I’m in one of the most crowded categories on the store: Diabetes Management. There are over 1,000 apps in this space. It is dominated by medical giants with massive UA budgets and 10,000+ five-star ratings. Arguably, my app should be result 1,001.
By simply naming and describing my product accurately (addressing diabetes specifically for women's hormonal cycles), I hit the #1 rank for "diabetes management for women" and many more. I am outranking the biggest players in the industry for those niches. In a category this competitive, that should be a massive win.
Organic downloads from search remained at near-zero.
I recently made a post in a relevant community. I didn't include a link; I just discussed the concept. It got 16k views and 40 downloads in 24 hours. People actually took the time to exit Reddit, open the App Store, and hunt for the app manually.
If you’re building a new category, ASO is a capture tool, not a creation tool. You can rank #1 for a term, but if the "mental category" doesn't exist in the user's head, they’ll never type those words into the search bar.
I’m curious: has anyone else "won" their niche keywords only to realize the search volume is dead because users don't have the vocabulary for the solution yet?