Apple Search Ads keyword research from zero: the list we build in the first week

A new Apple Search Ads account has no history, no search terms report and no idea what works. The temptation is to throw hundreds of keywords at it and let the data sort it out. That burns budget on guesses. Here is how we build a first list in a week.

Day one: the problem, in the user's words

Write down how a person would describe the problem before they knew your app existed. Not "AI bedtime story generator" but "stories to help my kid sleep". Not "manifestation app" alone but "how to visualize goals". Ask a few real people. Read reviews of competing apps; the phrases people use in complaints are the phrases they search.

Day two: the search bar

Open the App Store on a phone, type the first two letters of each term and read the autocomplete. Those suggestions are live, ranked by real volume, and free. Do it for every seed term, write everything down, and do it again in your top three non-English storefronts.

Day three: competitors

List the apps that show up for your category terms. Their names are keywords: expensive, usually, and worth a small test in their own campaign. More useful is what they rank for. Read their titles and subtitles; the words they chose are the words they believe people search.

Day four: four buckets

• Brand: your name and its misspellings.
• Category: what the app is, in generic terms.
• Problem: what the person wants solved.
• Competitor: other apps' names.

Each bucket gets its own campaign, because each behaves differently and needs its own budget and target.

Day five: cut it to fifty

Rank every term by how closely it matches what the app actually does. Keep the fifty best, exact match. Put the rest in a discovery campaign on broad match with a small budget, and let the search terms report promote the ones that earn it. Fifty good terms with clean data beat five hundred guesses that never get enough traffic to judge.

Then: weekly

Every week the search terms report adds a few and retires a few. After a month, the list looks nothing like the first draft, and that is the point. The first list is a starting hypothesis; the account is the research.