Glossary

Backlink – This is when one website hyperlinks to another website using HTMLhref code. Backlinks are a major factor used by Google in determining organic rankings.

Blog – Short for “weblog”, a blog is a web page or a website that is regularly updated with new written content. Blogs are an important section of a website in digital marketing, as they offer fresh new content on a regular basis which can help attract new visitors, engage existing visitors, and give authority signals to Google.

Bot – An automated program that visits websites, sometimes also referred to as a “crawler” or a “spider”. Search Engines like Google uses bots to crawl websites so that they can be ranked and added to search indexes.

Campaign – A series of advertising messages that share a theme, and market a product or service. In the context of digital marketing, campaigns can be run through search and display network advertising platforms (i.e. Google, Bing), social media, email, or other online platforms. Campaigns can also refer to a comprehensive digital marketing strategy or project.

Conversion Rate – The rate at which visitors to a website complete the predefined goal. It is calculated by dividing the number of goal achievements by the total number of visitors. For example, if 100 people visit a website and 10 of them complete the conversion goal (like filling out a contact form), then the conversion rate is 10%

CPC (Cost Per Click) – The amount of money spent for a click on an ad in a Pay-Per-Click campaign. In the Adwords platform, each keyword will have an estimated click cost, but the prices change in real-time as advertisers bid against each other for each keyword.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) – A branch of digital marketing that aims to improve the conversion rate of web pages, thus making the pages more profitable. Conversion rate optimization combines psychology with marketing and web design in order to influence the behaviour of the web page visitor. CRO uses a type of testing called “A/B split testing” to determine which version of a page (version A or version B) is more successful.

Digital Marketing – A catchall term for online work that includes specialized marketing practices like SEO, PPC, CRO, web design, blogging, content, and any other form of advertising on an internet-connected device with a screen. Traditionally, television was not considered digital marketing, however, the shift from cable television to internet streaming means that digital advertising can now be served to online TV viewers.

DNS – Stands for Domain Name System, it is a protocol that translates website URLs (which use alphabetic characters) into IP addresses (that use numeric characters). DNS exists because it is more useful for internet users to remember letters and words in website URLs, but the worldwide web communicates in numbers with IP addresses. Without DNS, every website would just be a string of numbers rather than a traditional URL.

Ecommerce (or E-Commerce) – Stands for Electronic Commerce, it is a classification for businesses that conduct business online. The most common form of e-commerce business is an online retailer that sells products direct to the consumer.

Email Marketing – The use of email with the goal of acquiring sales, customers, or any other type of conversion.

Google Adwords – Google’s online advertising service. This system allows advertisers to reach customers through their search and display networks. AdWords offers several cost models which vary by bidding strategy and company goals.

Google Reviews – Reviews left using Google My Business platform. Reviews are on a 1-5 star scale and include a brief message written by the reviewer. Reviews can show up in the knowledge graph in Google searches and have been shown to positively correlate with SEO rankings.

Hashtag – a phrase beginning with the symbol “#” used in social media as a way for tagging content for users to find. Adding hashtags to a post allows users to find that post when searching for that topic.

Index – When used as a noun, index refers to all of the web pages that Google has crawled and stored to be shown to Google searchers

Inbound Marketing – Inbound marketing refers to the activities and strategies used for attracting potential users or customers to a website. “Inbound” is a more recent euphemism for what has traditionally been called “SEO”.

Keyword – A word or phrase indicative of the major theme in a piece of content. When you search for something in a search engine, you type in a keyword, and the search engine gives you results based on that keyword. One primarygoal of SEO is to have your website show in searches for as many relevant keywords as possible.

Lead – A potential customer in the sales funnels who has communicated with a business with the intent to purchase through a call, email, or online form fill.

Linkedin – A social networking website oriented around connecting professionals to jobs, businesses and other professionals in their industry. Linkedin is also a robust platform for marketing, job posting, and sharing professional content.

Organic – A source of the traffic to a website that comes through clicking on a non-paid search engine result. Organic traffic is a primary measurement of an SEO campaign and will generally grow as a site ranks better for relevant keywords in search engines.

PPC / Pay-Per-Click – An online advertising model in which advertisers are charged for their ad once it is clicked. The PPC model is commonly associated with search engine and social media advertising like Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.

Penalty – An infraction issued by Google, to a webmaster, for breaking Google’s guidelines. The penalty is issued by Google through Search Console and can result in a sites’ removal from search engine results. The issues that caused the penalty will need to be fixed before the penalty is lifted, and once the penalty is lifted, it may still take some time to return to the previous rank in Google search results.

Quality Score – Google Adwords’ rating of the relevance and quality of keywords used in PPC campaigns. These scores are largely determined by the relevance of ad copy, expected click-through rate, as well as the landing page quality and relevance.

Responsive Web Design – A philosophy of creating a website that allows all of the content to show correctly regardless of screen size or device. Your website will “respond” to the size of the screen each user has, shrinking and reorganizing on smaller screens, and expanding to fill appropriately on large ones.

Search Engine – a program that searches an index of information and returns results to the user based on corresponding keywords. The most well-known search engines are Google, Youtube, Bing, and Yahoo.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – the process of improving a website’s performance and positioning in organic search engine results through a variety of methodologies including content production or improvement, technical and code improvement, and link acquisition.
SERP – stands for Search Engine Results Page, the page featuring a list of search results that are returned to the searcher after they submit a keyword search.

Sessions – A metric in Google Analytics that measures one user interacting with a website during a given period of time, which Google defaults to 30 minutes. A session is not dependent on how many pages are viewed, so if a person goes to a website and looks around at different pages for 20 minutes, it would count as one session.

Spam – A broad term that includes many different nefarious activities in digital marketing that are done either to help a website rank better or to harm a competitor website. Spam is often seen in the form of hundreds or thousands of low-quality backlinks that were built by a black hat SEO to manipulate rankings.

Spider (crawler)– An automated program that visits websites, sometimes also referred to as a “crawler” or a “bot”. A spam spider visits websites for nefarious reasons, often showing in Google Analytics as junk traffic. However, Google uses a bot to crawl websites so that they can be ranked and added to Google search.

UI – Stands for User Interface. The user interface is the area with which a user interacts with something through a digital device. Good UI should be fluid and smooth for most people to understand.

UX – stands for User Experience. UX refers to how a user interacts with a website or app (where they click, which pages they visit). UX can be shaped by testing differences in page layouts, CTAs, colours, content, and much more to improve conversion rates. Having a good UX is crucial to having a good business, as it drives repeating users and engagement.

Visitors – A metric in Google Analytics that quantifies a user of a website over a particular period. Visitors are often broken down between “new visitors” who are browsing for the first time in the allotted period, or “returning visitors” who have already browsed at least once in the given time frame.

Website – One or a group of documents, content and/or media that are accessible on the World Wide Web. Websites are typically identified with a domain name and published on a web server.