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When it comes to having cutesy anagrams, buzzwords, and weird anachronisms, digital marketing has most other industries beat. As someone that’s interested in hiring an agency (or freelancer; not-so shameless plug) to do some digital marketing work, you might find it quite easy to be put off by all the jargon and word salad. What actually is SEO? What do all these metrics mean exactly?
With my digital marketing jargon buster, you needn’t worry any longer! This guide will take you through some of the most commonly used words and phrases by digital marketers and explain how they apply to what you are looking to accomplish with your online marketing activities.
General Digital Marketing Terms
Whilst I am an SEO specialist, digital marketing is an industry that requires all of the different channels to work together as a coherent force in order to gain results. By working together, there is crossover in the key terms that are used by marketers, and it’s always helpful to have a broad understanding of some of the more general marketing terms that people in the industry are using. Common words and phrases include:
Affiliate Marketing
This is a marketing channel that lets you promote your products or services on another website, usually with the cost of commission for every product sold, etc.
Backend
The backend of a website describes the parts that are hidden from visitors. This includes things like the information structure, any applications, and the CMS.
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is a metric that outlines the average number of site visitors that leave a page without completing any further actions. These actions can include clicking another link on the page, buying a product, and more.
Channels
This describes the different traffic sources that can be seen for your website, the most common of which include organic (website visitors coming from search results), paid (website visitors coming from ads), and referral (website visitors coming from other websites).
CMS
A CMS, or Content Management System, is a backend web tool that is used to easily manage a website’s content.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is focused on the creation and distribution of content to specific audiences. This can include anything from blogs, to videos, to infographics and much more.
Conversions & Conversion Rate
A conversion can also be known as a goal completion, and is simply what you track as success on your website. Goals often include sales, form submissions and signups. The conversion rate is the metric describing the percentage of visitors who completed these goals vs those who didn’t.
CPC
CPC stands for cost-per-click. This is a metric mostly seen in marketing channels that use paid ads, including PPC (pay-per-click) advertising and Paid Social advertising. It is used to determine how much the advertiser has had to pay for each successful click from an ad.
CTA
CTA stands for Call to Action; a call to action describes any means through which a user completes an action on your website. CTAs often take the form of a clickable button, link, or form submission- usually to generate a type of lead or conversion.
CTR
CTR stands for click-through rate, which is a metric used by marketers to show the percentage of users who initially “clicked-through” an ad or link.
Email Marketing
This is a channel of digital marketing that involves using targeted email campaigns to advertise to specific lists of people. Common uses of email marketing include promoting a new product, advertising a sale, or sending out newsletters to subscribers.
Front End
The front end of a website contains everything that a site visitor can see, including images and content. The front end of your website is what visitors will use to access all your content.
HTML
HTML, or Hypertext Mark-up Language, is the standard mark-up language used for displaying pages in a web browser. The mark-up tells search engines how to display the words and images of a page.
Impressions
Impressions are a metric used to describe how many times an ad was shown on a webpage. A common misconception is that this tells you how many people viewed the ad- but this isn’t necessarily true. The metric is most helpful in outlining the overall reach an ad had.
Landing Page
A landing page is a dedicated page on your website that people are sent to after completing an action from an external link, such as clicking an ad. For example, the landing page of an ad promoting a new product will be the page selling that same product on your website.
Mobile & Desktop
In the context of digital marketing, mobile and desktop serve as a user metric. For example, you can see how many impressions an ad made on mobile users vs desktop users. Websites can also be built in specific ways for mobile and desktop users, accounting for things like differences in screen size and visibility.
PPC
PPC stands for pay-per-click advertising, and is a channel of marketing through which an advertiser pays for ads to be shown to users; most commonly in Google results pages.
ROI
ROI stands for return on investment, and is a performance metric that describes the profit of an action in relation to its cost.
SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and is a channel of marketing through which the marketer attempts to organically improve a website’s Google ranking, reach, and performance by optimising content, technical performance, and more.
Sessions
Sessions are what we call any website visit within your chosen date range; a single session is the period of time during which a user is actively engaging with your site.
Web Design
The process of planning out, coding and creating a website, taking into consideration factors like the overall look, structure, and functionality. Web designers often have a lot of overlap with SEO specialists, as similar factors come into play for both in achieving their goals.
SEO Terms
The deeper you delve into any one marketing channel, the more annoying terms and acronyms you’ll find! SEO is no different, and is a field of marketing that concerns website performance, and how your website interacts with search engines to reach as many people as possible. The most SEO common words and phrases you’ll need to be aware of include:
Anchor Text
Anchor text is simply the text of a link; this text needs to properly convey the context of the page the link is taking you to. For example, a link to my contact page should be worded with anchor text that describes where you’re going. See what I did there?
