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What is in this resource:
How to build your ASO strategy from end to end
Learn to pick target keywords, write metadata, follow rank and base every decision on data.
From data to action
Simplify the keyword data and stay in line with App Store rules.
Tools that lift rank
Carry the keywords drawn from competitor reviews into your metadata and take your app out of the cusp band into the top 10.
The product in one sentence
What rankcusp measures, what it does not, and how it does both. Not a brochure - a method summary: everything here corresponds to something running in the panel.
rankcusp measures every day which phrases your app appears for on the App Store, separates out the ones you rank 11-30 for, and suggests a single metadata move for each of them.
Every part of that sentence is deliberate. "Measures every day": without rank history no move's effect can be measured. "11-30": relevance is already built in that band and what is missing is a few places of rank. "A single metadata move": when more than one thing changes at once, which one carried cannot be separated.
What is absent from the sentence is deliberate too. No download estimate, no revenue estimate, no promise of a guaranteed rank. Those cannot be measured, and presenting the unmeasurable as measured makes the decision rest on the wrong ground.
This summary is that sentence opened out.
A pool fed by five channels
The keyword pool grows from five sources, and the fifth is the one no other tool looks at.
- Your own metadataApp name, subtitle and description. The two- and three-word combinations of those words form the pool's base. Relevance is certain, but so is the risk of being trapped in your own language.
- Rival metadataThe names, subtitles and descriptions of the apps in your category. What comes out shows positionings that did not occur to you.
- Search suggestionsThe completions returned when a word is typed into the search box. These are genuinely searched phrases, and the popularity signal comes from here.
- Category chartsApple's open category rankings. They show the category's shared language; the most valuable channel when entering a new one.
- Rival reviewsUsers' own words. Sentences are broken up, phrases that look like searches are picked out; ones with pronouns and repeated brand names are dropped. This is the source in no keyword tool's pool.
How the measurement is set up
Phrases in the pool pass through three measurements, and the order matters because each has a price.
Popularity first: a relative value derived from search suggestions. A cheap measurement, and it eliminates most of the pool immediately. Where no suggestion returns the field stays blank - not zero, because zero is a reading and people decide on readings.
Rank second: each remaining phrase is searched in that country and the first 200 are read. Measurement runs per phrase, not per row: every app tracking the same phrase is read out of one search. That has two consequences - adding a rival does not raise cost, and your rank and your rivals' are read at exactly the same moment from the same list, which makes them comparable.
Difficulty third: computed from the same search - how many apps carry the phrase in their title, what the rating counts at the top are, how many words the phrase has. No extra request, so it comes free.
Rank is measured once a day. Measuring more often raises the noise rather than the information; intraday movement belongs to the measurement, not the market.
175 storefronts and normalisation
Apple's store is open in 175 countries and regions, and that shapes the whole measurement.
Each country has its own keyword field and most are indexed independently. Leaving one empty spends all 100 characters there - and there is no visible sign of it anywhere.
Phrases are normalised before they are stored, and normalisation depends on the country. In Turkish and Azerbaijani a capital I becomes a dotless ı; everywhere else a dotted i. Apply one rule everywhere and a phrase like "AI" becomes "aı" in the Turkish pool, matching nobody who searches for it.
In writing systems that do not separate words with spaces - Chinese, Japanese - word boundaries are not marked, so a separate boundary-finding step runs. Without it the extracted phrases are meaningless.
Measurement cost rises with phrases and with countries; it does not rise with rivals. That is a direct consequence of measuring per phrase.
The cusp band and the action plan
The idea at the centre of the product is that the 11-30 band is an app's cheapest growth.
Ranking for a keyword needs two things: relevance and rank. Building relevance from nothing for a phrase you never appear on is expensive and the outcome is not guaranteed. For a phrase where you already sit at 24, relevance is built; what is missing is a few places of rank.
The first page is where almost all of a search ends. Users do not scroll. So an app at 12 is effectively invisible for that phrase - but the invisibility is two places of distance, not irrelevance.
rankcusp separates that band out, orders it by popularity, and sets aside the phrases whose strength threshold is out of reach. What remains is that week's work list.
Each row carries one suggestion: which field, and what to write. Subtitle for the phrases at the top of the band, keyword field for those at the bottom. A suggestion for the app name appears only when the phrase genuinely describes what the product does.
The metadata audit
The audit does not estimate; it counts. There are five items and every one can be verified by hand.
Repeats from the app name and subtitle: writing a word that already appears in those fields into the keyword field gains nothing. Each shared word is waste equal to its own length.
Formatting waste: spaces after commas, leading and trailing spaces, double commas, punctuation that is not part of a word. One character each.
Stem repeats: singular and plural of the same stem, close inflections. Apple does not keep them apart; everything but the shortest is waste.
Phrases written whole: the words in the keyword field combine freely. Writing a phrase whole spends the space between the words and blocks the other combinations.
Unused space and empty countries: every character left unfilled is a word never indexed, and every country left empty is 100 characters.
