BANS Today

Why KEI Sucks

Written by mbpage on August 15, 2008

When I started to learn search engine optimization one of the suggestions was that you should identify keywords with high KEI.  Is this something you do?  Well perhaps you should reconsider.  KEI is supposed to be a useful indicator of our potential to rank in the serps for a given keyword or keyword phrase yet it has many inherent disadvantages.

Consider this example from my research today “baby”.  Do you think you could rank no. 1 in google for the keyword “baby”?  Not likely, in fact, never in a million years if you’re a one man band yet guess what?  The KEI is 27.98.  I’ve read on many forums that a KEI of more than 1.0 makes a keyword attractive so by those standards this looks a no brainer.

Let’s delve a little deeper though.  If we look at the number of searches we see that there are 159,000 searches a month for the term baby (nice) and the competition is a paltry 901 million!!!!.

So we can see the need to exercise some common sense here.  The competition is way to fierce regardless of the KEI to target this keyword.  What we want is a high number of searches with as low a competition number as we can find.

Take a term like “cat stroller” KEI 27.59, searches 2000 per month, competition 159,000.  In theory this is the kind of term you should be targeting.  From this it is easy to conclude that we need to take all three variables into account when choosing keywords to target.  But there is another problem.

KEI varies according to the data center, keyword program and search engine you obtain the information from - massively.  I targeted a phrase recently where the competition was shown to range from just 400,000 to 7 million, the KEI varied from 0.25 to 75 and the search volume from 2300 per month to 27000 per month depending on where I pulled the data from.

This is the reason KEI sucks and why a good dose of common sense is also needed when evaluating data.  Just try to get the same results I did for the word “Baby” and you’ll see what I mean - you’ve got no chance.

Now I’d love to offer a silver bullet to solve this mess but it simply doesn’t exist.  There is no current solution to this problem and until something comes along we have to rely on common sense and gut feel.  Hardly scientific, but hey, that’s part of the challenge.

In summary then KEI is a useful indicator but no more than that.  You still need to take account of search volume and competition, take the figures with a pinch of salt and test your results.

Tags: choosing keywords, google, kei, keyword phrase, search engine optimization, SEO

Google Search Volumes

Written by mbpage on July 10, 2008

I’m sure you caught the news yesterday that Google was now making search volume information available via it’s free keyword tool. This is fantastic news and with the data seemingly verified as accurate by a number of independent experts one wonders where the future lies for the likes of nichebot and wordtracker. Not that I think they’ll go bust but they will certainly need to deliver more to their subscribers now.

I have spent a couple of hours comparing data with the above and some of the differences are marked. Mainly on the positive side I have to add with many terms having higher volume than wordtracker was estimating. The great news is that using the Google tool has been a really boon already for determining niche store categories. I think it will make all of us more money and when used in conjunction with any tool that can help analyzing competition it comes into its own. Can’t wait for a Keyword Elite update myself.

For me the area of most excitement is being able to search keywords by territory which makes it the best international keyword tool available. Think I might build my first BANS Australian store to celebrate.

Tags: google, Keyword Research, keyword tool