American Marketing Association Professional Certified Marketer (PCM) Content Marketing Practice Exam

What term refers to the strategic use of keywords to improve search engine ranking?

1. Keyword stuffing

2. Keyword strategy

3. Search engine optimization

4. Content curation

The correct answer is: Search engine optimization

The term that refers to the strategic use of keywords to improve search engine ranking is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO encompasses a variety of practices aimed at enhancing a website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). This includes the integration of relevant keywords into content, optimizing metadata, ensuring a mobile-friendly site, improving site speed, and earning backlinks, among other techniques. SEO is critical because search engines, like Google, use complex algorithms to rank sites based on their relevance to search queries. By strategically employing keywords throughout their content, marketers help search engines understand the context and relevance of their pages, which can lead to higher positions in search results. This process is comprehensive and involves not just the use of keywords but also understanding how search engines evaluate content quality, user experience, and website authority. While other terms, such as keyword strategy or keyword stuffing, are associated with keywords, they do not fully capture the broader, strategic approach reflected by SEO. Keyword stuffing, for instance, refers to the outdated practice of overloading content with keywords to manipulate rankings, which can actually lead to penalties by search engines. Content curation relates more to the gathering and sharing of existing content rather than optimizing one's own content for search engine ranking.