Keyword Effectiveness Index

[Mike]

Hi guys,

Just got a little query on this...

Obviously there will be more competition for keywords which are searched more than others, so why does the difficulty thing matter? As, if you had a really 'easy' keyword to get - then not many people would search for it.

Mike

[Chris]

No, thats backwards.

People search for what they need, they don't care if what they're searching for is an "easy" keyword or not.

Sure, there is more likely to be more competition on more popular keywords, and there is usually a direct relationship between popularity and competition. However that relationship isn't always equal.

A KEI helps you find keywords where there isn't as much competition as their should be.

[Mike]

Ah, I get it...

Thanks Chris.

[chromate]

The thing is with the KEI is that it measures the amount of competition in terms of quantity rather than quality? Would that be right?

Say, purely for example, we take the keywords "dating sites". This may indicate loads of competition (because there's so many of them). However, the quality of that competition may not be that hot and therefore the effort required to get a top search engine position may not be as hard as the KEI leads you to believe?

I'm probably way off! Let me know :)

Cheers,

Richard.

[Chris]

Thats why I use Google PR instead of results returned for my KEI.

Some terms are simply so common that they produce alot of results, looking at the PR of the top sites tells you, roughly how hard you'll have to work to get there.

[chromate]

Ahh right. That makes much more sense!

In fact, measuring KEI with "results returned" could, at a stretch, almost work inversely in one respect, I would think. Where there's more results returned for your keyword, there's bound to be proportionally more opportunities to gain context based incoming links. I guess actual magnitude of that proportion would vary according to subject matter, with some subject matters having naturally higher degrees of link exchanges etc. The proportion would also depend on the number of words in the key phrase.

If that makes any sense?... Inverse KEI. Hmmmm :)