One of the first steps in creating a successful website is discovering a list of effective keywords. There are many ways to measure the effectiveness of keywords, and in this series will explore some of those ways.
One way is to find how many searches per month there are for each keyword on your list, and sort the keywords so that those with the most searches per month are on top.
Then step down the list, and for each keyword, type it into a search engine like Google and learn how many competing websites there are for that keyword. While doing that, also obtain the page rank for websites that are in the top 10 search results. When you reach keywords where you think your new website can rank in the top 10, then you know which keywords to use.
However this process is a lot of manual work, and it can be made much easier if done automatically. Let us assume that the more websites that compete for a keyword, the better quality the best 10 of those websites will be. For example, if a keyword has 1,000,000 websites competing for it, the best 10 of those will likely be better than the best 10 of a keyword with only 100 competing websites. So for our first attempt, we can look only at the number of websites that have been optimized for that keyword. Since one of the first optimization steps is to put the keyword in the title of the page, we can get an idea of the number of competing websites by finding the number of websites with that keyword in the title.
By looking at these two numbers, the number of searches per month for this keyword (call this S), and the number search results with this keyword in the title (call this R), we can develop a measure for the most effective keywords. Keywords with a high S are better than those with a low S, and keywords with a low R are better than keywords with a high R. Putting these together, we can use the formula R/S, which means the number of websites with the keyword in the title and divided by the number of searches per month for that keyword. In this formula, keywords with low numbers are better, since they have high searches per month and a low number of competing websites.
Here is an example of the R/S formula at work in 3DMarketVision. To make the example clearer, I have removed all the columns except PhSMP (Phrase Match Searches Per Month), Sites (number of websites whose titles contain the keywords) and the R/S column. The actual formula used by 3DMarketVision is Sites/(PhSPM / 30) and the keywords are sorted by the R/S column. The best keyword “lucchese boots” has 18,100 searches per month and there are only 1,100 websites optimized for it. The worst keyword is “boots western” with 6,600 searches per month and 20,200 competing websites.
The advantages of the R/S formula are that it uses the most important factors that affect the success of the keyword, and that it is simple to compute and then sort all keywords from low to high R/S to look for the most effective keywords.
However there are also a few problems using this measure. For instance, this measure does not take into account the volume of searches for a keyword. A keyword that has 100 searches per month and has 50 sites optimized for it ranks just as well as a keyword with 10,000 searches per month that has 5000 sites optimized for it. I think you would agree that it’s much more cost-effective to go after a market with 10,000 searches per month than one with 100 searches, assuming you can compete in the bigger market.
Another problem with this measure is that it doesn’t take into account the quality of the competing sites. After choosing our initial keywords we still need to check that the top 10 competing websites are websites that we can compete with. If their page rank or their inbound links are too high for us to compete with, then we need to find another set of keywords with less competition.
A better measure than R/S would also take the volume of the searches per month into account and give more weight to those keywords that have more searches per month. This is exactly the idea behind the keyword efficiency Index or KEI measure of keyword efficiency. We’ll talk more about KEI in the next part of our series.
