What is the Keyword Difficulty (KD)?
The App Store Keyword Difficulty (KD) score is a score of difficulty for keywords.
The higher the score, the more difficult it will be for your app to rank on this keyword.
It is inspired by popular SEO tools such as ahrefs, but adapted to the App store search results.
What does the KD score representation do?
The Keyword Difficulty is a score between 0 and 100.
If you know how to use the classical KD score, you should already know what the App Store KD means!
Here are some indications on what the KD score ranges represent:
- Between 0 and 14 : Very easy Keyword Difficulty
- Between 15 and 29 : Easy Keyword Difficulty
- Between 30 and 49 : Moderate Keyword Difficulty
- Between 50 and 69 : Strong Keyword Difficulty
- Between 70 and 84 : Hard Keyword Difficulty
- Between 85 and 100 : Very hard Keyword Difficulty
An example of very hard KD is the keyword vpn with a KD of 99 for Chrome extensions. It will be impossible to rank for this keyword unless your Chrome extension has reached an AppWatch Score over 90 and you have optimized everything to rank on the Chrome Webstore
How is the KD calculated?
The KD score is calculated in order to have the most accurate representation of the difficulty to rank on this keyword.
This means that the 2 main components are taken into account for the search results:
- App strength using the AppWatch Score which represents the number of users, number of reviews and average rating
- Keyword matching: using the name of the extension and the description description
It also takes into account the number of search results for the keyword to modulate the difficulty.