants the same ideas written as readable sentences in an indexed description per Google's listing rules. Do the research once, write it twice.