Today we’re breaking down the jargon and giving you the rundown on Digital Marketing and more importantly SEO Terms. With a comprehensive digital marketing glossary, you’ll have the knowledge and confidence to talk about digital marketing & SEO terms to communicate effectively within a marketing environment.

Read on till the end of the digital marketing glossary to find out why knowing these digital marketing & SEO terms gives you a rounded understanding.

The Digital Marketing Glossary Of SEO Terms

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200 OK – URL status code returning 200 means the web page is live ad working ok.

301 Redirects – Permanent redirection links from one web page to another web page. These are often used to solve 404 errors and redirecting disused URLs to new, more relevant web pages.

302 Redirects – Temporary redirection links from one page to another web page. This tells search engines that its temporary meaning they’ll hold on to the indexation of the previous link.

Soft 404 Error – Soft 404’s are returned by a server when the status code is in fact 200 (ok) without a custom 404 page either.

Hard 404 Error – Much healthier than soft 404’s, These return a status code of 404 with a custom 404 page.

4Ps of Marketing – McCarthy’s marketing model looks at Product, Price, Promotion, and Place in a marketing strategy.

A

Above The Fold – This is the content visible upon landing on the web page. It’s important to display certain content above the fold to keep users engaged.

A/B Testing – Referring to ad copies. Testing 2 different content types and seeing how users engage with it can help improve and understand how users interact with certain content.

Ad Copy – The headline, description, and extensions used for a Google Ad.

Adwords/Google Ads – AdWords is the former name of Google Ads, a pay-per-click(PPC) platform for paid advertising online. Widely mentioned among SEOs.

AdSense – Website owners can get money for showing ads on their website using Google AdSense.

Affiliate – Anything affiliate is a commercial partnership or affiliation with another company. Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing channel.

AI – Artificial intelligence or sophisticated algorithms are used in some digital marketing software to make tasks easier and even automated.

Alexa – A universal internet ranking system.

Algorithm – Algorithms are the rules and laws that search engines use to rank websites. Each web browser has its own algo’s, but SEO is talked in general with relation to Google’s platform.

Algorithmic Penalties – These penalties are automated and make you aware that, as a webmaster, your website has committed some sort of quality offence. These are not as serious as manual actions. These are sent to webmasters through their search console or webmaster tools.

Alt Text/Tag – Alternative text is used for media like images and videos. This is often spammed with keywords to help a page rank but the main goal is to make the your visual content accessible with impaired users.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – A mobile website structure created by Google to speed up load times and content delivery on mobile devices.

Anchor Text – Text that is hyperlinked to a web page. Links can be manipulated using anchor text for keywords.

API – Access Programme Interface or API is an integrated software.

Authority – Translated as PA(Page authority) and DA(Domain authority), a measurement of your websites ‘status’ and ‘expertise’.

Auto Responder – An automatic email can be set up to send emails should you receive an incoming email.

Avatar – An image used as a profile photo.

Average Position – This is where your website is ranked (on average) across all the keywords you appear for on Google Search. This is also used in Ads as well, in which, average position refers to your Ads position.

B

B2B – Business to business means the customer base for the business is to sell to other businesses.

B2C – Business to consumer means the business sells to the domestic market.

Backlinks – Links from other websites pointing to your website (links on other web pages pointing to your web pages)

Banner Blindness – refers to users who ignore adverts. This could be because they’ve seen the advert too many times, there’s too many adverts on the page, or they’re just not interested in clicking on ads.

Below The Fold – Opposite of above the fold, this is the content not visible upon landing on the website that you need to scroll down to see.

Bitly – A URL shortener that can mask a URL.

Bing – Don’t forget about Bing. It might not be the first choice of search engine but the there’s still traffic that can be targeted on Bing.

Black Hat – Bad SEO Practice. Black Hat SEO techniques are risky, spammy, and focus on tricking search algorithms.

Blog – Blogging is a content network of posts online. Blog content is usually long-form content about topics relating to the website.

Blogger Outreach – Asking the owner of a blog to allow you a link or a guest post on their website.

Bookmark – Creating a saved link of a website for reference. Some bookmarking sites are used to gain backlinks.

Bot – Bots or Spiders or Crawlers are constantly crawling the internet to register and index web pages. These bots are responsible for finding your content and helping rank it.

