Pick keywords where the top 3 apps have few reviews and lack the keyword in their title

Steve Young… of app, or it's too competitive—you know how many calorie trackers there are, or macro trackers there are now?—if people are searching for it, but it's too difficult, then ASO is not the game for you. And I think, you know, indies get just caught up with like, "Steve, nothing's happening with ASO. You talk about ASO." It's like, my ASO strategy is to focus on keywords that nobody is going after, not the ones that are everybody is going after.

Steve YoungAnd so for me right now, if you're an engineer, you could build anything you want, I always start with distribution first. And if you're going to rely on ASO and Apple Ads, like really do a lot of keyword research. And the the ones that have gotten to profitability really quick for us is just the ones that were like, we find the keyword first, Joseph, and then build the app. And so we already have distribution first, then we figure out the features.

Joseph ChoiI guess, in a way, like ASO and keyword research is basically just ideation, or like it's it's thinking about what what's a good app that has demand right now. Have you ever seen an app make a lot of money—

Steve Young… So when you think about meditation, it's like, it's a little bit like a vitamin. But when you think about like green noise or binaural beats, you're starting to get more niche into this. And then when you feel the keyword, so the the other keyword that I gave away and I did a video about this is migraine tracker. Migraine Buddy does about 50,000 a month. And dude, if you look at their onboarding and their paywall, [laughter] not good, right?

Steve YoungSo you try to find these painkiller keywords that people are more likely to pay, and that's when you can hard paywall them. And Superwall's really, really good. A lot of our community members in the App Founders community that we have, they're all sharing their Superwall stuff. And so that's how I would try to do this. And then you build the app. And so I always look at the search results for, let's say, migraine tracker, right? What are the apps that are showing up, like the top three apps? How many reviews do they have, and how many people have it in their title? And that's a clear indication, I don't care what any ASO tool says about the difficulty, but that's a clear indication to me that, hey, is this a competitive keyword or not? Because if there's not a lot of people targeting that keyword in their title, and the number two or three apps only have 100-plus reviews, then I know I could probably beat them.

Joseph ChoiYou want to see that they're doing revenue, but then they're just not optimizing something about it, like the reviews, or the onboarding, or something. Like I'm I'm on Sensor Tower right now. It's like migraine um Migraine Tracker, the top three are not that good. There's this one that has 5k downloads, 10k revenue a month. And then the one you just told me about, Migraine Buddy, is like 70k a month from 30k downloads on on iOS, um which is a …

Joseph ChoiIs there a science at all to it? Like let's say you look up the the top five results, and it's like Green Noise App, Green Noise Free, Green Noise Sleep, there's a few different combinations that you could put those words into to put into your app, and then you probably also want to create some sort of brand around it, maybe. So you put your own branded name in it, as well. Is there like a a science to it?

Steve YoungI'm trying to figure out the science. So here is this is why, right? This I use I'm using Appfollow so you guys can see the autofill search results. So when you put green noise, these are this is what Apple is autofilling. Some people, I feel like people are lazy, they'll just like, "Green Oh, okay, I'm just going to click on the autofill result," right? And then what I used to do, Appfollow used to be, I would pick out like this app. You're like, "What the hell? How is this ranking number three with only 138 reviews?" So I click on this little "i" icon, and then back in the day, Appfollow was really good about finding these new keywords. If you start off with, let's say, meditation, and then I try to see which app does not kind of belong.

Steve YoungSo I'm like, okay, this is 400,000, 2 million almost, 1 million almost for Headspace, 71,000, 42,000, 4,000. I was like, "What is this keyword?" And I would just click on, "What is this app, right? They must be doing something right with ASO." Then I'll click this little "i" icon, or I might put this app into ASO Mobile and see like, "All right, how else What other keywords am I not paying attention to?" And this is the exact strategy I did for …