Keywords

Keywords are the most important words that appear in your content, and that describe it. There are billions of web pages, and without a way of effectively searching this content, it would be impossible for people to find what they are looking for.

For instance, a DIY shop might use the keywords ‘DIY’, ‘Paint’, ‘Tools’ to help users locate them.

As mentioned elsewhere, keywords alone won’t always help locate a page, as search engines use secret and complex algorithms to work out which pages to show in response to a user’s search.

However, not all keywords are created equal. You can advertise on many platforms, one example being Google Adwords.

Adwords allows you to specify keywords that relate to your content, and if a user searches specifically for that keyword, then your page is likely to be returned. There are many other factors (such as how much you are willing to pay for the search result to be displayed) that also affect the frequency with which your results are displayed.

Social media platforms often have their own advertising tools built in, and these work on a similar principle: specify the keywords for your content, and hopefully when people search the media platform, your pages will be returned.

Efficacy

Efficacy relates to how well something works. Spending money on any advertising campaign is only a good investment if the increase in sales/profit is greater than the outgoing for the advertising.

With that in mind, how do we know how effective our advertising is? Tools provided by the social media platforms allow you to track how many times your content has been shown from searches, what keywords were used in each search and therefore what the most popular and effective keywords are. You can also see other information about the demographics of the users (see target audience).