Bounce Rate – A metric measured in Google Analytics, bounce rate is the percentage of web users that have left your website straight after clicking on it.

Brackets Update – An algorithm update affecting content quality and more specifically rich snippets.

Branded Keywords – Keywords surrounding your brands name and anything branded in a company – slogans included. If you have these keywords it means you rank on Google for them as a search term.

Brand Archetypes – The theory of brand personalities and personifying a brand in 1 of 12 brand archetypes.

Breadcrumbs – A navigational feature on a website to aid users moving through website structure. These show you the path taken when moving through web pages.

Broken Links – These links no longer work – they may return a 404 error or a 500 error. These are harmful to SEO if not dealt with.

Browser Cache – To save you load time, web browsers cache(save a website) you’ve been on partially display that saved websites design with live content. This can sometimes cause confusion after a redesign as some users will have to clear their cache to view the new web page.

Buyer Persona – A fictional persona that represents your target audience to sell to. The character is close enough to your real target audience to help you stay focused on your users.

C

Cache – Similar to browser cache, this is another level of caching, commonly cached on the website using a cache tool. This again helps speed the website up. But just make sure to clear this for updates to take effect.

Caffeine Update – An update to the indexing algorithm, Caffeine made Google’s indexing much quicker.

Call To Action (CTA) – These encourage user engagement in a desired action. These are asking you to take an action, for example, “call today” “get a quote”.

Campaign – A digital marketing campaign is a project that has a specific goal. Tasks are undertaken to complete the campaign.

Canonical URL – If this URL is listed on a web page it’s made clear that the web page is the original content, so any subsequent duplicate content will not affect its ranking.

Captcha – Captcha is an anti-spam tactic that’s embedded in forms and submissions, usually as a checkbox to confirm you’re not a robot.

Cannibalisation – If your web pages are too closely related, this can cause Google to not know which web page to rank and not rank any or on the flip side, they could all rank for the same keyword.

Cart Abandonment – When a web visitor adds items to their eCommerce basket, but does not go through with the sale, instead, leaving the website.

Click Bait – Falsely using a really catchy title that doesn’t live up to its promise just to get more clicks.

Click Fraud – Clicking competitors AdWords to negatively affect their Google Ads campaign with no interest in the service, business, or product.

Click Through Rate – CTR is the percentage of people that saw your website on the search engine results page and clicked on to your website.

CTR Manipulation – A black hat technique used to change rank positioning based on high click-through rate.

Cloaking – Another black hat technique, cloaking is hiding text on a webpage. This could be placing an image over the text or changing the text cover to match the background. The text is not visible to users but can be seen by bots.

Content Management System (CMS) – Software for building your website upon, CMS like WordPress, Magento, Shopify, Drupal are the foundations of websites.

Core Web Vitals – A factor of Google’s ranking signals that includes loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

Citations – Similar to backlinks except citations list contact and location information about your company. This technique helps businesses rank not only on SERP but the map pack too.

Code – Refers to any kind of coding that’s used in the website. The most common coding languages are HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Java, Python, C+, and C++.

Comment Spam – A backlinking technique used to comment links on blog posts and other commentable web pages.

Competitor Research – Done in the auditing phase of SEO. Competitor research is looking at other websites and businesses on the search engines results page and looking at how they rank.

Content – Content is a ranking factor, this refers to everything on a web page, also referred to as on-page.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Websites can be served on CDN servers across the world – This can speed up website response times as the user is closer to a server.

Conversion – This is a goal completion. Conversions can be set up in Google Analytics. Conversions usually correlate to an enquiry or a sale.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) – CRO is optimising and making changes to a website to increase conversions. There are many techniques and is separate to SEO.

Conversion Rate – The percentage of users that complete a conversion on your website.

Cookies – Used to capture and track your web page users through their online travels in order to market your products to them and serve them digital ads. Cookies are unique to you and, should you go on the website again, it will remember who you are (potentially sign you back in).

Cookies Consent – A GDPR feature, this consent pops up once you land on a web page for the first time, at which you’ll have to decide whether to agree or decline.

Cornerstone Content – A content piece that is a main page for a topic which sub topics could link off from.

CPC – Relating to Adwords, cost per click is the amount payable everytime someone clicks on your ad.

