That key point is KEI. Stands for Keyword Efficiency Index and is generally compiled by taking the number of searched squared and divided by the number of competing pages (that use the same keywords).
Now in my last post on finding long tail keywords, I spilled the beans on the various arcane tools I'd found to get these things figured out. And I got busy right after that in pounding through on what I had figured out.
Problem was, I'd forgotten that KEI is developed to be used on the number of searches being done daily. So when you use Adwords Keyword Tool to get Google's searches, you have to divide by the number of days in an average month (365/12, or approximately 29.67) and this gets you back to accurate KEI.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that this keeps you from making an error.
Sure, you can simply find the competition, take anything less than 50K, and then find the monthly searches above 3000, finally looking up the lower number of competing pages to get your target pages. But sometimes, you'll be thrown off. Not because those aren't good targets, but because you might be missing some great targets. Like digging right next to a gold vein and being happy with finding some gold dust - instead of big nuggets.
Our sequence is the same:
- Find relevant keywords with Google's Adword Keyword Tool.
- Use KRP or similar program to get your competition numbers of pages.
- Put these together on a single spreadsheet.
Here, though we add a column which calculates the daily searches.
And then another for KEI, using the formula above.
Now, sort these by
a) Less than 50K pages in competition - insert a row to separate
b) Then by KEI, and separate anything below 3.0 (sort from high to low)
Now you return to the point of looking up the actual SEO'd pages with Web1Marketing's Keyword Competition Estimator
If you want to see some really interesting stuff, compare the number of competing pages with their "in title" and "in link" pages, per Web1.
A far more interesting column is to use your KEI formula above on your estimated SEO pages, which really tells you your hottest keywords.
All this is to show you what pages you really should be working on.
And none of this should dissuade you from using your own common sense. Obviously, if you find a keyword with only 120 optimized pages, then it's going to be easier to take over the top spots with that keyword.
If you work sensibly, this spreadsheet tells you what your content and your inbound links should talk about. And then you can start your article marketing and commenting to get backlinks, as well as what your titles for video's and other documents should entail. It all just rolls from here.
A caveat is to work on whatever you find right now. Keywords have a habit of changing. Nearly a couple of years back, I found a nice little unknown keyword called "Reiki". And most of the sites which existed were all from the same PLR articles. So I published a simple book based on that PLR, but didn't do anything else with it. Just looked it up today and found out that there are 10 million pages competing on it, and the optimized ones are about 186,000! So the point is to work now on what you find - or just skip it. (Since Google only shows about 750, this doesn't mean you can't get to the top of those keywords. It does mean you are going to need to do a lot more work.)
This also doesn't mean you can't go back and harvest more terms. You have to realize that when you first picked out pages which had some positive adwords action, they were profitable. And if they had more than 3000 visitors a month, you could get possibly 100 visitors a day. And the rule of thumb that less than 50K competing pages gives you usually a couple hundred competing pages still holds. So the KEI might not be all that hot, but it's possible to get some traffic and top SERPs anyway.
The point is to not number-crunch this to death, but look for opportunities. And then take those by the horns and create all your content and in-bound links to really take advantage of them as soon as you can.
Cheers!
