Is KEI Useless?

KEI Keyword Identification

[medowl]

I am using a demo version of Wordtracker in WebPosition. I am finding it almost impossible to find terms with a KEI over 1 or 2, and those are for incredibly obscure 3 word terms, with one or two searches per month. The software reccomends looking for KEIs over 10 or 15, but they don't seem to be out there.

Has the distribution of KEI scores changed as more pages are built and indexed? Has the existence of KEI tools directed the development of new pages? Or am I doing something wrong?

[JasonVanOrden]

medowl,

I am currently wrestling with using KEI as a metric as well. It seems to simplistic in my opinion. It is just a quantitative measurement of supply vs. demand and doesn't take into consideration the quality of the comepetition (on-page and off-page optimization, backlinks, etc.)

In short, I finding the usage of KEI to be lacking and frustrating in choosing my keywords. I am curious what others have to say on this subject as well.

Jason

[medowl]

I agree with you that it is limited - as all statistics can be. Low competition (according to KEI) in an area doesn't mean that an area would be profitable; maybe a new statistic that combined KEI and the average price of a key word would be useful, as would some of the proposed competitiveness measures (# of backlinks to top pages for a term, etc).

But I am also wondering if there is a marketplace effect that is going on and lowering all KEIs - competition rushing into the niches, or if the particular demo software I am using is innacurately reporting low KEI for every term I search on. I ran several hundred phrases, and most of the KEI values were much lower than the ideal. Will the expansion of the web affect KEI?

I ran a KEI a few months ago and thought I was getting higher numbers across the board. But the most important thing I got was an understanding of how people were searching. I was more technically oriented and using terms like "widget manufacturing" while many people used "build a widget" - that prompted some changes in my pages.

[JasonVanOrden]

medowl,

I was recently discouraged by low KEIs in a niche that I wanted to pursue. Then I did some analysis on my own. I looked at the top ten sites in Google for a couple of my phrases.

I looked at their on-page and off-page optimization. There were a lot of things that they were not doing that I could do to compete. In other words, it wasn't going to be as hard as the KEI was making it sounds to compete.

And yes, there was sufficient popularity for these phrases so that was not the reason for the low KEI.

I have been messing with SEOMoz dot org's Keyword Difficulty tool. They look at some of the qualitative factors that are important to consider. Of course, this is labor intensive and so that is maybe why so many people seem to default to the KEI analysis to get a quicker and easier idea of what to focus on.

Jason

[JasonVanOrden]

I just read this statement from SEO Research Labs concerning their keyword reports:

"Wordtracker's KEI score is based on the total number of matches for a given search phrase, which may dramatically overstate the amount of competition you face. We do not recommend relying on this score, we include it for the sake of comparison only."

They also calculate a KEI based on "in title" and "in anchor" results. I thought that was a good idea for assessing competition.

Jason