Our recent list of digital agency terms and acronyms you should know will help you stay informed during your project. Once your site is live and ready to be promoted, our Digital Marketing Services (DMS) team comes in. We are concerned with keeping site performance high, increasing visibility in organic search, and driving web traffic and leads through paid strategies. Here are some of the terms you’ll probably hear from our DMS team.

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Terms to know when it comes to search

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is the process of creating web pages and content in a format that search engines, like Google, will want to rank higher in search results. This can be done by including relevant keywords and phrases throughout your site along with a regular cadence of well-written content.

Technical SEO: Technical SEO refers to the back end of your website and the way it’s coded. Following best practices in technical SEO optimizes your webpage for search engine crawling and indexing, which helps improve the visibility of your site in search.

On-Site SEO: Any changes you make on the web page to the HTML or to the content are considered on-site SEO.

Off-Site SEO: Off-site SEO includes a variety of external forces that could be affecting your SEO. This includes backlinks, aka inbound links, where other sites link back to your content from their blog posts or landing pages.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP): These are the pages that appear when you type a search query into a search engine, such as Google or Bing.

Indexed pages: These are the pages on your website that can be crawled by the search engines and can show up in SERP.

Meta description: These are small snippets of characters or tags in HTML that tell the search engines what the content on the page is about. These descriptions can also show up in SERP.

Title tags: These are pieces of HTML that tell the search engines what the title of the page is. They appear as clickable headlines in SERP. These are often also referred to as page titles.

Page rank: This is the value that a search engine puts on a page. It takes into account the importance, popularity, and authoritativeness of the webpage. This determines the order that pages appear in SERP.

Sitemap: This file includes information about the pages, videos, and other features of your site, as well as the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.

Inbound link: An inbound link is a hyperlink from another website back to your website. The more high-quality links you receive the better your site will perform.

Link building: Link building is the process of gaining inbound links for the purpose of increasing your site’s domain authority and page rankings.

Outbound link: Outbound links live on your website and link or direct to another website.

Do-follow: Do-follow links are HTML attributes that allow search engines to follow the link from one webpage to the next. They assist in page ranking.

No-follow: A no-follow link is a tag that tells search engines not to count this link. They don’t help the page increase its SERP ranking.

In the know when it comes to Pay-Per-Click

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): This is when businesses bid on keywords and pay for their advertisements to appear on SERP. These ads are known as PPC ads, and can be text-based or visual ads. Both SEO and SEM are fundamental parts of online marketing strategy.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC): PPC marketing is when websites have their page appear at the top of the search results and pay a fee every time one of their ads is clicked. This is essentially “buying” visits to your site, rather than hoping for visits via organic traffic.

Budget/Spend: Your budget is what is allocated for given time period, and the spend is how much you have used so far.

Search campaign: This is when a business pays to have their advertisements in search engine results. They pay a fee every time one of their ads is clicked.

Display campaign: This type of marketing relies on banner ads, images, video, and other rich media to communicate an advertisement.

Conversion Landing Page (CLP): This is a stand-alone web page built strategically to increase conversions. These pages are typically made specifically for advertising or marketing campaigns.

Keywords: A word or phrase that has significant importance to your products or services. Keywords are used in both paid and organic strategies.

Match types: Setting match types for keywords tells the search engine what queries your ads should appear for. There are four match types - exact match, phrase match, broad match modifier, and broad match. Each one has a corresponding symbol. Managing match types will help optimize a paid campaign strategy.

Conversion form: A form where you capture information about the user. Typically this includes contact information with the goal of driving leads.

Search term: A keyword or phrase, also known as a query, that a user enters into a search engine for the purpose of producing webpage results.

Google Quality Score (GQS): GQS is a 1-10 rating system that Google uses to determine the relevancy of your keywords and your PPC ads. There are several factors that can affect your GQS such as historical performance, keyword and ad relevance, landing pages, and click-through rate. The higher your score the better your campaigns will perform.

Reporting and Insights

Clicks: The number of times an ad was clicked on.

Conversion: These are measurable goals defined by your business. A common definition for a conversion is the successful capture of personal information from a user so they can be re-engaged and pushed further down the marketing funnel.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR): This is the number of impressions that resulted in clicks. The higher this number the more effective your campaign is.

Conversion rate: This is the number of times a click resulted in a conversion or lead. Similar to CTR, the higher this number, the more efficient your campaign is.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC): This is the amount your business will spend or is spending per click. This metric is usually an average.

Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA): The amount spent in order to obtain a lead or conversion.

Traffic: The number of visitors to your site.

Referral traffic: The percent of visits that came to the site from paid campaigns.

Impressions: The number of times an ad is displayed and seen by a user. If a user sees the ad five times, Google will count each time individually.

Impression share: The number of impressions an ad receives divided by the number of times it was eligible to be seen.

Sessions: The number of times a user is actively engaged on your website or app.

Pageviews: The number of times a page is viewed. Multiple pageviews by the same user will be counted each time.

Bounce rate: This represents the times when a user visits only one page and then leaves without advancing to another page on your website.

Average session duration: The average length of time a user spends on your website.

Assisted conversions: The number of conversions where a marketing source was a stop along the path to a conversion or goal completion.

Goal completions

Conversions and leads in analytics are set up as goals. However, goals can also include visiting a new landing page or staying on a page for a certain duration of time.

Helpful tools to succeed in digital marketing

Google Ads: Google Ads is an advertising platform developed by Google where businesses can pay a fee to promote their products, services, applications, and content to Google’s web users.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that allows you to track and report on website metrics and marketing campaigns.

HotJar: HotJar is a tool that offers marketers and UX designers a fast and visual way to see how users are navigating a website or webpage. These insights can help a team make strategy changes to the content or layout of a website.

SEMRush: SemRush is a software that provides visibility and marketing analytics solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research.

What's Next!

You’ve made it to the end! I hope you found this list comprehensive, informative, and helpful. Be sure to bookmark this page to save yourself an internet search in the future.

If you still have questions or want to talk more about your digital marketing strategy, let’s talk!