How we rewrote Soso's App Store title to win both keywords and customers

A lot of people treat App Store Optimization and positioning as if you have to pick a side. Either you chase keywords (a polite way of saying you stuff your store listing) or you build a brand. As if combining the two were somehow impossible.

It is not. ASO and positioning should feed each other. Your keyword choice reinforces your positioning, and your positioning makes it easier for the customers who actually care about your solution to find you. You can have both, and you should.

We just went through this exercise for one of our own apps, and I want to walk through the mindset we used so you can apply it to yours.

The app: Soso, a period tracker for tweens

Soso is a period tracker we built as a family — my wife, my daughter and I — because we couldn't find a period tracker that was actually made for younger kids. Girls are getting their periods earlier and earlier; some as young as eight years old. And if you look at the period trackers out there, they're built for grown-up women trying to get pregnant, trying not to get pregnant, and a few other use cases I'd rather not list out in this video.

We've been doing our best to grow Soso, and a recent opportunity to revisit our title and subtitle turned into a perfect case study for the ASO-vs-positioning trap.

The old listing — and why it wasn't working

Here's what we had before:

Title: Soso — Safe Period Tracker
Subtitle: Made for her first period

If you've done any ASO, you can already spot a few problems:

"Period" is duplicated. Title and subtitle both burn one of the most valuable slots we have on the same word.
"Safe" and "made" are dead words. When we looked at keyword volumes, nobody is searching for a "safe period tracker." Those characters are not earning their keep.
"Safe" was also confusing. We meant "age appropriate." But when we talked to customers — mothers and kids — they read "safe" as something else. Some wondered whether they even needed it. That's not just an ASO problem; it's a positioning problem. People weren't recognizing themselves in the listing.

So we had a listing that was bad at search and bad at resonance. Time to fix it.

Finding the word the audience actually uses

The biggest unlock came from one word: tween.

This is one of those things that's hard to discover if the language isn't your native one — I'm not American, so I had to do a fair amount of research (and lean on AI) to land on it. A "tween" is a girl roughly eight to twelve, sometimes up to fourteen. Basically a younger teen. And that is exactly the age range we're targeting.

If you look at Google Trends, "tween" is rising as a category — parents are searching for tween-specific products more and more. With a single word, we now communicate the target age and the moms looking at the listing immediately think, "this is for my daughter." Two birds, one stone.

The harder trade-off: "teens" vs. positioning

Then we hit the more interesting problem.

"Tween" trends well, but if you look at raw search volume, "teens" is much bigger. And here's where ASO and positioning collide. Most of the teen apps on the App Store are not safe — they include chat features and other things that, as parents, we don't want our daughters exposed to. So we could just stuff "teen" into the title to ride that volume, but:

It would be wrong. It would put us in direct competition with apps that are 100× bigger than us.
It would hurt our positioning, because we'd be promising something we deliberately don't offer.

But ignoring "teen" altogether wasn't right either — parents using "teen" to describe a mature twelve-year-old might genuinely need a solution like ours. We wanted that keyword surface area without losing the context that makes Soso different.

The fix: say it's for teens, but not all teens. Specifically, the younger end. That's exactly what "tween" lets us do.

The new listing

After the rewrite, the slots earn their keep — and the positioning gets sharper instead of softer:

Title: Soso — Period Tracker for Tweens
Subtitle: Tweens. First Cycles.

What changed and why:

"Period" no longer duplicates between title and subtitle.
"Tweens" carries both the keyword and the positioning — same word doing both jobs.
"First" stays, because "first period" is an actual query we see — and it's central to who we serve.
"Cycles" gets added so the listing covers the broader concept beyond a single period.

This is going live now with Soso version 1.6 — which also ships a whole new experience where you can generate a unique keepsake for your first period. We're really excited about it.

The takeaway

If you find yourself debating between ASO and positioning, the answer is almost always "both, and the same words should do both jobs." Every word in your title and subtitle should:

Be something the right customer actually types into search, and
Reinforce the way you want that customer to see you.

If a word only does one of the two, it's probably the wrong word.

The next challenge for us is replicating this in our other markets — Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain — where there isn't always a clean equivalent for "tween." That's a localization problem worth its own video. If you'd like that breakdown, leave a comment on the video and we'll make it.

— Rômulo. I build apps and the tools behind them. If you want to connect your App Store and Google Play data in one place so you can actually see what's working, check out BeyondAnalytics.io and EasyAppReports, the best ETL for apps.

Full transcript

Lightly cleaned up for readability; the original is the video above.

Hi, hi. Okay, okay. So today I want to talk about App Store Optimization and Positioning. My argument is actually that a lot of people think that this is "versus" — right? So like you either chase keywords, which is just a fancy way of saying that you are keyword stuffing your store listing, or you build a brand. It's like one or the other and somehow it is impossible to combine the two. And it's just not true. So this is "App Store Optimization + Positioning" and one should feed the other. So your keyword choice reinforces your positioning, and your positioning also makes it easier for the customers that actually care about your solution to find you. You can have both.