The audit's output is a list, not a score: what was found, where, and how many characters come back. A score does not tell you which job to do; a list does.
| Measurement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Rank | Read straight from the search result; verifiable. |
| Popularity | Derived from search suggestions; relative, not absolute. |
| Difficulty | Computed from the same search; no extra request. |
| Metadata waste | Counted, not estimated. |
| Review phrases | Extracted from public review text. |
What we do not measure
The most necessary section of a product summary is the one saying what it does not do.
We do not show download counts. Apple does not give them to third parties; the estimates in circulation are computed backwards from rank and their error bars vary widely by category.
We do not show revenue. In-app purchase and subscription revenue is entirely closed.
We do not show a rival's keyword field. Apple keeps it private to the developer; tools claiming to show it infer backwards from rank data.
We do not give absolute search volume. Apple does not publish it; popularity is relative and is written as relative everywhere.
We do not show conversion rate. How many of the people who saw your page installed is visible only in your own developer account.
We do not promise a guaranteed rank. Apple's algorithm is not published and what your rivals will do is nobody's to control.
All six look fillable with an estimate. We do not fill them: the moment an estimate goes on a screen the user takes it for a measurement and decides on it.
- Downloads, revenue and conversion: Apple does not publish them.
- A rival's keyword field: private to the developer; tools showing it are inferring.
- Absolute search volume: cannot be given; relative popularity can.
- A guaranteed rank: the algorithm is not published.
- Where a value could not be measured, a short dash sits - never a zero.
A week as it runs in the panel
The best description of what the product does is what a week looks like.
Monday: look at the ranks. Measurement continued over the weekend; the ranks of your tracked phrases and your rivals are recorded. The first place to look is the control group's total movement - what did the market do this week?
Tuesday: pull the band. The 11-30 phrases are ordered by popularity and the ones above the strength threshold are already set aside. Choose one of the top three.
Wednesday: write the move. The suggested field and suggestion are ready for the chosen phrase. Edit the metadata, clear the waste the audit found at the same time, and ship the release.
Thursday and Friday: do not touch it. The index has to settle. If there is work to do, it is widening the pool for next week's candidate.
The following Monday: compare. Subtract the control group's movement, write what is left down to the move, update the record. If you won, apply the same kind of move to the next phrase.
That loop takes about two and a half hours a week. Every screen in the panel corresponds to a step in it; there is no screen with another purpose.
Who it fits, and who it does not
The last section of a product summary should also say who it is not for.
It fits: an app live on the App Store, receiving downloads in at least one country, whose metadata you can change. Those three are what measurement needs to start.
It fits: apps live in more than one country. Because each country has its own keyword field, a multi-country setup surfaces far more waste and far more opportunity.
It fits: categories where rivals have high review volume. Review mining then produces phrases other tools cannot find.
It does not fit: apps not yet live. Rank measurement needs a live app. What can be done before launch is running the pool-widening part and writing the first metadata against it.
It does not fit: apps whose rivals sit far above the strength threshold for every phrase they target. There is no distance left for metadata, and the honest answer is that the work has moved to the product.
It does not fit: apps whose rank rises while downloads stay flat. The problem is not visibility but the page or the product; one more keyword does not solve it.
Frequently asked
- Does adding a rival raise my cost?
- On the rank side no: every app tracking the same phrase is read out of one search. What raises cost is the number of phrases and the number of countries.
- Why do you not show download estimates?
- Apple does not give download counts to third parties. The estimates in circulation are computed backwards from rank and their error bars vary widely by category; resting a decision on that number is resting it on the wrong ground.
- Why is an unmeasured value not shown as zero?
- Zero is a reading and people decide on readings. A phrase whose popularity could not be measured, shown as zero, drops to the bottom of the list and looks worthless - when nobody measured it to be.
- How many countries do you measure?
- Search can run in the 175 countries and regions Apple's store is open in. Search suggestions do not return everywhere; where they do not, popularity stays blank and is shown as blank.
- Can I export my data?
- Yes. The measurement history is yours and has to be portable; a history that cannot move is reset when you change tools.
Explore our resources
Keyword competition in the games category: from obligation to competitive advantage
Struggling to get past the App Store's metadata rules and the limits of the 100-character keyword field? rankcusp answers with a platform designed to solve what we call the "100-character lock.
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Retail apps and App Store search: getting ahead
Grasp clearly the difficulties retail apps face in App Store search and identify the most effective keyword opportunities. With category data, country-level comparisons, applicable suggestions and cusp band examples, this guide helps you measure your rank, define your keyword strategy and put into practice the concrete steps that will raise your visibility.
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A return analysis: the impact of rankcusp's ASO platform and the value of the cusp band
Download the report explaining how rankcusp's ASO platform turns visibility into real downloads. With the cusp band report, keyword extraction from competitor reviews and daily rank tracking, discover the ways to lower your acquisition cost, protect your team's time and obtain a measurable return.
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