App name, subtitle, and the Keyword field
Three fields decide which searches can find your app: the name, the subtitle, and the Keyword field, holding 30, 30, and 100 characters between them.
The words Apple can match a search against come from three fields, and they are small. Two of them are read by people as well as by Apple, and one is read only by Apple. Getting them right is an afternoon of work that keeps paying, and the mistakes are almost always the same handful.
What the three fields are, and where they live
All three sit in App Store Connect, Apple’s website for managing your app, on the page where you edit the store listing for a version.
- The app name and the subtitle appear on your store page and in search results, so they are doing two jobs at once: telling Apple what your app is about, and convincing a person to tap.
- The Keyword field never appears anywhere a visitor can see. It is a hidden list of terms that only Apple reads.
Changes to all three go live with your next app version, not the moment you save them, which is worth knowing before you plan a week of experiments.
The name: 30 characters, and the one people read first
The name is the field a shopper sees before anything else, and Apple reads it for search too. Thirty characters is not much, so a name that is only a made-up word spends a field you cannot get back on something nobody searches for.
The pattern that works for most indie apps is the brand plus the job, in that order: your name, a colon or a dash, then a plain description of what the app does. “Cadence: Habit Tracker” is doing more work than “Cadence” on its own, because the second half is a phrase people type. If your brand is not known yet, the plain half is the half earning the downloads.
The subtitle: 30 characters, and its own job
The subtitle is the short line under the name. Same length, and a different job: it should finish the sentence the name started rather than repeat it. If the name already says “habit tracker”, the subtitle is where the specifics go, the ones a person would recognize as their own situation.
Write it as something a human would say out loud. It sits under your name in search results, where it is competing for a tap against the other results on the screen, so a slogan that could belong to any app in the category is a wasted line.
The Keyword field: 100 characters, commas, nothing else
This is the field people overthink. The rules that matter are short:
- You get 100 characters in total.
- Separate terms with commas.
- Spaces after the commas are not necessary, and every space you leave is a character you could have spent on a word.
- Single words go further than phrases.
- Words that already appear in your name or subtitle do not need repeating here.
So a list looks like budget,expense,receipt,invoice,freelance and not budget tracker, expense manager, receipt scanner. Count them and the reason is plain arithmetic: the second version spends 48 of your 100 characters to name three things, and the first spends 40 to get five words onto the list.
Apple publishes the length limits, but not how it weighs the three fields against each other. Anyone quoting you a ranking of them, including a guide that tells you the name is worth more than the subtitle, is guessing. What Apple does say is that words already in your name or subtitle do not need repeating in the keyword list, so the useful question is coverage rather than which field a word sits in.
Where not to spend characters
Five things eat the 100 characters and give nothing back.
Plurals. Apple’s guidance says not to add a plural of a word you already have, so if “timer” is in your list, “timers” is a wasted slot.
Your own name and subtitle words. They are already read from those fields. Repeating them here buys the same coverage twice.
The word “app”. Apple’s own keyword guidance says not to use it, and searches match your app without it.
Repeats inside the field itself. A word listed twice in the Keyword field costs its characters twice and buys nothing the second time.
Category words you cannot win. A single enormous term you have no chance at costs you the same characters as three specific ones you could actually place for. If you are not sure which is which, how to pick App Store keywords walks through popularity and difficulty in plain words.
One habit is worth more than all five rules: after you fill the three fields in, read them together and ask which searches this listing could possibly answer. If a phrase you badly want to be found for appears in none of the three, it cannot be matched, however well the app does that thing.
ASOblick has a Workshop for exactly this moment, one of its seven modules. You compose the three fields there with the counts running as you type, and it splits Apple’s 100 characters into the ones doing work, the ones buying nothing, and the ones you have not spent. It flags the first four reasons above by rule, says which applies to each word, and one click strips those words out. Category words you cannot win are a judgement the Workshop does not make for you; what it adds instead is its own estimate, a separate row for words it has never seen a search use, behind its own button, because not having seen a search is not the same as knowing a word is wasted. Below that sit the searches your draft can already appear in and the ones it cannot, with the exact words missing from each.
When you have pasted the fields into App Store Connect you tell the Workshop you published, and it records the date and the three fields and compares your keyword ranks either side of it. That is the part worth waiting for: not advice about what should work, but what actually moved after you changed something.