How often should I update my app store keywords?

Once a month is enough to decide the next change. Most of a metadata change shows on the first daily reading, and fourteen days of readings are what separate it from normal noise, so a monthly pass leaves each change the time it needs to be read.

What should I look at first in a monthly ASO review?

Movement across your whole keyword set over the month, not one keyword: the monthly ASO recap email or the visibility trend. Then rule out a store-wide event before you interpret anything as your own doing.

Is thirty minutes a month enough for ASO?

For a single app with a stable listing, yes. The monthly pass exists to decide the one change for the next release, not to produce activity.

A monthly ASO routine in thirty minutes

A timed checklist for the once a month pass: read the movement, rule out the store, close one competitor gap, refresh the keyword list and pick the next change.

This is the once a month pass: thirty minutes, one app, ending with one decision about what to ship next. It needs a tracked app with keywords and at least one competitor. The easiest way to keep the date is to let Applyra set it: under Email notifications on your account screen, set ASO recap emails to Monthly, and run the pass the day the recap lands.

The monthly ASO routine, block by block, with its budget:

Read the movement (3 minutes).
Rule out the store (3 minutes).
Read the keyword set (6 minutes).
Read the competition (6 minutes).
Read the listing (6 minutes).
Refresh the keyword list (4 minutes).
Pick the one change (2 minutes).

1. Read the movement (3 minutes)

Start with the Monthly ASO Recap. It carries the month in one email, on every plan: your Visibility Scores with their change, your Average Rank Change, and the Top Movers, split into Biggest Gains and Biggest Drops.

Then open Home, at the top of the sidebar (see a tour of the dashboard):

Visibility overview draws your average visibility score across your apps. On Unlimited, set it to Last 30 days and read the shape, not today's number; the free plan draws the last seven days.
Biggest gains and Biggest drops list the keywords that moved most at the latest reading, with the total count on each.
Today's insights turns the latest readings into plain sentences: a keyword that entered or left the top 10, a score that keeps declining, a competitor that shipped an update.

On the app page, the visibility chart carries a dot on every day your listing changed, so the month's curve and what you shipped sit on the same line.

What good looks like: the trend is flat or rising, and the recap's drops are fewer than its gains. Write down anything that surprises you; you will test it in the next two blocks.

2. Rule out the store (3 minutes)

Before you interpret any movement as your own doing, open the algorithm change detector and pick your store and country. The market page charts every day against that market's normal band, and every update day is listed under Detected updates. The card for the other store in the same country, on the same days, tells you whether the event was one store or both.

If the month contains an update day, you are not reading your own work over that window, you are reading the store's. A recalibration also rewrites difficulty across the whole store, so a shortlist built before the event needs re-checking.

What good looks like: you can name the days in the month that were the store's, and exclude them from your own before and after.

3. Read the keyword set (6 minutes)

Open the Keywords Tracker. Three stat cards sit above the table: Tracked keywords, with the share of them that rank as a badge, Average position and Top 10 coverage, the share of your ranked keywords sitting in the top 10. Read the last two together with the ranked share: a keyword that falls out of the results leaves the average, so a flat average with a shrinking ranked share is a loss.

Then sort by Trend (7d). It orders rows by their latest move, and an Out counts as the biggest fall of all, so one click brings the losses to the top and a second brings the gains:

The losses. An Out pill means the keyword was ranked at the previous reading and is not today. One is noise. Several at once is an event, and diagnosing a ranking drop is the procedure.
The gains. Keywords that climbed into the top 10 are candidates to defend rather than to touch. Star them, so they sort first from now on.

For one keyword's whole month, open it in the Keywords Inspector and set the Tracking Status chart to Last 30 days, on Unlimited. Also on Unlimited, Export to CSV at the end of the block writes every row with its current and previous rank, traffic, difficulty and KEI: next month, that file is your baseline.

What good looks like: Top 10 coverage and the ranked share up or flat, and every Out explained.

4. Read the competition (6 minutes)

The Competitor overview card on Home shows you against each rival, and one click opens the comparison. Do two things there.

Count the gaps. On the Head-to-head tab, the recap card reads the split, for instance "They lead 7 / 20". Compare it with last month. The share moving your way while they shipped nothing is strong evidence your listing work landed, because a store-wide shift moves both of you. The chart at the top of the page puts both visibility scores on one line, with a dot on every day either listing changed.

See what they shipped. You will usually have been told already, by the bell and by the daily Competitor updates email. The Release history tab is the log: their current listing, then what changed, newest first. A competitor who rewrote their title last month is a common explanation for a keyword where you dropped without doing anything, and block 2 has already ruled out the store.

On Unlimited, the AI insights tab turns the same data into a briefing with an action plan, which is the fastest version of this block. The long form is turning a competitor gap into a plan.

What good looks like: They lead is smaller than last month, or you know exactly why it is not.

5. Read the listing (6 minutes)

The ASO Health widget at the top of the app page names the Biggest lever, the sub-score holding the listing back most. Open the ASO Health tab: each sub-score, Keyword coverage, Targeting fit and Store appeal, says how many things it has to fix. Click one and What to do about it lists its findings, most severe first.

The three that show up on a monthly pass:

Your listing is going stale: both stores favour active apps, and visitors read an untouched page as an abandoned one. The release you were going to make anyway fixes it.
Most of your screenshot slots are empty: the Store appeal breakdown shows how many slots you fill, and each extra screenshot is another argument for installing.
Your title aims above your weight class: the terms in your title belong to apps far bigger than yours. The fix is a more specific variation you can win now.

The Listing version picker puts your current listing next to the ones before it, each with its own score, and Simulate changes opens the Metadata Simulator on the live text. Full reference in ASO Health.

What good looks like: all three sub-scores read Nothing to fix, or you know which one holds the score back.

6. Refresh the keyword list (4 minutes)

Keywords go stale. Four places hand you candidates without a search:

Keywords to watch on Home: terms related to the ones you already track, one click from the inspector.
Keywords to track on the app page: search terms found in your own listing that you are not following yet, with Traffic, Difficulty and KEI on each card.
Related Keywords in the Keywords Inspector, around any term you inspect.
The Head-to-head rows marked Not tracking, each with a Track button.

Add one to three, on the same bar you used to build the list: real demand at a traffic score of 25 or more, Easy difficulty at 33 or below, and a KEI rated Good or better, which starts at 0.6. See KEI and choosing the keywords to target.

Then drop something. A keyword you have held at position 1 for six months teaches you nothing, and one that has not entered the top 100 in three months is telling you it is out of reach; the Tracking Status chart on Last 90 days settles both on Unlimited. On the free plan, where you track five, this trade is the entire exercise.

What good looks like: the same number of tracked keywords, with the dead ones swapped for live ones. If the candidates have dried up at home, the next source of easy keywords is a storefront you are not in yet: launching in a new market.

7. Pick the one change (2 minutes)

Close with a single decision: what does the next release change, and which number should move. Draft it with Simulate changes, or with Write my listing with AI on Unlimited, score it before you submit, read it at day 7 and decide at day 14. The full cycle is in preparing a release.

If the answer is "nothing", that is a legitimate answer. A listing you are still measuring should not be touched, and the cheapest month in ASO is the one where you let a good change finish landing.

Once the pass is a habit, the reading half can run without you on the paid plan: a weekly movement report and a keyword sheet that refreshes itself are two of the patterns in recipes for the API and MCP, and an assistant connected through the MCP tools can pull your score history and rank history on request.