Case study: rank 80 → rank 4 in 9 weeks on a stalled habit tracker

A friend who ships indie iOS apps had a habit tracker that plateaued. About 30 organic installs a day, search rank in the high 70s on the keywords he cared about. He was already running Apple Search Ads, the install cost was tolerable, but the organic side had been flat for almost a year.

He asked if I’d open his App Store Connect and look. The product was fine. The metadata was the problem.

Three changes, nine weeks, no ads, no product changes. Search rank on his lead keyword went from 80 to 4. Daily organics roughly 4×.

Here’s exactly what we did.

Change 1 (week 1): rewrite the subtitle

The original subtitle was something like “Track your daily habits & build streaks.” Generic. Two words (“habit”, “streaks”) that overlapped with his keywords field. Zero unique keyword surface.

We rewrote it to lead with the specific job his app did better than the generic habit-tracker pack — a niche use case, named directly.

Two reasons this is worth the time:

• The subtitle is indexed for App Store search, with weight close to the title’s. Wasting 30 characters on words already in your keywords field is a free-throw missed.
• It’s the line that sits directly under your app name on the search results card. If someone scrolls past, this line is what makes them tap or scroll on.

He picked 28 characters that named a use case the algorithm could match on, and a specific user could connect with. Rank on the lead keyword moved within 10 days — not all the way, but enough to confirm the change was working.

Change 2 (week 3): rotate the keywords field

The keywords field is the most-overlooked surface in App Store search. 100 characters, comma-separated, no spaces, never shown to the user. Words you put here get matched the same as words in the title and subtitle.

He had ~60 characters of relevant terms and the rest filled with synonyms of words already in his title. That’s wasted budget.

What we changed:

• Removed all duplicate stems. If “habit” was in the title and subtitle, it didn’t need to be in the keywords field too. App Store search already concatenates across fields — you don’t compound a stem by repeating it.
• Added 5 long-tail terms based on what users were actually typing. We pulled those from Apple’s autocomplete suggestions across the top of his category, not from a third-party “search volume” estimate.
• Kept the field comma-separated, no spaces. Spaces eat budget.

Net change: ~30 new characters of fresh keyword surface, all targeting phrases his competitors weren’t using.

Change 3 (week 4): fill the five other English storefronts

This is the one nobody bothers with, and it’s the one with the biggest leverage.

He’d only had en-US enabled. We added en-GB, en-AU, en-CA, en-IN, en-SG — same metadata, same keywords, with two small regional substitutions (“favorite” → “favourite”, “color” → “colour” in en-GB and en-AU).

This is the English locale trick. It’s free reach, doesn’t need a binary update, doesn’t need translation work. The Indian English storefront in particular is huge and underserved for most app categories.

What happened next

By the end of week 5, the lead keyword sat in the top 10 in en-US. By week 9, top 5. The new English storefronts started producing organic installs in week 2 — small numbers individually, meaningful in aggregate.

The exact ratio:

Metric	Before	After 9 weeks
Daily organic installs	~30	~120
Lead-keyword rank (en-US)	80-ish	4
English storefronts ranked	1	6

Apple Search Ads spend didn’t change. He didn’t run any influencer promo. The product binary stayed on the same build for the entire window.

Why this works — and why most indies miss it

The reason this works is depressingly simple: most indie devs treat metadata as something they do once at launch, and never touch again. The App Store rewards the opposite. Search is a moving target — competitors change, vocabulary shifts, your own product moves.

If you’re sitting on a flatlined app and the product is good, treat metadata as the lever. Three rewrites and one localization push is two afternoons of work. Most indie devs never spend those two afternoons.

How to run this play yourself

The order matters:

1. Look at your subtitle. Read it aloud. If it could be the subtitle of any app in your category, rewrite it to name what only your app does.
2. Open your keywords field. Strip every stem that’s already in your title or subtitle. Replace with long-tail terms pulled from Apple’s autocomplete.
3. Enable the five other English storefronts. Copy your en-US over, swap British spellings in en-GB/en-AU, push, wait a week.

Then watch your tracked keywords for two to four weeks before declaring anything. App Store rank changes lag metadata updates by a few days at minimum.

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