How to Find Keywords for Your Google Play App

Google Play has no keyword field. The App Store gives you 100 hidden characters for keywords; on Google Play, the words in your title, short description and full description are your keywords. So keyword research for Google Play comes down to three questions: what do people type, which of those searches can your app win, and where in your listing does each one go.

The examples below use a real game, Trap Castle, a troll platformer full of traps.

1. Write down your seeds

Seeds are three to five short phrases that describe your app the way a user would say it, not the way you'd pitch it. For Trap Castle: "trap game", "troll game", "platformer", "castle game".

Leave the jargon out. Someone looking for a roguelike deck-builder probably types "card game" first. If you can't picture a person typing the phrase into a search bar, it isn't a seed.

2. Expand them with Google Play autocomplete

Type a seed into Google Play's search bar and read the suggestions. Google Play only suggests searches that people actually make, so every suggestion is a real keyword. Then type the seed followed by a space and a letter ("trap game a", "trap game b", and so on) to get more.

To see what this gives, we ran 40 common seeds through Google Play's autocomplete in the US in November 2026. A few of the results:

Two words kept coming back. "Free" appeared in the suggestions for 30 of the 40 seeds, and "offline" for 19. Searches tell you what people care about: if your game plays without a connection, "offline" belongs in your listing. "Free" is a different story. Google's policy doesn't allow price words in your title, and Google Play already shows that your app is free.

Doing this by hand takes time, since every seed has 26 letters to try. Our free ASO keyword tool runs the seed and every letter from a to z in a few seconds, for any country.

3. Cross out what doesn't fit

Not every suggestion is for you. Skip:

• Other apps' names. "Trap adventure 2" is a real search, but the people who type it want that exact game. The same goes for searches like "solitaire cash" or "car parking multiplayer 2": the brand's own app will hold #1 forever.
• Features you don't have. "Word games single player" won't help a multiplayer word game.
• The wrong audience. "For kids" searches, if your app isn't made for kids.

Keep the searches that describe your app truthfully. They're the only ones that turn into installs: someone who searches "trap game offline" and finds an offline trap game installs it. Someone who wanted something else leaves without installing.

4. Estimate how many people search each one

Google Play doesn't publish search volumes, but two signals help:

• How early autocomplete suggests it. Type the keyword one letter at a time and note when it appears. A search suggested after a few letters is one many people type. "Rage platformer" shows up after six letters; "troll platformer" needs ten; "impossible platformer" never shows up at all, which means very few people search it.
• Its place in the list. The first suggestions are usually the most searched.

Web search volumes from Google Ads or SEO tools can help you compare keywords with each other, but they measure Google web search, not Google Play. Don't read them as an install forecast.

5. Check how hard each keyword is

Search the keyword on Google Play and look at the top 10:

• Installs. If every app has 10 million installs or more, a new app won't get there soon.
• Ratings. Tens of thousands of ratings mean established apps.
• Titles. If most of the top 10 have the exact keyword in their title, you'll need it in yours too.

A keyword whose top 10 includes small apps, with thousands of installs rather than millions, is one you can win. Often that's a longer search: "escape room games jail" instead of "escape room".

Our free app ranking checker shows the top 10 for any keyword and where your app stands. Inside ASO Tracker, Keyword Check gives each keyword a traffic score and a difficulty score, so you can compare a whole list at once.

6. Learn from your competitors

Your competitors have already tested a lot of keywords for you. Open the apps that rank where you want to rank and read their titles and short descriptions: the phrases they repeat are the ones they target.

Then look for gaps, keywords where several competitors rank in the top 10 and you don't. Those searches are proven to bring players to apps like yours. Our video on spying on your competitors' keywords shows how to find them in a few minutes.

7. Pick your keywords and place them

You should now have a short list. From it, pick:

• One main keyword for your title. Trap Castle's title is "Trap Castle: Troll Platformer": the name, then the main keyword, inside the 30-character limit.
• One or two for your short description, which has 80 characters.
• Five to ten for your full description, each used a few times where it reads naturally.

Here's Trap Castle's shortlist, checked in the US in November 2026:

"Troll platformer" is searched less than the others, but its top 10 is full of games with a handful of installs, and Trap Castle already sits just below them. That's the keyword to win first, so it goes in the title. The more popular searches go in the descriptions, to build on later.

Title first, short description second, full description third: that's the order of weight most ASO practitioners agree on. For short searches of one or two words, our study of 183 Google Play top 10s found the exact search in the title of 55% of the apps ranked #1.

8. Track, wait, and adjust

Rankings take days to react to a listing change. Track your keywords, daily if you can, and give each change two to four weeks. Replace the keywords that haven't moved by then with the next ones on your list. The ones where you sit between #11 and #20 are your quickest wins, so make them stronger in your text first.

How to check your app's ranking on Google Play covers the tracking side, and how to write a Google Play app description covers the writing.

Free or paid keyword tools?

You can do everything above for free, with Google Play's autocomplete, the Play website and a spreadsheet. Paid tools save time and add what you can't get by hand: search volume estimates, difficulty scores, daily rank history and competitors' keywords. Start with the free method. Pay for a tool when the manual work starts taking time away from the app itself.