Help > TheDowser Professional & Niche Database: ‘KEI’ Column Definition

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) was invented by a leading SEO Expert, Sumantra Roy of 1st Search Engine Rankings (http://www.1stSearchRanking.com).

KEI is a measure of how effective a keyword is for your web site.

In TheDowser Professional, KEI is computed based on Overture “Searches” data and Google “Results” data.

How to Interpret ‘KEI’ Data:

Generally, the higher the KEI, the better the keyword effectiveness.

High KEI keywords are usually easier to optimize and rank highly on major Search Engines.

The exception is when high KEI keywords also have unusually large number of competing web pages.

Consider the following example:

“web hosting” has a high KEI of 49,244.69 and may seem like an “effective” keyword to optimize for, but the truth is, you should not optimize for this keyword because it has far too many competing web pages - close to 35 million to be exact!

KEI vs R/S Ratio

KEI is a better indicator of keyword effectiveness than the popular Results-To-Searches Ratio, or R/S Ratio (used by many other keyword research software).

This is because KEI takes into account the relative scaling of both demand and supply of a keyword while the R/S Ratio does not.

Consider the following example:

“msn web hosting” has a R/S Ratio of 6.56, which is lower than the R/S Ratio of “yahoo web hosting”, which is 7.07.

So if you only compare the attractiveness of both keywords based on R/S Ratio, you’d wrongly conclude that “msn web hosting” is a more attractive keyword, because the R/S Ratio is lower (for R/S Ratio, the lower, the better). In fact, “yahoo web hosting” is a much more “attractive” keyword because of the relatively higher volume of traffic it can attract (i.e. 12,721 searches), relative to the number of competing web pages.

The higher KEI for “yahoo web hosting” of 1798.04 correctly identifies the relative attractiveness of this keyword compared with the lower KEI (225.96) keyword phrase “msn web hosting”.