Digital Marketing Jargon Buster

As a marketer, it’s sometimes easy to forget that not everyone knows what we’re talking about when we start throwing acronyms and digital jargon around. We might as well be speaking another language! The marketing world doesn’t need to be difficult to understand and we want to collaborate with our clients to help them navigate the sometimes jargonised world of SEO and digital marketing. 

Now, let’s cut through all the confusion and provide you with our list of the most misunderstood digital marketing terms…

Above The Fold/ Below The Fold

With regards to web design, ‘above the fold’ refers to the part of the web page that is visible as soon as the page loads. If you need to scroll in order to see the content then it is not ‘above the fold’, it is ‘below the fold’.

App Store Optimisation (ASO)

App Store Optimisation is the process of improving the visibility of your mobile app within a mobile app store, such as the Apple App Store and Google Play. ASO tactics include keyword optimisation and backlink acquisition.

Backlink/ Link acquisition

A backlink is a link from one website to another. Backlinks are a very important Google ranking signal (See Ranking) because a link from one website to another indicates trust and noteworthiness.

Banner ad

A banner ad refers to the embedded rectangular display across the top, bottom or side of a website. Banner ads consist of an image or multimedia object; they can be static or animated. The purpose of banner ads is to direct traffic from the host website to the advertiser’s website.

Canonical

A canonical, or canonical tag, shows the master source of content. It is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the original copy of a page.

Citation Flow

Citation flow is a number used for predicting how influential a URL might be based on the quantity of links pointing to that site.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Conversion Rate Optimisation, also known as Conversion Optimisation or CRO, refers to the method used to increase the number of website visitors that actually convert into customers or complete any desired action on a webpage e.g. sign up to a mailing list.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Cost Per Acquisition is a metric that is used to measure the total cost to acquire one paying customer on a campaign.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Cost Per Click, commonly known as CPC, refers to the price you pay for each time a user clicks on your advert, in your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing campaigns.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM)

 Cost Per Thousand (CPM), also known as cost per mille (meaning one thousand in Latin), is a marketing term referring to the price of 1000 advertisement impressions on one webpage. (See Impression)

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-Through Rate refers to the percentage of users who click on a specific link on a webpage, email or advertisement.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Most commonly known as CRM, Customer Relationship Management refers to software used to manage interactions with potential and existing customers. A CRM system is a useful tool for businesses to help build customer relationships and improve customer service.

Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that indicates how authorative a website is and how well it will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). This score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater ability to rank. Backlinks are a key determinant of DA, with a strong backlink profile often contributing to a high DA score.

E-A-T

E-A-T stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Google places high importance on these three qualities and favours web content that displays a high level of expertise, authority and trustworthiness.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen refers to content that is always relevant and does not become dated. Evergreen content is necessary in order to be found online by search engines and rank for keywords. (See Ranking)

Featured Snippet

Featured Snippets are a format intended to provide users with a concise answer to their search query on the search results page, without the need to click through to a specific web page. Featured snippets are not to be confused with rich snippets. (See Rich Snippet)

Flywheel

The Flywheel, or ‘the flywheel effect’, refers to a strategic business approach that focuses on generating momentum in order to generate leads and raise brand awareness. The Flywheel is split into three stages: attract, engage and delight. The ‘attract’ stage focuses on earning the attention of potential customers and teaching them about your brand e.g. with fantastic content. The ‘engage’ stage encourages potential leads to engage with your brand and build relationships. The ‘delight’ stage focuses on leads and existing customers, keeping them engaged and building brand loyalty.

Googlebot

Googlebot is Google’s official web crawler software which collects documents from the web to build an index for Google’s search engine. (See Web Crawler)

Impressions

Impressions are when an online ad or any other form of digital media is seen on a user’s screen. Impressions are not action-based and defined solely on the user potentially seeing the advertisement or media.

Indexing

Indexing refers to how search engines store and organise the content found during the crawling process. (See GoogleBot & Web Crawler) Once a page is in the search engine’s index, it is ready to be displayed as a result to relevant search queries.

Long-tail

Long tail keywords are the few keywords which are very specific to your product or service. If a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, it is likely they know exactly what they intend to buy. These searches are more likely to result in sales than generic searches.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

A Marketing Qualified Lead, also known as a MQL, is a lead with apparent interest in a brand and is more likely to convert and become a customer than other leads.

Panda

Panda refers to Google’s Panda update. It’s a search filter introduced in February 2011 which penalises sites with poor quality content and excludes them from ranking in Google’s top search results.

Position Zero

Position Zero refers to the first organic search result that appears in Google, above organic SEO listings. Position Zero results directly answer the search query and can be in list, bullet-point or paragraph form.

Progressive Web App

A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web application that delivers an app-like experience, including instant loading, an immersive user experience and quick responses to user interactions.

RankBrain

RankBrain is an element of Google’s core algorithm which uses machine learning to determine the most relevant result to search query. It is like Google asking itself ‘what is the true intent of this search?’ and showing them a result accordingly.

Ranking

In SEO, ranking refers to your website’s position on the search engine results pages. (see SERP)

Referring Domain

A Referring Domain is the website from which a website or page has a backlink from. For instance, if a new site gains a backlink from the Daily Mail, it has one referring domain. If a web page has backlinks from the Daily Mail and The Sun, then it has two referring domains.

Rich Snippet

Rich Snippets benefit search engines, users and websites if their page earns the rich snippets. Rich snippets enable search engines to display more relevant results, which makes it easier for users to find the most relevant result for their search query relevance of results in the SERPs. Sites with a rich snippet can benefit from higher click-through rates or reduced bounce rates as users know whether the content is relevant prior to clicking through; it is an enhanced organic search result.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file which tells bots (see Google Bot) how to crawl your site. Essentially, it is the instructions for the Googlebot/crawler on how to crawl & index pages on websites.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

A Sales Qualified Lead, commonly known as an SQL, is a prospective customer that has engaged or interacted with your marketing material and is deemed by your marketing team as ready for the next stage in the sales process. An SQL is not to be confused with an MQL (See MQL). The main difference is the level of engagement e.g. an SQL may have filled out a contact form or exchanged their email in exchange for a content asset.

Schema markup

Schema markup or ‘structured date’ is code that you apply your website to help the search engines display more informative results in the SERPs for users. It allows you to tag your content more specifically, e.g. event, product, recipe, video so Google can better understand what it is and pull through relevant data in the SERP.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and refers to the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by boosting the visibility of website in the SERPs It encompasses a range of different tactics to optimise a website’s performance for Google’s algorithm to improve rankings and generate higher volumes of traffic.

SERP

SERP refers to the ‘search engine results page’ aka web pages displayed to users when they search for something online using a search engine, like Google.

Trust Flow

Trust Flow refers to the quality of the links pointing to a site, as trustworthy sites tend to link to equally trustworthy sites. For example, a link to your website from a site such as the BBC sends a positive trust signal to Google, and can help to boost your overall trust flow.

Visibility

Visibility refers to search visibility, which is how a web page is displayed in SERPs (see SERPs). Well-optimised and hyper-relevant content will be visible at the top of organic search results, whereas poor quality, or less informative content will be less visible content in the SERPs, perhaps ranking on page two or after.

Web Crawler

A web crawler, also known as a spider or crawler, is a program that browses the web with the purpose of indexing content for search engines. Each crawler has a ‘crawl budget’ per website, which means it’s best practice to ensure that your priority pages are linked to from the top navigation, especially if you have a large site with hundreds of pages.