Crawl – Like bots, a crawl is how bots flow through your web pages and content.

Crawl Budget – The theory that Google places a certain amount of time on a website to be crawled so a poorly optimised site might lose out on being completely crawled.

CSS – Cascading Style Sheets are part of the codebase along with HTML and JavaScript. CCS is responsible for the styling and design of the web page.

Cross Device – Incorporating all devices or mobile and desktop devices to make websites more accessible.

D

Ddos – A common attack on a website. These are called denial of service attacks and use up server requests to ensure the sever cannot cope with requests easily; this results in the web page not being able to load properly.

De-Indexed – Being removed from a search engines index of websites – you’ll no longer appear in search results organically.

Deep web/Dark web – the hidden internet that famously used for shady/illegal business.

Digital Marketing – All forms of marketing on the internet. This includes SEO, PPC, SMM, CRO and web design. The aim of these actions is to bring in more business for a company and run alongside traditional marketing.

Digital PR – Press Releases online to news websites.

Direct Traffic – Direct traffic comes from typing in the web page’s URL directly into the address bar and going straight to the correct web page. This does not affect organic results.

Directory – Directories are websites which list web pages by the thousands and group/collate them.

Disavow – Disavowing is disassociating backlinks from your website, should they be deemed as harmful. This is done through Google’s disavow tool.

Do-Follow Links – Links that pass on link equity/juice. They give you some authority from the website linking to you.

Document Relevancy – This is the check that your type of webpage (blog post, product page, News report etc.) is relevant to the searcher on a search engine results page.

Domain Name Server (DNS) – This is where your domain name is hosted, you can buy hosting to serve your domain name online.

Domain Name – A unique name or address on the internet that represents your website.

Drop Off – The rate at which users leave your website on different web pages.

DTC Marketing – Direct to consumer marketing means your business produces the product or service, and you then market directly to consumers. i.e you don’t involve retailers in your supply chain as you act as both manufacturer and retailer.

Duplicate Content – This content is copied or has previously been written on another web page. This is not unique content.

Dwell Time – The length of time a user is on a web page. This can be extended by writing better content and more content. Dwell time can be monitored on Google Analytics.

E

eCommerce – eCom is a shopping website, that brings with it a different type of SEO for products and similar pages.

EMD Update – The exact match domain update reduced the impact of having an exact match domain on SEO rankings as this used to be overpowered.

Email Marketing – Digital marketing channels like SEO are often used in conjunction with other channels like email marketing. If a website is collecting emails to subscribe to newsletters or get discount codes, then you can sure they’re using email marketing.

Evergreen content – Written content so good that it’ll be hard to beat or take of the SERP. It also means it will always be current and its relevance will not change with age.

Exact Match – A Google Ads match type that is specific and narrow, preventing wastage of budget.

Exact Match Domain (EMD) – These domains are keywords.

External Link – A link from another website that is not ‘internal’ on your website.

F

Favicon – The icon at the top of a tab for a website.

Featured Snippet – Often referred to as position 0, featured snippets are features of Google’s search engine results that bring information from a website onto the results page.

Fetch As Google – A tool within google Search Console, you can request Google to crawl a URL.

Florida Update – The first biggest update Google released. Countering spam and affiliate websites.

Follow links – These are do follow links we just thought we’d mention them here too 🙂

Forums – A communications website, forums can be a source of link building.

Fred update – Focused on bettering user experience this could impact websites with excessive pop-ups and cluttered content.

Freshness – How new or recent content has been published. News sites do this well.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol is used to manage a website’s files and change settings.

G

Geo-targeting – This is targeting a user or content based on a location.

Geo-tagging – To appear more local, some SEOs geo-tag photos at specific locations, giving images local coordinates can help associate an image with a location.

Google Analytics – A web tool for tracking and monitoring website usage and tracking how users interact with your website.

Google Bowling – A negative SEO tactic, this is an attack on another websites SEO rankings through means of getting them a penalty. Though minimised through algorithm updates protecting authentic webmasters, this tactic is still used.

Google Dance – The shift in website ranking positions can be described as a dance after an algorithm update.

Google Disavow Tool – The disavow tool is used to discount links from your website. Used to protect webmasters, you can find this tool in the Google Search Console.

