🚀 I did ASO for the Chinese App Store — without speaking Chinese

Got into top 5 for multiple keywords. Here’s how.

Hey Indie Hackers,

I wanted to share a recent ASO experiment that worked surprisingly well — even though I had zero knowledge of the language I was optimizing for.

🧩 The challenge:
I needed to help a travel app grow in the Chinese App Store.
The problem?
I don’t speak or read Chinese. No localization team, no budget for native translation, no external help.

But using Google Translate + ASO tools, I managed to:
✅ Build a usable, relevant keyword set
✅ Extract metadata structure from competitors
✅ Rank top 5 for multiple mid-traffic search terms
✅ All while not understanding a single character

Here’s what I did step-by-step:
• Used Google Translate to get initial seed keywords
• Searched them in Asodesk to identify top competitors
• Pulled their ranking keywords and filtered duplicates
• Grouped them into meaning-based clusters using tool-assisted translation
• Wrote titles, subtitles, and keyword fields using those clusters
• Validated everything by analyzing App Store search results

📊 The full breakdown (with visuals + mistakes included):
👉 https://medium.com/@aso.jenli/how-to-do-aso-in-a-language-you-dont-speak-a-step-by-step-guide-using-the-chinese-app-store-ecd68d9e1d91

💬 If you’ve ever tried to break into a foreign market without native fluency — how did you do it?
Let’s compare notes.