Law firms involved in improving the search engine visibility of their websites may have come across the term "Keyword Efficiency Index" or "KEI."
Briefly, when conducting keyword research, the goal is to find keywords that will have the greatest positive impact on your website's search engine visibility when used in site copy and meta tags. KEI is a formula that can be usesd to measure the search engine optimization impact of individual keywords by comparing the frequency with which a keyword is used in search queries to the number of competing sites using that keyword.
Mathematically, KEI is calculated as a ratio where the numerator is the popularity of the keyword (measured as the number of times a keyword has appeared in search queries recorded by a sample search database in the past 90 or so days), and the denominator is the number of competing sites that are using that keyword as an exact phrase (i.e., surrounded by quotes).
Based on this definition, the KEI for a keyword increases if its popularity increases (i.e., it is being used in more searches), and the KEI for a keyword decreases as the number of websites using that exact keyword increases (i.e., use of that exact keyword is more competitive). In short, the best keywords are those which have a high KEI, i.e., are popular in searches, but face little competition (i.e., high numerator, low denominator).
As a purely hypothetical example, if the keyphrase “New York tax lawyer” appeared in 85 searches in the sample search database in the past 100 days, and 1,670 websites use that exact phrase, the KEI for that keyword is 4.326 (i.e., 85 squared divided by 1670).
Generally, a keyword with a KEI of 10-100 is considered “good” from the standpoint of SEO, while keywords with KEI rankings of 100 or higher are considered “excellent.”
However, just because a keyword has a high KEI, doesn't mean you should add it to your website copy and tags. Plugging in keywords that have no relevance to your website in terms of content simply because they have high KEI will not impress Google (which says it only consider related keywords when ranking a site). Instead, keywords should be added to a website so they make sense in context and will make sense to readers.
Further, even though keywords with a high KEI will contribute the most to a website's search engine visibility, it doesn't mean you should omit other keywords which will also help tell Google and other search engines what the site is about. Indeed, it may be that none of the keywords your firm is interested in have a high KEI. Nevertheless, in the end, you should still write site copy that is as descriptive as possible in terms of your firm's practice areas and expertise.
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