The Keyword Effectiveness Index

November 8th, 2007 | 11 comments

I recently heard of something called the “Keyword Effectiveness Index” or “KEI” and since it was new to me I quickly did some research. The following is what I believe to be true about “KEI.”

The Keyword Effectiveness Index is an algorithm created by Sumantra Roy, which assigns a number, described as the “KEI”, to any given keyword or keyword phrase.

The idea behind it is that keyword research services like NicheFinder and KeywordTracker can implement it and provide their clients with an easy to understand “ranking” of any given keyword. So ultimately their clients can do a quick search for any keyword and find a list of keyword phrases with high KEI’s and they now have a good idea as to how valuable that keyword is. They target those keywords and they dominate them, right? Unfortunately it’s not that easy, although it isn’t extremely difficult if you do it correctly (manually.)

In a nutshell, KEI finds long-tail keywords for the queried search term, compares the number of searches to the number of results in the search engine and assigns a number to each keyword based on the likelihood of it ranking for that phrase when considering the quantity of search results that are displayed.

While I do give credit to Mr. Roy for putting alot of hard work into something that was intended to help people, you simply can’t do proper keyword research without manual review and this is why:

You may have a search term that gets 100 searches a day, but only 8,000 search results. This would have a GREAT KEI and it would seem like an AWESOME phrase to target. But how do you know if every page in the top 10 is optimized for that phrase or not? you don’t without manual review.

In my time I’ve found loads of keyword phrases that have had a good amount of daily searches with very little competition when looking at the number of SERP’s, but at a closer glance, quickly realized that there were several pages highly optimized and very strong right there dominating the front page.

My conclusion is that KEI can be useful, in the reduction of initial keyword research, but it’s by no means a keyword research “answer.”

Just about any keyword research tool out there does something similar in one way or another and they can all save you some time, but when it comes down to it, if you truly want good keywords, you’re going to have to do a little manual reviewing on top of it all.

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11 comments

Caroline Middlebrook (32 comments.)
8th November, 2007 at 12:32 pm

Yeah this is true, I have fallen into this trap recently of going after keywords based purely on the numbers and then finding that I simpy can’t get anywhere near the top 10 search results. Here are a few things to look out for in your competitors:

1) High PageRank
2) Lots of Backlinks
3) Lots of web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Squidoo etc

A cool Firefox plugin that can help is SEO for Firefox which shows you all sorts of data such as PR & backlinks.
Josh Spaulding
8th November, 2007 at 4:30 pm

Thanks Caroline, I’ll look for that plugin. I believe this is the first I’ve heard of it.
Angela Wills (7 comments.)
8th November, 2007 at 7:40 pm

Wordtracker uses KEI and I think it’s pretty usefull and pretty accurate. Of course I then take the words it gives a high KEI for and research them individually but doing it this way allows you to quickly go through thousands of keywords and look for some gems.
I guess it also does depend on your goal with the optimization, how hard you’re trying to get ranked at the top or if you’re just looking for a large number of words you can use. I agree with you it’s definitely not the answer and a one-trick solution to doing your own research and work

Angela
Josh Spaulding
8th November, 2007 at 8:09 pm

Angela, you’re exactly right. Perhaps I should have phrased the whole post a bit differently, but I’m definitely in agreance. (did you know “agreeance” used to be a word, but is no longer? )
Angela Wills (7 comments.)
8th November, 2007 at 9:51 pm

Nope didn’t know that about agreeance . This is the first time I’ve seen your new blog design (read through RSS normally), nice new look! I’m pretty sure it’s new or else I’m a bit confused from looking at too many sites…lol

And how neat to have that little number beside each poster saying how many times they’ve commented, I like that… the competitive in people will make them want the highest, hehe.
Josh Spaulding
8th November, 2007 at 10:11 pm

Isn’t useless trivia fun lol Yep, I changed the theme several weeks ago, thanks! I came to the realization that the old theme was a bit unprofessional and it may have even resembling a scam site so I decided to give it a makeover.

The little number is provided by Lucia’s Linky Love http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/lucias-linky-love-a-dofollow-plugin-to-foil-human-comment-spammers/ and it also strips the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comments left by those who have made 3 or more comments. However, you have to use the same name and URL for it to keep track of that. Would you like me to add your last name to the last comment so you have 3 followed links?

You’ll have 3 comments, before you know it you’ll be #1
Angela Wills (7 comments.)
9th November, 2007 at 12:09 am

Sounds good re: the three links! I’ve got too many emails I forgot which one I had used (in the rss reader).
Josh Spaulding
9th November, 2007 at 1:34 am

No problem Angela, I just made your comments match so your links are now followed. Thanks for contributing.
Alex Liu (4 comments.)
19th November, 2007 at 6:22 am

Dear Josh,

I’m totally addicted to your blog. I didn’t follow you exactly when I choose keywords. But I do manually review sites on the top 10. I check their backlinks, page ranks, and their keyword density.

Thank you again Josh!
Internet Junkie (10 comments.)
14th February, 2008 at 8:53 pm

I don’t focus too much on keywords research but I will have to give it a try if I want to get off my 20 daily visitors a day!
Bob McClain (9 comments.)
18th December, 2008 at 8:39 pm

Google was right. Blog comments are even more valuable than blogs. I’ve never used KEI because I’ve seen so many screwy results from it.

i’m a copywriter specializing in optimized copy for websites. That means I work with a lot of SEO and Internet Marketing firms. One benefit is I get to see how they all operate and how well they perform.

The outfits that rely too much on KEI perform the worst for the reasons given above. The best performers do everything manually.

They monitor the competitor’s websites, they do the keyword research, they work with the client to develop the list, and then choose the keywords based on which ones have the best chance to get good SERPS and which mones really target the client’s products or services.

I just wrote a post called, “There’s No Such Thing As Writer’s Block.” Essentially, it says that if you’ve done your research and have become an expert in your client’s subject, you should have no problem writing. SEO is the same thing.