Review miningWhat copying the same metadata to every country costs you
Every storefront carries its own title, subtitle and keyword field. Copying the English text hands every search in that market to somebody else.
· 7 min read
In the App Store every country is a separate store. A separate result list, a separate cast of rivals and - most importantly - separate metadata. The same app's German subtitle and its Turkish subtitle can be written completely independently.
Most teams know this and copy one English text everywhere anyway. The reason is usually not time but missing measurement: because the size of the loss is invisible, the job keeps getting postponed.
Not translation - writing in the search language
Localization is not translating the text. It is rewriting it in the words people in that market actually type into the search box. A literal translation usually produces a term nobody searches.
To give an example, the formal term describing a category and the term people use in everyday speech differ in most languages. The second is the one that wins in search. The only way to know is to look at the real search suggestions and the real reviews in that storefront.
An empty local keyword field is 100 unused characters
Localization's fastest win is usually in the least visible place. If you never filled the keyword field in a storefront, you are not using 100 characters of indexing in that market at all. Fixing it does not even require new prose; placing that market's words is usually enough.
rankcusp flags this as its own warning: which field is empty in which storefront, in one table. A gap that cannot be measured turns into work that never gets done.
Which country first?
You do not have to localize every market at once, and it is good that you do not. Priority is decided by three inputs: is there demand in that market, are the rivals weak, and how large is the gap you left there.
When all three cannot be measured, the right answer is not a low score but an empty cell. A zero that looks safe sends you to invest in the wrong country - and localization is one of the most expensive things to undo.