Shortlist your keywords

Having created a long and diverse list of keyphrases you need to shortlist the best ones.

Again, you can choose to perform the keyword analysis work yourself as guided below, or optionally request one of our keyword ranking reports which will include such analysis.

Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI)

KEI is a special number calculated from the search volume and competition of a keyword or keyphrase. This index indicates how good a keyword might be for bringing traffic to your site. The higher the KEI, the better.

Here is the magical formula for calculating your own KEI for keywords—let's break it down:

Search volume (Sv)

Search volume is the number of queries made each month for a keyword.

To check the search volume for each word or phrase: visit Google's Keyword Tool and enter your search term. Results will be returned with the how many global searches are done per month like follows:

The figure emphasised with a red box is the number you would record in a separate 'Searches' column of your keyphrase spreadsheet.

Competition (C)

Competition represents how many websites get returned for this keyword.

Generally, all sites that have the same keyword as you are your online competition. The fewer websites that are optimised for the same keyword, the higher and better the KEI.

The figure emphasised with a red box is the number you would record in a separate 'Competition' column of your keyphrase spreadsheet.

Relevance (R)

Relevance indicates how closely your keyword is related to what your business offers to customers.

As you probably noticed, 'R' is not part of the classical KEI formula. Normally, SEOs or business owners can quickly figure out the relevance of a keyword. An adapted KEI formula that has found some traction amongst SEO enthusiasts however is:

So if you want to use this formula (recommended), make a separate column for 'Relevance' in your keyphrase spreadsheet. Now for each keyphrase, add a relevance value based on the following:

• 1 for Excellent
• 2 for Good
• 3 for Poor

Calculating KEI

Now add another column to your spreadsheet to count the magic KEI and KEIR numbers for your keywords.

Your final spreadsheet should look something like as follows:

Select your best keywords

When selecting your keyphrases you want the highest KEI (or KEIR if you added a relevance factor).

Highlight your top 5 keywords and lets colour them red—will be your major keywords. Choose the next 30 and lets colour them orange—these are important keywords. Mark 65 or so more keywords in yellow—these are supplemental keywords.

Now you have a nice list of keyphrases, as a straight-forward SEO strategy you can target the red ones first, make use of the orange ones as alternatives, and the yellow ones as backups.

More complicated SEO strategies will incorporate considerations previously covered when exploring good keywords. Keywords that have 3-4 terms ("long-tail keyphrases") are more targeted, likely have less competition and searches, but more likely to convert. You can often get higher rankings much more quickly for long-tail keyphrases.