Reading the scores without an ASO background

What difficulty, traffic and effectiveness actually imply about your chances, and the one column that answers the question directly.

A prospective user who had already tried several ASO tools told us they had never understood the strategy: "you see a good keyword with a good rating, you put it in your app, and that\u2019s it?" That is a fair reaction. Every tool in this category shows scores and assumes the model behind them is obvious. It is not.

The loop, in four steps

What each score means

The column that actually answers it

Difficulty is a number with no theory of the game attached. "Can you rank" replaces it with a comparison you can check yourself: how many apps smaller than you already rank for the term, who the smallest one is, and what position they hold.

If a small app already holds a top position for a term, size is demonstrably not the barrier, whatever the difficulty score says. If every app ranking there is enormous, it plainly is, and no wording will fix that.

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