Keyword Difficulty

Understanding Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is a score from 1 to 100 that estimates how hard it will be for your app to rank in search results for a specific term. A difficulty of 10 means almost any app can rank with proper metadata. A difficulty of 80 means the keyword is dominated by established apps with thousands of ratings, large download volumes, and entrenched positions.

Difficulty is one of the three core metrics in keyword research, alongside keyword popularity and the opportunity score. While popularity tells you how many people search for a term, difficulty tells you how realistic it is for your app to appear in those results.

What Drives Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is determined by the strength of apps that currently rank for that term. Several factors contribute:

• Number of competitors: Keywords with many apps competing for rank are inherently more difficult.
• Competitor strength: If the top-ranking apps have millions of downloads, high ratings, and strong brand recognition, displacing them is significantly harder than competing against smaller, less-established apps.
• Rating volume and quality: Apps with tens of thousands of ratings and reviews have a durable ranking advantage. The App Store algorithm factors in social proof signals.
• Download velocity: Keywords where top apps receive high volumes of daily downloads are harder to crack because new apps struggle to match that momentum.

Difficulty Ranges and Strategy

How Difficulty Affects Keyword Classification

Difficulty decides where a brand new app lands in the search results. Measured on real App Store searches, a brand new app with the keyword in its title typically lands around #37 on a very easy keyword, #99 on a middling one, #123 at difficulty 75 and #135 at 90, and a few land much higher. An app with ratings of its own does better. The downloads averaged over where such apps land are what the opportunity score measures, and four of RespectASO's five tags are read off that score. Difficulty is not judged a second time: it already decides where the app lands, which is what the score counts.

• Sweet Spot: the rank the app can expect pays 10 or more downloads a day. Usually low difficulty, but a huge keyword can qualify higher up.
• Good Target and Supporting: the rank the app can expect pays 1 to 10 downloads a day, or one every 10 days to 1 a day. With a difficulty of 35 or lower, these are the hidden gems of ASO guides: thin fields with modest but real downloads.
• Worth Climbing: the top spot pays a download a day or more, but little at the rank you can expect today. Worth targeting: it pays more as the app climbs, and a title with it also ranks for longer searches that contain it.

The fifth tag, Low Volume, ignores difficulty altogether: when even #1 brings under one download a day, the keyword is Low Volume at every difficulty. Difficulty feeds the opportunity score through the rank alone: the harder the keyword, the further down apps like yours land, and the fewer taps that rank gets.

Difficulty Varies Dramatically by Country

One of the most important insights in ASO: the same keyword concept has wildly different difficulty scores across countries. "Budget tracker" might show difficulty 65 in the United States but only 15 in Brazil. This happens because fewer apps optimize their metadata for smaller markets, creating genuine opportunities.

The Country Opportunity Finder leverages this by ranking all 175 App Store storefronts by opportunity for a given keyword, surfacing markets where difficulty is low relative to popularity.

Common Mistakes with Keyword Difficulty

• Ignoring difficulty entirely: Targeting only high-popularity keywords without checking difficulty is the most common ASO mistake. A keyword with popularity 80 and difficulty 85 will almost never produce results for an indie app.
• Treating all high-difficulty keywords as off-limits: High-difficulty keywords for your exact category are still worth including in metadata as long-term aspirational targets. Just don't rely on them for immediate visibility.
• Not considering market-specific difficulty: A keyword that's impossibly competitive in the US might be wide open in other markets. Localization can transform a high-difficulty keyword into a sweet spot.

How RespectASO Measures Difficulty

RespectASO scores every keyword's difficulty on the 1-100 scale across all 175 App Store storefronts. Search a whole list of keywords at once to compare difficulty across terms and countries. The Dashboard says above the Opportunity column whose score it is, says on hover what the score means for that app in downloads a day, and flags keywords the app can grow into as "Worth Climbing", giving you instant tactical guidance. The opportunity score integrates difficulty with popularity into a single actionable metric, making it easy to find keywords where ranking is both achievable and worthwhile.

Put it to work: how to find App Store keywords for your iOS app, step by step.