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KEI Analysis


Play 'Analyzing Keywords' video tutorial!Play 'Analyzing Keywords' video tutorial!

It can be quite easy to rank in the top 10 results for some search terms, but it can be very difficult for others. For this reason, the most popular search terms may not be the best terms to target.

To help you identify the best keywords, we provide a Keyword Analysis tool. Simply click the ANALYZE button, to view a range of statistics for each search term.

Example:

KEI Analysis report

From the above example, you can see that "hotel sydney" is a popular search term, but competes with 688,000 other web pages (on Google) that use this exact match phrase. Out of those 688,000 only 10 can be on the all important, first page of search results.

Now if you look at the phrase "sydney hotel", which has a half the number of competing web pages on Google (365,000) and is almost 4 times as popular, in terms of searches. From this we can deduct that trying to achieve top 10 rankings will be difficult for both terms, but only one of the terms is more likely to generate an increase in traffic.

The phrase "rydges hotel sydney" has only 648 competing web pages, making it much easier to achieve a top 10 ranking with term. The down side is that even if you do generate a top ranking for this phrase, it is not as popular in terms of searches, therefore will not generate as much search traffic as a top ranking for "sydney hotel".

The very best keywords have high popularity (as in a large number of searches), but are not very competitive, that is they do not appear on a large number of pages. This relationship is represented by the Keyword Effectiveness Indicator, or KEI. KEI is a logarithmic scale that aims to quantify the effectiveness of any search term. The KEI value is 0 to 10. It is similar in principal to the Richter Scale, commonly used to measure earthquakes, and this is a good way to think about the figures.

When using KEI, keep in mind that KEI is only a basic measurement, whereas tools such as SEO Toolkit also check the other more important criteria, such as intitle, inanchor, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, PI Rank and the number of competing PPC ads on both Google and Yahoo.

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