Keyword Effectiveness Rank (KER)

Keyword research is one of the most important parts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Services like WordTracker help to determine how well your choice of keywords and phrases are doing, but reading the data can be confusing. The invention of the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) made things a little easier, but still is confusing.

The main problem with the KEI is that it assumes that the competition of a site in position 10.000.000 is just as strong as the competition of a site in the TOP10. Also it assumes that a popularity of 100.000 is twice as big as a popularity of 50.000.

I believe that the lower a site ranks, the less strong its power of competition is. For instance; the competition power of 10.000 sites is just twice as big as the competition power of 1000 sites. The same logic goes for the popularity of a phrase. You will like a word with a popularity of 100.000 only twice a much as a word with a popularity of 10.000 .

In order to get an idea of the real value a keyword has for your web site you need to compare it with something. Comparing it with the average popularity and average competition of your chozen keywords, will give a result that is understandable. The KER shows a result in percentages. A keyword with a KER of 100% is an average keyword. A keyword with a KER of 400% is a very good keyword.

The KER calculation is relative. It gives a rank based on the keywords you have chosen. In one set of keywords the KER can be high, while in an other set of keywords, the KER for the same word can be low. This makes perfect sense because a keyword can be important for one web site and be totally meaningless for another web site.

To calculate the KER of your keywords choose one of the 4 sheets available:

25 word KER

50 word KER

75 word KER

100 word KEI

At the moment just the 25 word KER page is available for testing purposes. Contact me with your opinon of the KER.

For those of you who are crazy about math, this is the formula I created to calculate the KER:

P = count of how often a keyword is searched for
C = number of sites that show up in the Search Engine Results Pages
Ap = Average P of all keywords in the list
Ac = Average C of all keywords in the list

Multiplying by 100 helps to get a natural percentage feeling and understanding of the results.