Google Display Network (GDN) – Is an AdWords option to run visual image ads.

Google Keyword Planner – Found in Google Ads, this tool is used to discover keywords and search for relevant terms to include in your SEO content.

Google Maps – Integrated in Google Search as the “Map Pack” your GMB listing is displayed here.

Google My Business (GMB) – A website that lets you create a business listing which will, in turn, be listed on the search engine results page.

Google Plus – A discontinued social network that may still be referred to.

Google Trends – A web tool that holds data on search queries and helps us understand how users search.

Google Search Console – Another one of Google’s free tools, GSC lets you manage your website on Google. Here you can manage your sitemap, coverage, index, errors, and more.

Google Stack – An SEO tactic used to funnel link juice to a website.

Google Webmaster Guidelines – Google’s own advice to webmasters on how they rank web pages and how you can be a better webmaster.

Grey Hat SEO – Right between black and white, we have grey hat. A mix of both best practices SEO and slightly shadier practices as well.

Guest Posting – Some webmasters will allow you to post content on their website if you write quality content for them.

H

Hashtags – hashtags are used across the internet to tag keywords to give your content more prominence in search.

Heading Tags – Heading tags correlate to on-page SEO and are heading on your web page. They range from H1 being the largest and most important to H6 being the smallest and least important.

Heatmap – Visual representation of where the most mouse clicks happen on a web page.

Hit – A hit is a visitor to your website.

Homepage – This is your domain name without a slug on the end. This is your main page.

HTML – Hypertext Markup Language is code. All web pages run on HTML. HTML is the structure.

HTTPS – This is the bit text in your address bar, usually HTTP, HTTPS means that it’s secure and safe. This transfer protocol improves your website’s visibility and aligns with Google’s guidelines.

Hummingbird Update – This is an update to help Google understand the semantics of words and how they relate to the main keywords.

Hreflang Tags – Part of the HTML code of your Site, this tag determines your sites language and geographical targeting.

Hyperlink – Just a link.

I

Image Carousels – Image sliders that rotate between images automatically.

Impressions – These are users that view your web page on the search engine results page.

Inbound – SEO is inbound marketing, as it gets traffic to contact and engage first. Outbound is the opposite marketing method.

Index – Websites that are stored acknowledged and served by search engines.

Influencer – An individual who has amassed a following and can influence their followers. Companies can pay influencers to promote their products.

Informational Searches – The derived intent of the searcher is to find out particular information regarding a subject.

Internal Links – Links on your website that may link to other pages within your website or external resources.

IP Address – This is the server location of your website on the internet.

K

Keyword Density – The percentage that keyword is mentioned on the web page.

Keyword Research – Research into keywords that are being searched and that you’d like to go after and rank for. This is the process of using web tools to find new keywords.

Keyword Stuffing – Another sketchy SEO technique, keyword stuffing is placing your keyword throughout your content lots of times to the point where it negatively affects user experience.

Keyword Mapping – Once you have keyword research, you can begin mapping keywords to a web page, in order to avoid keyword cannibalisation.

Keywords – Keywords are the search terms and works that, when typed in on a search engine like Google, they rank for.

Knowledge Graph – The knowledge panel appears sometimes on informational searches where Google can answer the Question on the SERP instead of having to go to a website.

L

Landing Page – The landing page is the web page that a user lands on when they click on a search result.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – These are words with similar connotations or meaning to the focus keyword. Scattered throughout content, these words help Google understand what your content is about and clarify the correct meaning of your content.

Lead Generation – Any content that can bring in legitimate business enquiries and ‘generate’ business.

Link Bait – Creating shareable content that visitors will want to link to and share with others.

Link Building – Getting backlinks through finding and creating them yourself, spammy or otherwise.

Link Checker – link checkers analyse a webpage for broken hyperlinks, and usually highlight the broken links.

Link Decay – The idea that links will lose SEO value over time.

Link Equity/Juice – This is the authority passed on when a link is given to your website if it’s a dofollow link.

Link Exchange – Like a marketplace for backlinks, You can exchange backlinks without paying meaning if they backlink to you then you have to backlink to them.

Link Farm – A link farm is a cluster of websites that are exploited to interlink with each other and other websites for the use of improving search rankings.

