KEI Measurement Revisited

We had a few questions sent to us by one of our users regarding TLKT and the KEI function. Some of these questions came from a video that Kelley made on KEI and Ratio and using TLKT for affiliate marketing .

Question 1: The KEI measurement on The Last Keyword Tool Application from Theme Zoom. Can you help me understand anything about this?

Kelley Reynolds is the developer and in charge of technical implementation of the Theme Zoom Software Suite. He decided to write about KEI in order to help people understand more about it it. (KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index).

KEI is defined as the following:

1) The KEI for a keyword should increase if its popularity increases.

2) The KEI for a keyword should decrease if it becomes more competitive.

3) If a keyword becomes more popular and more competitive at the same time such that the ratio between its popularity and competitiveness remains the same, its KEI should increase.

KEI isn’t a formula, it’s merely a concept that incorporates those three rules, and they can be based off of anything. Most people determine the popularity by the number of clicks (or searches or both) and competitiveness as the number of competing pages, or results in Google (or Yahoo or Bing or some combination of them). KEI is merely some ratio of the two, typically popularity squared over competitiveness, but it can be tuned up or down however the SEO requires it to be. Depending on the market you are in (cars or paintbrushes or mortgages) and the locale you are in (english, french canadian, australian), the KEI numbers will move up and down. If you come up with a formula in French Canada where the KEI of something is ‘40′ and that is ‘good’, it does not necessarily mean that ‘40′ in the German market means the same thing. The biggest misconception about KEI is that it is Just One Formula™ and that it’s values are absolute … it’s just a concept that has any number of different formulas, and the numbers from one method to another do not mean the same thing … that’s why it’s better to be educated about what KEI *is* rather than be told to find things with a certain *number*.

Question 2: The KEI Measurement. Why is your equation using clicks, and not searches?

As explained above, they are both valid ways to determine KEI .. one defines popularity as clicks on advertisements, the other defines popularity as searches in a search engine. HINT: What would be an interesting column would be to compare the difference between the two to know if you are wasting organic resources on something that isn’t popular with searches, or wasting advertising dollars on something that people only search for and don’t use advertisements

Question 3: Hey, about the KEI measurement: Why is your example video by Kelley showing RATIO? Did he mean to put KEI? Also, what is the significance of multiplying by 5882…can you explain this concept further? ( Can I just select DEFAULT KEI every time and then put * 5000? )

As KEI is just a ratio of two numbers, sometimes those numbers are very big … in the millions or billions. In some cases (like in the video), that can either make the KEI results very large or very small. The only reason I multiply by a number in the middle is to make it visually easier to compare, it doesn’t functionally change the order/relation of the results. If column numbers are tiny or huge, divide by a number in the middle to scale them down or up.