GTM Sauce

A health and fitness app · B2C · guest's recent acquisition

Target 24 more versions of the keyword you already rank #1 for, and cut Apple Ads

Unknownasoapple-search-ads

What they did

For a newly bought ~$500K/year app already #1 for its main keyword, exported keyword data and filtered by the main term: 24 variants with search volume >= 24 (analogy: green noise -> blue noise, purple noise). Keep adding them to the title/subtitle instead of diluting into unrelated terms (like 'Migraine Buddy: Track Headache' adding chronic pain, triggers). Cut Apple Ads from ~$10K to ~$5K/month to shift effort to ASO. Next: test Meta aimed at an older audience.
Stage
post-acquisition

In their words

Steve Young - Beginners Guide to Buying & Selling Apps 2026

Play from 47:05
9:13

Joseph ChoiAnd are these two organic App Store Search, or paid search?

9:17

Steve YoungNo, it's all organic. Yeah, this is primarily organic. We're doing a little bit of paid. Here, this one that we just purchased, I'm spending about 5,000. I'm I'm lowering it. So last month I spent about 10,000 on Apple Ads, and this month I want to lower that, because I found that ASO, there's a lot of keywords that I can still go after, so I'm actually going to I'm scaling down Apple Ads and scaling up ASO. Because, again, this is a niche that no one's paying attention to, and so when I'm when I'm talking about ASO and the way I approach ASO is like, I'm not trying to compete with everybody. I'm trying to be in the corner, Joseph, and be like, "Nobody pay attention to me," type of thing.

9:53

Joseph ChoiYou know what this reminds me of? You know how people compare consumer apps to dropshipping? Because the marketing is similar, right? Like because building is so easy now, you can just market your app on ads and TikTok, and it's like similar to dropshipping. The way that you're talking about it right now with ASO is almost like Amazon FBA. This is a deep cut. I don't know if people are into internet marketing and stuff, but Amazon FBA is all …

Steve Young… the way the the way I'm approaching this, but the analogy would be like, oh, there's blue noise, there's purple noise, there's all these other noises that I can go after that have search volume. So I'm using data. I'm looking at the spreadsheet right now for the app that I just acquired and I'm like, "Wow, there's like" I just sorted it by the main keyword that uh we're already number one for, but like also that word is has different iteration.

47:05

Steve YoungThere's 24 keywords that have at least 24 search volume and up. That's 24 keywords with the main green already in there that I can start to go after, and nobody Not a lot of people are paying attention to it. So my approach is, instead of like diluting this, why don't we just keep moving this and calling everything green, blah, blah, blah?

47:29

Joseph ChoiHere's another analogy, like Migraine Buddy: Track Headache. This, in a way, has three different keywords, right? Cuz it's like migraine, which is the main one, Buddy is their brand, Migraine Buddy, and then track, right? Cuz like some people might be searching migraine tracking, and then headache is like another keyword, right?

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: app-store, apple-search-ads, keyword-variants, budget-shift, long-title