Link Prospecting – The process of finding a potential website or web pages that would link to your content.

Load Speed – The time it takes for a web page to load. This can be calculated on Google’s Page Speed Insights or other such tools.

Local Pack – The local pack is a Google SERP feature that shows when you may be searching for a local business. The local pack is pulled from Google My Business listings.

Long Tail – Long tail keywords are longer keywords than short tail keywords. This is a technique of finding low competition keywords with longer search terms as fewer people has such specific content.

M

Manual Action/Penalty – More serious than the automatic penalty, a Google employee has reviewed your website and decided it’s not fit for their index so has made you aware of why your website has broken Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Match Types – Used in Google AdWords, match types can surround keywords like search operators do to modify the reach of the keyword. You can have very broad or narrow keywords depending on your match type.

Medic Update – This update mainly affected medical websites that could be misleading. This is about making sure information is correct and provided by an expert.

Marketing Mix – Referring to the composition of the marketing strategy. The marketing mix has various models to follow, the most popular being the 4Ps

Media Kit – a series of resources for advertising a product or service, these are commonly given to affiliate marketers to help advertise.

Meta Data – This data is information that’s pulled through to Google Search Engine Results. The Meta Title and Meta Description have a huge impact on SEO.

Meta Title – The meta title is the blue link that gets pulled through onto the Google SERP. This has a big SEO impact and grabs the searchers attention the most.

Meta Description – Less SEO is placed on this, but this is the short paragraph below the headline on the Google Search Results page.

Meta Search Engine – A search engine that displays results from multiple search engines.

Metrics – Digital Marketers have their own metrics to track and monitor to make sure their work is on track. Very similar to KPIs in another workplace.

Mobile Friendly – Websites should display and function well on mobile devices. Features should be created for the ease of use.

Mobile-First Indexing – Google crawls websites. They used to crawl desktop versions of websites first but with mobile devices being used so much – Google shifted from looking at desktop versions to checking mobile features first and indexing based on that.

Mobilegeddon – A Google update, Mobilegeddon was focused on mobile devices and mobile-friendly features.

Moderator – a site administrator or moderator manages user generated content on websites.

Moz – Rand Fishkin’s Moz is a credible source of SEO information and also an SEO web tool used by SEO professionals.

N

NAP – NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. Sometimes also referred to as NAPW with a website address included. This is the information needed for citations.

NAP Consistency – The idea that your contact information needs to be consistent across the internet and everywhere you post it, making it more reliable and useful for your users and Google.

Navigational Searches – These searches are users trying to find a particular web page they already have knowledge of. For example, branded searches.

Negative Keywords – Exclusive to Google Ads, negative keywords can be given to NOT bid on these keywords.

Netiquette – Etiquette for behaviour online.

Nofollow Links – These links are expressed in HTML as rel=”nofollow” and mean that the link should not receive any link juice.

Noindex – Placing a noindex tag in the robots.txt of a web page will discourage search engines from indexing the web page in the results page. Important if you need to hide certain exclusive pages from Visitors on Google.

Neil Patel – Founder of neilpatel.com, Neil Patel is a digital marketing guru.

O

Off-page SEO – SEO factors that are no on the web page’s content itself but are on external websites and factors.

On-Page SEO – The optimisation of content on the website.

Open Graph – Facebook’s API that let’s 3rd party website use Facebook’s features.

Open Rate – In email marketing, the open rate is how many opens an email gets in comparison to how many emails were sent.

Open Source – This refers to software that has been created by a community, and available to all.

Organic – Organic refers to web traffic streams of visitors coming from search engine results pages. These users have typed in keywords to find your website and use it.

Organic Search Results – refers to unpaid search results that appear as a result of the algorithm and are relevant to the search term (aka natural search results)

Organic links – the creation of hypertext links between websites, with or without an explicit link exchange agreement

Organic traffic – web traffic streams of visitors coming from search engine results pages. These users have typed in keywords to find your website.Outbound link – A link on your website that links to an external website in order to improve the trustworthiness and quality of your content.

Orphan Pages – pages that are not internally linked to or only accessed by typing in the link.

Over Optimisation – Takes place when too much SEO has been done to the point of having a negative impact. This could be too much keyword stuffing on-page or your anchor texts all pointing to one keyword.