And I just did an exercise for ourselves, for one of our apps. And now I want to show you exactly the mindset and how to think about this problem and how to solve it.

So the app that we're working with is "Soso", which is a period tracker that I built with my family, with my wife and my daughter — because basically we couldn't find a period tracker that was actually made for younger kids. I don't know if you know, but kids these days are getting the periods earlier and earlier. Some girls are getting periods with eight years of age. And yeah, if you look at the period trackers out there, they are made for grown-up women, for getting pregnant or trying not to get pregnant — and other things that I will not mention in this video, because I might get into trouble. That's how bad it is.

So we built this app and we've been doing our best to grow it. And now that we have an opportunity to revisit our title and subtitle, I would like to use this opportunity to talk about the ASO and positioning problem that I just described.

So this is the old version that we had. So you would say "Soso", "Safe Period Tracker" and the subtitle would say "Made for her first period". Which is okay, but if you have been doing ASO for some time, you can already spot a few problems with this. So let me just list some of the problems.

First, the word "period" is duplicated. So we are wasting very, very valuable space here. Not only that, but we have the words "safe" and "made", which — people don't search for this. Right? So we started to look at keyword volumes and see that people are not searching for a safe period tracker.

And the other thing that we noticed by talking to customers is that when they saw this, they were actually confused — like "safe", what do you mean by safe? Of course, we know that we mean that this is age appropriate. That's what we mean by safe. But this was not clear for mothers and for kids. It was also like, "safe — is this really what I need?" So basically this positioning doesn't make sense. So it's an ASO problem because people are not looking for safe period trackers. It's also a positioning problem because people don't care about this problem. They are not recognizing themselves in it. That's an even bigger issue.

So we looked at that and said, OK, let's do some research and see if we can find a solution for that. And so we found a few. That's what I want to discuss.

First of all, on the main positioning issue. We started to look at, OK — if people are not searching for safe period trackers, then what the hell are they looking for? Are they even looking for a solution like this? And this is one of the things that, if you are not native on that language, might be very hard to find this conclusion. I'm not American, of course. So I had to use AI and do a lot of research to find this. But I found out that "tween" is like a girl from like eight to like — some people say 12, some people say 14. But it's a younger teenager, basically. And that's exactly the age range that we are targeting.

So this is perfect. And if you look at Google Trends, you see that people are looking more and more for tween-specific products. So this is perfect. Because with one word, now we are communicating exactly the target age that we're aiming. And also, for a mother that looks at this, OK — so this is for my daughter. This is perfect. So two birds, one stone — wife is calling — two birds, one stone situation, which is again perfect.

But then the second issue: we had some words that didn't make sense. "Period" is duplicated. "First period" is good because that's an actual query that we see. But we already have "period". So how do we optimize that?

So I figured out that "cycles" was missing. So that was something that we needed to go there. And — OK, "tween" is trending, but honestly, if you look at search volumes, "teens" is actually the biggest word. And here's where we get into the App Store Optimization versus positioning issue. Because if we look at the teen apps that you have on the App Store, they're not safe. Like they talk about other stuff way down. There's chat and all the sort of stuff that we as parents, we don't want to expose our kids to.

So we could just do this. But then the problem is that, first, this will be wrong. This will be detrimental to our positioning. And it's not what we want. It would also have us competing directly with apps that are like 100 times bigger. Really doesn't make sense.

But we needed to find a way to somehow put this here, because people that are looking for a tracker for teens might actually need a solution like ours. Maybe by "teen", you mean like your 12-year-old daughter that's all grown up and mature. So we wanted to have that keyword as well, but not have it lose that context. So the solution was: say that it is for teens, but not all teens. "Tweens. First Cycles."

So we add "tween". We keep "first", which is extremely important for our positioning and for our optimization as well. And there you have it. We're super happy with the solution. It's going live now with the version 1.6, which is amazing. By the way, there is a whole experience where you can generate a unique keepsake for your first period. We're super excited about it. And yeah, now we are also solving this ASO and positioning issue.

I think the challenge now is how to replicate this in other languages, because the word "tween" is very US-specific. And we are also strong in Brazil and in Germany and Italy and Spain. And we don't really have a specific word for that. So localization is a different issue. But if you really like this sort of breakdown, then I could also do another video where we cover that.

So that was it, guys. If you don't know me, I'm Rômulo and I build apps and the tools behind them. So you can check us out on BeyondAnalytics.io or EasyAppReports, which is now the best ETL for apps. If you want to connect your App Store and Google Play data in one place so you can visualize your data, like I'm already doing with Soso and other apps, then you might want to check us out.

I hope that you enjoyed. Please just leave your questions and potentially challenges so we can do more videos like this in the future. See you next time. Bye bye.