I need help understanding KEI

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TaloN39

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I understand that KEI is not the end all beat all, but I believe it is useful, so I want to understand it.
I have searched Google and read the explanations of KEI, but I'm not sure I understand how KEI is calculated.
I understand that KEI formula's must satisfy the 3 axioms. From what I understand the standard formula to calculate KEI is:
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]KEI = (P^2/C),
or [/FONT][/FONT]KEI = (P^2/C)*1000
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] i.e. KEI is the square of the popularity of the keyword and divided by its competitiveness (times 1000?).
Where P is the number of searches on a search engine for a keyword phrase, while C is the number of search results for[/FONT][/FONT] for that exact phrase.

I am not sure I understand [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]KEI = (P^2/C). For one, I'm not sure what the carrot means. I think it means P Squared (or P X P) is then divided by C, and sometimes the result is multiplied by 1000.
For Example:
The keyphrase "santa elf bowling" supposedly gets 1,520 search per day on google.
Google shows 4,550 results for the phrase "santa elf bowling".
So the KEI would be
[/FONT][/FONT]
Code: 
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=2][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=2]1,520 * 1,520 = 2,310,400
2,310,400 / 4,550 = 508ish
So the KEI = 508?[/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT]
Is that right? If not could someone explain it with an example?
Every time I try to apply this formula to the KEI results I see in keyword research tool, my answer differs wildly from the one in the tool.
 


Thanks SuperDave2U, but I had already read that article (among others), which is what prompted my questions about [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]KEI = (P^2/C). I must not understand this formula, because when I calculate it, it never even comes close to the number I see in keyword research tools. I really hope someone can explain the math, and give an example. If I understand how the formula's used, I can use whatever data to I want to calculate it.
Maybe there is better way to ask this question.
Please calculate the KEI of the following keyword data. Please show your math:

Keyword 1
[/FONT][/FONT]
  • [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Popularity (Searches per month) = 23450[/FONT][/FONT]
  • Competition (Search engine results) = 77385
  • KEI= ?
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Keyword 2
[/FONT][/FONT]
  • Popularity (Search per month) = 86462
  • Competition (Search engine results) = 35679
  • KEI = ?
I will be interesting to see if everyone comes up with the same answer.
 
Ok here's a more realistic one:

Keyword 3

  • Popularity (Searches per month) = 1520
  • Competition (Search engine results) = 4550
  • KEI = ?
 
KEI is a waste of time IMHO. Use the search function to find ImageAndWords tutorial (very helpful's) on keyword research. I don't know why I am letting the cat out of the bag but here goes:
1. Go to advanced features in google and check "100 searches per page"
2. Type in any keyword you can think of - the most competitive term, mortgages, buy viagra, free sex what the hell ever
3. go to the last page - you will see an exact number there in the hundreds
4. That's the real competition - what google considers the "qualified least imperfect"

It makes better sense to look at silo competition - allinurl:"x" those are the folks optimizing professionally for that. Alternatively, anything under 800 (which most things are) when you start getting the redundant/imperfect results is pretty good

good luck....
 
One more thing. The biggest lesson I ever got when it comes to keyword research was free and actually now that I know it's value, it is easily more in the tends of thousands -understand the major difference between KEYWORD RESEARCH and MARKET RESEARCH.

Most people when they are looking for keywords look at what the keyword competition will be (your exercise above will enlighten you on that), and search volume. The more thoughtful will look at what they think will convert. We've already established how void competition is so look at what really matters:
1. What does the market say, i.e. CPC - anything above $2CPC usually means it is a profitable keywords (that's why smart SEO-ers use PPC to find profitable keywords THEN build their conten around that...the best can tie up both the paid and natural search; since they are both starting to be in bed with each other, this makes sense anyway....)
2. Market Share - what percentage of that keyword is responsible for X% of the traffic for that niche....it may be better to rank for a long tail of a highly traffic term than some obscure term that won't take you anywhere; check out compete.com for this, you can get the first few results for free
3. Co -occurrence....there's a lot to this but basically if you are really motivated you can google it. Also check out adlab for this. to make a long story short, in each niche, there are a handful of words that your "ideal demographic" uses to buy, fill out forms (leads), etc. Get to know what those words are and use them as often as possible as as modifiers to your core keywords - this is the difference between market research and keyword research; keyword research is about data, market research is about intentions of buyers, strategy, etc
If you are just starting out, stick to something around 500K-800k "competing" pages for fast traffic. 1m or more = market segment, 10m = market category (you can just google keyword research and market segmentation for this)


3. Searches of main term + of its synonyms- If you are using a free tool like wordtrack you'd be surprised that one nicely targeted article/page that only gets "2 searches a day" can pull in hundreds of terms if you use synonyms - this tool is helpful Google synonym Search Tool

good luck like I said....
 
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