Hey! Welcome back to our blog series on keyword research! If you haven’t yet read our previous installments, it’s important you do so or else you’ll be missing some crucial information and advice! Click on the following links to complete your education:

Part 1: What is Keyword Research?

The Balance Between Search Volume and Competition

A keyword’s monthly search volume refers to the number of times people use it to find something they’re looking for. For example: If you’re in New York City, you could expect the monthly search volume for the key phrase “bagel shop near here” to be in the millions, if not tens of millions. So if you have a bagel shop with a website, you know this is a relevant keyword – people are searching for it.

The more searched for a keyword or phrase is, the more desirable it could potentially be. Obviously, you’re going to want to make use of keywords that are popular, commonly searched for and will directly connect web users to your website and its products and services, but this is far from the complete picture.

Choosing popular keywords comes with a challenge: just as you are trying to use these search terms to drive targeted traffic to your website, so too is every other bagel shop, patisserie, and bakery in New York City and there are a billion of them. The more popular a keyword or phrase, the higher its competition, which means that unless you are the Levi Jeans or Coca Cola of baked goods, you are going to be totally drowned out by all your competitors.

Arriving at the perfect balance between monthly search volume and keyword competition is a veritable art and this art is expressed cleanly as the KEI or Keyword Efficiency Index, which we shall be discussing next. Also – and thankfully for us mere mortals – there is an array of fantastic keyword suggestion tools that can help us become the next Picasso of keyword research. We’ll be exploring those in Section B of this guide, but for now let’s take a look at the KEI.,

Click Here to check out the next blog installment and continue learning about the fascinating and essential marketing arena of keyword research.