How many times should you repeat a keyword in your Play Store description?
23 August 2026 · Zoubair Haja
Search for “how many times should I repeat a keyword in a Play Store description” and you will get firm, contradictory answers: three times, four times, five times, “2% density”. None of them are sourced. Nobody says where the number comes from.
So we measured the listings that already rank. On 23 August 2026 we took the top 10 for 30 keywords on the French Play Store — 300 listings — and computed, for each one, the actual density of the keyword it ranks on. The first result almost makes the question moot.
Almost half of ranked listings do not contain the keyword
of listings ranked in the top 10 never mention — not once — the keyword they rank on.
This is the finding that should give pause to anyone who has spent an evening fitting their keyword in an exact number of times. Out of 300 ranked listings, 141 do not write it anywhere in their long description. They rank anyway.
The explanation is that Google Play indexes more than text alone: the developer name, the category, the queries that actually lead to installs, semantic proximity. A photo editing app with ten million installs will surface on “photo filter” without ever writing those two words — its popularity and usage speak for it.
And that is exactly why density matters for you and not for them. When an app has neither the fame nor the install volume to be inferred, text is the only signal it fully controls.
The actual number: 1.87%
Among the listings that do mention the keyword, the median density is 1.87%, for 4 occurrences in a description of 485 words at the median.
In plain terms: about four repetitions in a description of roughly five hundred words. So the folk wisdom of “three to five times” was not absurd — but it left out the thing that makes it usable, namely the length of the text. Four occurrences in 200 words (2%) and four occurrences in 2,000 words (0.2%) are not the same thing. It is the ratio that matters, never the raw count.
Incidentally, that median of 485 words says something else: ranked listings do not use the 4,000 characters available. Filling the field to the brim is not what winning apps do.
Four out of five ranked listings are not optimized
Sorting the 300 listings by the band we recommend — between 1.5% and 3%, beyond 3.5% the text becomes suspicious:
| Keyword density | Listings | % |
|---|---|---|
| Absent from the description | 141 | 47 % |
| Below 1.5% | 65 | 22 % |
| In the 1.5–3% band | 54 | 18 % |
| Between 3 and 3.5% | 8 | 3 % |
| Above 3.5% | 32 | 11 % |
Only 18.3% of ranked listings fall inside the recommended band. In other words, the vast majority of apps occupying the top 10 have not worked on their density — they are there for other reasons, popularity first. For a young app, that is good news: the textual ground is barely contested.
At the other end, 10.7% of listings exceed the 3.5% threshold and rank anyway. So over-repetition is not instantly disqualifying. But it is not what the majority of ranked listings do either, and it is a gamble: Google's policy explicitly forbids keyword stuffing, and when the penalty comes, it is not negotiable.
The gap between categories
The more a category is dominated by very large apps, the less text matters there — and the less ranked listings bother writing the keyword at all.
| Category | Keyword absent | Median density |
|---|---|---|
| Education | 18 % | 2.14 % |
| Finance | 36 % | 1.61 % |
| Tools | 42 % | 2.38 % |
| Health & fitness | 46 % | 1.87 % |
| Productivity | 64 % | 1.43 % |
| Photography | 76 % | 1.02 % |
In Photography, three out of four ranked listings never mention the keyword: that category is won on fame. In Education, fewer than one in five omits it, and the median density is the highest there — that is where text carries the most weight.
What to do with this
Aim for 1.5 to 3% on two or three keywords, no more — the long description is finite space, and beyond a handful of keywords none of them reaches the threshold. Concretely, in a 500-word description that means four to six occurrences per keyword.
And keep the hierarchy in mind: density is the lever you control entirely, but it is also the weakest of the three. Review count determines whether the keyword is reachable at all, the title carries more weight than the description, and density decides between two otherwise comparable listings. Optimizing it on an out-of-reach keyword will produce nothing.
We measured those two other levers separately: how many reviews it takes to be visible and whether to put the keyword in the title.
Method and limits
300 listings across 30 keywords, French Play Store, collected on 23 August 2026. Listings without a usable long description (under 200 characters) were discarded rather than counted as 0%. Density is computed as (occurrences × keyword words) ÷ total words, URLs excluded — the exact formula the tool applies.
The main limitation is that this is a snapshot, not an experiment: we observe ranked listings, we do not prove their density caused their ranking. Correlation says nothing about the direction of the arrow — and on a signal this secondary, caution is warranted.