[New Feature] Category Keywords is live!

As MobileAction, we know that ASO is a repetitive and tedious work! To make the job of ASO warriors easier, we constantly improve our existing products and create new solutions. 

Keyword Tracking is one of the most used and beloved features of our ASO intelligence product. You’re already using it to iterate on your ASO strategies, see the performance of your selected keywords, and of course, discover new ones. So far, you have been able to see the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, search keywords based on their frequency of use in the description, uncover the long-tail keywords that you can track and do many other cool stuff… After numerous brainstorming sessions and taking your valuable feedback into account, we have invented a new weapon for you to use in your battle of ASO: Category Keywords.

Think you’ve run out of the sources to find new keywords? Still, feel under-equipped to come up with the best ASO strategy for your app? Wish you could see the most popular keywords for each category? Then, category keywords is the feature for you! See the most popular keywords belonging to each category and learn what additional keywords you need to target to reach a higher ranking. Not only can you discover the popular keywords for a specific category, but you can also get some great insights for localization strategies as well as for the comparisons between different categories. So, fasten your seatbelts! We’re about to get into the details.

Popular Category Keywords Uncovered!

To use the Category Keywords, simply go to “Keyword Tracking” under ASO basic and choose a category from the drop-down menu. Select the country that you would like to look into and… Ta da! You get the 50 most popular keywords of that category, ordered by popularity level. In order to track a keyword, just click on it, and it will be automatically added to your tracklist.

How to use Category Keywords

You’re asking how do we know these are the most popular keywords for that category? We combine the estimated number of taps allocated to a certain category of a keyword and the popularity score of it to get a new score for each keyword. Then, we order them based on that score and show you the top 50 keywords. Interested to know more about it? Our sales team would love to enlighten you!

We got quite interesting insights thanks to this new feature. See the two of them below:

To target a brand name or not to target a brand name?

Well… That’s the matter of category 🙂 We checked travel, shopping, social networking, and entertainment categories on the App Store for the U.S., and guess what? The most popular keywords are nothing but brand names exclusively! So, the users target a specific brand’s app right from the start, a situation clearly shows the power of the brand name and the necessity for the apps in those categories to target brand names when building their ASO strategies.

Entertainment Category in the U.S.

Yet, we can’t really say the same thing for productivity, games, and books categories. Though there are a few exceptions, it turns out that people generally search for exactly what they need, without specifying a brand name when they need a VPN app or want to play a game.

Productivity Category in the U.S.

Seems like different criteria have to be taken into consideration when one crafts an ASO strategy for different categories, and brand power changes the game to a great extent.

Someone said localization?

Localizing your app for a completely new market or deciding which market to go for can be very daunting, especially if you’re not familiar with the language. Adding the different user needs and behaviors to the challenge of the language, one needs to spend painful days and nights to come up with the optimal localization strategy. But fear not, we are here for you! Checking the popular keywords in a specific category for the targeted country can save you a great deal of time! Let us show you an example of the health and fitness category of the App Store in the U.S. and in Japan.

You see the below results when you check the U.S. market:

Health & Fitness Category in the U.S.

As you might have realized, There are specific brand names such as “my fitness pal” and “headspace” along with a variety of keywords indicating a specific need such as “sleep”, “workout”, “white noise”, and “calorie counter”.

Yet, the Japanese market seems to value different things:

Health & Fitness Category in Japan

To make sense of what we’re about to explain, let us give you some of the translations of these keywords:

ダイエット：diet

体重管理：weight control

計算：calculation

ダイエット記録：diet recording

ダイエットアプリ：diet app

ダイエット無料：free diet

カロリー計算：calorie calculation

歩数計：pedometer

Many words searched by Japanese users contain “ diet” and in fact, most of the popular searches are about weight control, free diet, diet recording, weight recording, diet app, and calorie counter. Do you see what the Japanese users care about? While the queries for the U.S. market address different needs, the ones for Japan generally focuses on a very specific need, which is “diet”.

Now you know how useful this new feature can get, you can start your first experiment 🙂 Try Category Keywords yourself and don’t forget to share your opinions with us!

Happy optimizing!