App Store Optimization for a New App: How to Rank With No Data
Every guide to App Store Optimization starts the same way: look at the keywords your app ranks for and improve them. Which is useless advice for the people who need ASO most, because a newly published app ranks for nothing. There is no data to look at. The tools return empty, and the guides have nothing to say.
This is the guide for that situation. It is also, incidentally, how experienced ASO practitioners work regardless — they just rarely write it down.
Why your app has no data (and why that's normal)
Keyword databases only contain apps that appear in store search results for something. If your app is not ranking in the visible results for any keyword, it is not in the database. Not because anything is wrong with it — because nobody has had a reason to record it yet.
So stop looking at your app. Look at the apps already winning the searches you want.
The competitor-first method
Step 1: Start from a search, not from your app
Pick the phrase a player would actually type. Not your app's name — nobody is searching for a name they have never heard. The category term: hill climb racing, meal planner, offline puzzle game.
Search the store for it and note the top ten apps. Those are your real competitors, defined by what they rank for rather than by what you assume.
Step 2: Read their keyword maps
Established apps do have data. Every keyword they rank for is visible, along with search volume and their position. Pull that for the top three and merge it.
Now you have something better than your own data would have been: the complete keyword universe for your category, with evidence of what works, before you have spent a day on it.
Step 3: Find the gaps, not the peaks
This is where most people go wrong. They see the highest-volume keyword, put it in their title, and never rank because five established apps with a hundred thousand reviews each are defending it.
Two patterns are worth far more:
- Keywords only one competitor ranks for. If one app holds a term the others missed, it is not contested — it is an opening.
- Keywords where the best competitor sits at position 15 or worse. Nobody is defending that term. A well-optimised new listing can take it.
A keyword with 400 searches where you can reach the top five is worth more than one with 40,000 where you will sit at 60 forever. Position matters more than volume, because almost nobody scrolls.
Writing the metadata
The two stores work differently and the same listing will not serve both.
App Store
- Title: 30 characters. Your strongest keyword goes here.
- Subtitle: 30 characters. Your second angle.
- Keyword field: 100 characters, comma separated, no spaces after commas — the spaces cost you characters.
The rule people miss: never repeat a word between the three. Apple indexes them together, so a repeat is wasted space you cannot spare.
Google Play
- Title: 30 characters.
- Short description: 80 characters. After the title this is the strongest signal, so the primary keyword must appear here.
- Full description: 4,000 characters. Place the primary keyword three to five times naturally across it.
Play reads the description; the App Store largely does not. Stuffing gets the listing demoted rather than promoted, so write for a human and place keywords deliberately.
Your competitors' one-star reviews are a specification
This is the most underused source in ASO. Read the negative reviews of the top three apps in your category and you will find, written by the market itself, a list of what people want and are not getting.
Recurring complaints are your feature roadmap. The phrases people use for what they wish existed are your store listing copy — in their words, which is exactly the language they will later search with.
The first week for a new app
- Search the store for your category term; note the top ten.
- Pull the keyword maps of the top three and merge them.
- Shortlist keywords with real volume that only one rival holds, or where the best rival sits below position 15.
- Write title, subtitle and keyword field around that shortlist.
- Read 100 competitor reviews and note every recurring complaint.
- Publish, then leave it four weeks before changing anything — the stores need time to re-index.
What no ASO tool can give you
Download and revenue estimates come from panel data that a small number of companies license at considerable expense. Any tool showing you a competitor's install count without that licence is estimating, and the estimate is frequently wrong by an order of magnitude.
You do not need it. Keywords, positions and reviews are enough to decide what to do, and they are observable facts rather than inferences.
MyNexusBiz runs this method for both stores: search a keyword, find who ranks, read their maps, and get finished metadata with the character counts already checked. It works on an app with no rankings, because that is what it was built for.