An iPad PDF and document reader with real product depth — hidden behind an App Store title the search algorithm couldn't parse. How iExcel rewrote the discoverability layer.
LiquidText is an iPad PDF and document reader built for people who actually read — researchers, students, analysts, lawyers. The product handled annotation, highlighting, and cross-document markup in a way the flat "open a PDF" apps didn't. That kind of depth is the reason a user opens the App Store in the first place. It's also the kind of depth that rarely survives the trip from search bar to install button.
When iExcel picked up the engagement, LiquidText's App Store surface was doing what most product-first apps do — leaning on the brand name to carry a listing that the search algorithm couldn't parse. The title was written for humans, not for the ranker. The keyword field was doing double duty for terms already inside the title. The competitive set — Adobe, FoxIt, PDF Expert, GoodReader — was quietly claiming the generic queries LiquidText should have been showing up in.
The brief wasn't a rebrand. It was a discoverability rewrite — a tighter title, a smarter keyword field, and a competitor-matrix read that showed the team exactly which queries the app was leaving on the table.
Before touching the title, we mapped the field. The competitive set for an iPad PDF and annotation app in 2015 wasn't a mystery — it was a dozen apps with real download momentum, real store copy, and real keyword positions. What was missing was a single view of how LiquidText compared against each of them on the queries a serious iPad user would actually type.
We pulled SearchMan and Sensor Tower data on each competitor: keyword hits, keyword effectiveness index, category traffic and difficulty scores, and app-rank position on the queries that mattered. The output was a benchmark board — one row per competitor, one read on where LiquidText was under-indexed.
An App Store title has two audiences — the human scanning the results, and the ranker parsing the words. The old title was written entirely for the human. Long, conversational, brand-first — and structured so the search algorithm couldn't cleanly pick up the terms a user would actually type. The rewrite kept the product intact and put the discoverability signals up front.
The iOS keyword field is a 100-character line no user ever sees — and one of the highest-signal inputs the App Store ranker takes. The rule that catches most product-first apps: never repeat a term already in your title. Every word inside the field has to earn its slot on the discoverability graph, not double up on what the title is already claiming.
We rebuilt the field around two intents. First, the generic PDF and document terms a serious iPad user would type without knowing any brand. Second, the competitor-adjacent terms — the ones a user searching for "adobe" or "foxit" might see LiquidText surface against. Both targeted, both parseable, both distinct from anything already in the title.
The rewrite doesn't matter without the read underneath it. Every recommendation — the title, the keyword field, the competitor angle — was built off the same tracked data set: LiquidText's U.S. iPad keyword rankings, its search visibility score, keyword volumes, and App Store search ranks by keyword, pulled daily.
The tracking window ran September 4 through September 16, 2015 — twelve days of App Store visibility data timed against the recommendation delivery. That window did two things. It gave us a baseline read of where the current title was ranking before any change. And it gave the team a data spine to hand to the developer — a "here's what the ranker sees today" file, keyword by keyword, that made the rewrite an argument backed by rows, not opinion.
Within that same window, the tracked visibility score moved +68% off its own opening read — a 1.68× shift on its own baseline. That movement was part of the case built for the rewrite, not a result of it — the recommendations hadn't shipped yet. It's the kind of evidence that makes a metadata argument land with a developer: not "we think this will work," but "here's what the ranker is already doing, row by row."
App Store title snapshot, keyword rankings, search visibility score, keyword volumes, and App Store search ranks — pulled per keyword against LiquidText's live listing.
Traffic scores, difficulty scores, and competitor rank positions on the queries LiquidText should have been surfacing against — the field-level read, not the app-level one.
Store-visibility keywords tied back to both the recommended iOS title and the recommended keyword field — the ones we'd watch move if the rewrite shipped.
Twelve consecutive days of App Store visibility data — timed against the recommendation delivery so the team had both a "before" baseline and a rolling read.
Per-keyword competitor rankings pulled for the named PDF and annotation apps — the field LiquidText was ranking against on every generic query.
Final report bundling the competitive research, the keyword ranking read, the title analysis, the current keyword review, and the recommended title and keyword field.
If you have a serious iOS app — an app people would actually download and use for years — and the store listing is written the way the founder writes about the product on a call, the LiquidText engagement is the shape of the fix.
Read the field first — SearchMan and Sensor Tower on the competitors, not just your own listing. Read the title as the ranker sees it, not as a human reads it. Rewrite the discoverability terms into the first half of the string. Rebuild the keyword field so every character earns its slot and nothing doubles up on the title. Then track it. Daily. Against a named window. So the rewrite is a decision, not a guess.
Most agencies rewrite the marketing copy. iExcel rewrites the search surface underneath it — so the product a serious user is already searching for actually gets found.
An App Store title the ranker can parse. A keyword field that doesn't waste characters on terms already in the title. A competitor read that tells you which queries you're leaving on the table. Book a 15-minute sanity check on your store surface — we'll tell you what's under-indexed.
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