Jan 16

Determining of keyword effectiveness

Business and e-commerce, Online promotion and SEO KEI, keywords, optimization, seo

Choosing of the most effective and appropriate keywords and keyphrases is basic part of search engine marketing campaign, whether it is pay-per-click or search engine optimization.

First of all keywords might be relevant to the theme of page and there shouldn’t be too much of them.
Once you’ve determine all possible variants of keywords, you need to choose the most effective.

One of convinient methods of measurement of keywords competitiveness is comparing of their KEI - keyword effectiveness index. This method was first introduced by Sumantra Roi and now is used by some popular tools of keywords researching, such as Wordtracker and other. The formula of KEI is:

KEI = (P²/C), where KEI is the square of the popularity P of the keyword for 2 last month divided by its competitiveness C (the number of sites which search engine displays when you search for that keyword using exact match search).

Actually, there are some other variants of KEI formula:

• KEI = (P²*1000/C): P - popularity; C - number of competing sites in search engine for that keyphrase

• KEI = (P²/S): P - popularity; S - number of Google matches for “allintitle” for that keyphrase

• in Wordtracker KEI is a logarithmic scale from 1 up to 10. It is similar in principal to the Richter Scale, commonly used to measure earthquakes =)

• Instead of using 2 in KEI = (P²/C) formula, you can use any power of P greater than 1: the higher is the power of P in the formula, the higher will be the emphasis on popularity. We choose the 2nd power as a good balance between both popularity and competitiveness

So, how do we use KEI tool in our practice? First, we determine a target region for optimizing site and choose some most popular search engines for that region and target visitors. Then we calculate KEIs for each of those search engines and count an average KEI for each keyword. Researches for several search resources are necessary to get more accurate results.

There is a common rule for interpreting KEI results:

• less than 10 considered as poor keywords

• keywords above 10 - good keywords

• above 100 are excellent and should be used in your campaign

But there is always some “but”. In case of received KEI results, it is only a basic measurement, and you can also check the other important criteria such as getting Google Page Rank, the number of competing PPC ads on Google or Yahoo. There can be many reasons why KEI are showing you something unexpected: the most search engines don’t give the accurate number of pages in their index, the number of searchers isn’t an accurate number - in many times keywords popularity is inflated by the use of automated tools, etc.

So, you have to ask yourself: does this keyword have sense for my site and will it attract more users and convert them into clients. If your common sense tells you “yes” - don’t pay attention to possibly low KEI and use that keyword.

Make happy choice!