Black Hat SEO
Blackhat SEO is an admittedly dramatic name given to underhanded SEO tactics. A common example would be to add hidden text to a page that’s riddled with keywords. This text has no value to the user and is designed to trick web crawlers into thinking the page is better optimised than it actually is.
Backlinks
Backlinks are external links from another website to your own; the better quality backlinks you have, the higher your domain authority will be.A link from the BBC going to your website is more valuable than one from a dodgy forum, for example.
Crawling
When search engines find and return results to users after the user inputs a search term, this process is known as crawling.
Domain Authority
A metric provided by Moz, a popular SEO resource and authority. It serves as a good, general barometer of your website’s value with a score out of 100, taking into account areas such as your backlinks, overall website size and technical health.
Duplicate Content
Simply refers to any content that appears more than once on the web. Your content should always be unique to your website, but if it isn’t then search engines may flag your duplicate content and penalise you for it.
Featured Snippets
If you were to Google something like “when is Black Friday 2021”, you will see a big answer box at the top of the page giving you a clear answer. This answer box is known as a featured snippet, and may appear in SERPs on occasion when an answer can be quickly provided to a user’s query.
Header Tags
Header Tags are used to properly structure the content on a page; a H1 tag is the page title, and then H2s and H3s are used in descending order to categorise content into distinct sections. On this blog, for example, each term is titled with a H3, and will be sitting under a broader, H2 category (e.g. “SEO Terms”). You can easily check header tags on any page by highlighting the title, right clicking with your mouse and selecting “inspect”.
Indexing
After a search engine has crawled web pages, it completes a process known as indexing. This process results in the search engine organising the most relevant results for a user’s query from top to bottom. The goal in SEO is to have your pages be indexed and then rankin as high up the results page as possible for any relevant search terms.
Meta Description
Meta Descriptions are HTML elements that describe the contents of a page. They serve as a great opportunity to optimise your page through keywords, and when written well can contribute towards a user clicking into your website. Correctly optimised meta descriptions have a character length of 155 or under.
Meta Title
A Meta Title is another optimised HTML element- that instead serves as the page title for search engines. They should describe the contents of a page, without exceeding the character length of 60. Below you can see what the meta title and description of a page looks like in Google.
On-Page Optimisation
The art of optimising a website’s content, layout, and structure to make them more valuable and rank higher in search engines for keywords. Best practices for on-page optimisation include:
Optimising content for keywords with a high search volume.
Optimising metadata for keywords with a high search volume.
Increasing the number of internal links from pages of your site to other pages.
Improving the page structure of your website.
Organic Listings
In a search engine’s results page, organic listings are the results that sit underneath paid positions. The ultimate goal of SEO is to have your website ranking as highly as possible in these search engine results pages.
Rankings
Rankings in SEO refer to which position in a search engine results page your page appears. If your page is ranked No1 for a search term, it will appear at the very top. The higher your website ranks on average, the higher its visibility and the more people are seeing your website, the more conversions you will get.
Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are any normal results in a search engine results page that have additional info or visuals. They are great to have as they are more attention-grabbing and take up more space in the results page, meaning (theoretically) your result is more likely to be clicked than another.
Robots.txt Files
These are files added to a website that tell search engines which parts of your website they should and shouldn't crawl. It can be useful to tell Google not to crawl certain pages of your site that aren’t important, such as form completion confirmation pages.
Schema Mark-up
Schema is fairly complicated, but can basically be summarised as additional code you add to pages to provide more information for website crawlers on what that page is and does. Using Schema can have lots of benefits, such as improving rankings and bringing you rich snippets.
Search Terms / Keywords
Search terms, or keywords, are what we call the words and phrases most used by web users in search engines. The higher a term is used, the higher the search volume it will have.
Search Volume
The search volume of a keyword is how often it is entered into a search engine by a user. The higher the search volume of a keyword, the more valuable it is. If your website is able to rank highly for a high-value keyword, it will have more visibility than a website ranking for a lower volume search term.
SERP
A SERP is a search engine results page; this is quite simply what you’ll see when entering a query into a search engine- or “Googling” something. That long list of links and results is known as a SERP.
Technical SEO
This is an area of SEO that considers technical aspects of a website such as site speed, the user experience (UX), page redirects and much more. You can learn more about the topic in my article, unlock your website's potential with technical SEO audits.
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