What is KEI and How to Calculate KEI

KEI is Keyword Effective Index and I am sure most of the people have heard about it somewhere and many of you might already be using it for their keyword research, SEO and PPC Campaigns. For those of you don’t know what is KEI, KEI is one of many methods to compare a set of keywords to find which keyword may be the easiest to rank for due to less competition but still which can give good return.

How is KEI Calculated
KEI is calculated using two factors.

1. No. of searches made by user for that keyword
2. No. of Competitor pages for that keyword

And the formula for calculating KEI is = (volume of searches per month)^2/(total no. of competitors)

so say for a keyword “best domain registrar”, if the total number of searches is 1300 per month as per google keywords tool and the number of google results are 7.7 million then the KEI for the keyword will be (1300)^2/7,700,000 = 0.219 which is very less (ideally you want to go with keywords in the range of 10 to 100) making the keyword not suitable for our SEO campaign.

KEI is just a way of comparing various keywords and is in no way can be called accurate but still its a great way to quickly see which keywords are easier to target and which are not.

KEI Tool
If you want to calculate KEI then you can use this excel sheet which I uses for my Internal SEO work. All the instructions of how to Calculate KEI is given in the sheet though its pretty easy to understand. In 1st column, fill your keywords, in 2nd column fill the volume of searches, in 3rd column fill the number of results in google and the sheet will automatically put the KEI of every keyword in 4th column. Here is how the sheet will look like -

In case of any problem or questions related to KEI tool or anything else in general, you can ask them in comments.

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Other Related posts:

1. List of Keyword Research Tools
2. Keyword Discovery is better than WordTracker