We don't run paid acquisition on any of our apps. No ad spend, no influencer deals, no growth team — and some of them, BacIstorie and BacGeografie among them, still get found by exactly the students they're built for, every exam season, on organic search alone. That's not luck. It's App Store Optimization treated as a real, ongoing part of the product, not a one-time form filled out at launch.
Keyword research is a per-locale exercise, not a translation exercise
The naive move is to write a great English listing and translate it. It doesn't work, because the words people actually search rarely map one-to-one across languages — a Romanian student searching for Bacalaureat prep material doesn't type the literal translation of "history exam practice." For BacIstorie and BacGeografie, the keyword set was built in Romanian first, from how students actually phrase the search, not translated down from an English original. The Civio series does the same the other direction — Romanian, German, and American citizenship exam terms are three different keyword sets, not one keyword set in three languages.
Title and subtitle carry almost all the weight
App Store search weighs the app name and subtitle far more heavily than the description body, which barely gets indexed at all. Every keyword that actually matters needs to earn a spot in those two fields, not get buried three paragraphs into a description nobody's search query will ever match against. It forces a discipline that's healthy anyway: if a feature can't be named in a five-word subtitle, it's probably not the app's actual core value proposition.
The first screenshot is the pitch, not a preview
Most visitors decide from the first screenshot alone, before scrolling. We treat it as a headline with a UI behind it, not a plain screen capture — a single clear claim about what the app does, paired with the actual interface, not marketing chrome that doesn't match what opens after the tap. Screenshots that oversell also create the metadata mismatches we described in App Store rejections we've actually hit — so the honest version and the effective version turn out to be the same version.
Category and localized listings are the cheapest lever we have
Choosing the right category — and, on apps that qualify, the right secondary category — puts an app in front of people browsing rather than only people searching. Localizing the listing itself, not just supporting the language in-app, is the other lever: a Romanian-market app like Foaie Parcurs gets a fully Romanian listing, not an English one with Romanian in-app text, because App Store search in each storefront weighs the listing language for that storefront's queries.
App Store Connect already gives you the data — use it
The free Search Terms and impressions-to-conversion data in App Store Connect tells you which keywords are actually bringing traffic and which are dead weight, without needing a paid ranking tool. We revisit that data after each release, not just at launch — a keyword that performed well a year ago can quietly stop converting as search behavior shifts, and the listing should shift with it.
None of this replaces a good app. But a good app with an untranslated keyword set, a vague subtitle, and stock-looking screenshots stays invisible to the exact people it was built for — and for apps with no ad budget behind them, invisible is the only failure mode that actually matters.