P

Page Authority – This is a website metric that’s taken into account when deciding if a link is wanted from that website. It’s also used to track improvements in a website as the higher the score, the better the web page.

PageRank – A scale of 1-10 that exists to rank a website’s authority.

Podcast – An audio content stream that can drive more traffic to a website.

Paid Links – Backlinks that have been paid for. This is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and is a shadier SEO tactic.

Page Views – Analytics lists page views as the number of pages one user has visited on average while on the website.

Pagination – These are results pages that have varying numbers on the end of URLs to denote a different page.

Panda Update – Made to stop poor quality content ranking on Google’s platform.

Penguin Update – The Penguin update focuses on weeding out spammy links and penalising those that buy links and manipulate results using links.

People Also Ask Boxes – A google SERP feature that shows related queries searchers have asked regarding the topic you searched.

PHP – Hypertext Preprocessor is a programming language to help build websites and functioning.

Pigeon Update – Pigeon has a focus on local searches. Aiding searchers to find local businesses when searching for products or services locally.

Pirate Update – An update to penalise those infringing on copyrighted materials.

Pixel – Tracking code that can be inserted on a website to run Facebook ads.

Plug-Ins – A great SEO plug-in is Yoast. Plug-Ins are additional software features that can be integrated with your CMS system such as WordPress.

Possum Update – Another local update, Possum bettered the local map pack rankings of Google My Business listings.

Pop-Ups – Messages or advertisements that appear when on websites seemingly “popping” up.

Pay Per Click (PPC) – PPC or Paid Search refers to Google AdWords/Google Ads. It literally means you pay when someone clicks on the advertisement.

Profile – Some link building opportunities are given when creating a public profile on a website.

Push Marketing – Also known as outbound digital marketing, this is about pushing your products onto consumers.

Pull Marketing – Also known as inbound marketing, this is about drawing consumers in with your brand and product.

Q

Quality Score – In Paid Search, quality score is a rank given to the relevance of ads to keywords and ad copy.

Query – A search typed into Google as a keyword or phrase.

R

RankBrain – One of Google’s algorithms that weighs up web pages for search terms and decides their rank on the search engine results page.

Ranking – Meaning you rank on Google for that keyword or phrase.

Reciprocal Linking – Returning links once a webmaster gives a link to yourself.

Redirect – Talked about at the start, a redirection refers to one link that automatically directs to a different URL.

Referral Traffic – This is the traffic gained from backlinks, whether that be on social media or other websites. You can find the source of the referral traffic in Google Analytics.

Remarketing – Using cookies, we can target users that have clicked on an Ad previously and continue to target them and serve Ads to them for a short period of time.

Reputation Management – The process of enhancing a businesses reputation online through a variety of channels.

Retargeting – This is similar to remarketing. Retargeting is serving Ads to your previous websites visitors to interest them in your website again.

Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) – The profit made on Ad spend.

Rich Snippets – On-page features of the search engine results page where your content is visible right on the SERP.

Rich Results – Information found at the top of Google’s search results pages in boxes, including carousels, images and other non-textual elements which highlight key information from a web page.

Robots.txt – The robots txt file is an attachment to your website that is crawled by Bots first. This file dictates whether you give permission to the Bots to crawl your website or not. You can specify Bot names and or choose to allow them all.

ROI – Return on investment or ROI is how much you get for an investment. Marketing spend is a means of bringing in more business.

RSS – A web feed that lets websites access live updates of external sources, projecting those updates onto a website.

S

Sandbox – The sandbox is a form of punishment for a website that hasn’t followed webmaster guidelines. Google holds the website back on search results.

Schema – Schema is a markup or structured data that helps search engines understand your web page easier by labelling its components. Schema can also help your SEO by pulling through review stars onto the search engine results page.

Scrape – Taking data or content from a source.

Scripts – Used on Adwords, scripts let you automate data using JavaScript.

Screaming Frog – Downloadable software that can be used to monitor SEO on a website.

Search Engine – A search engine is not limited to websites. Rather, any search tool that runs algorithmically.

Search Query – The keyword or phrase entered into the search engine from a searcher.

Search Engine Results Page – SERPs are the pages that list the search results once you enter a search query. These pages typically run from pages 1 to 19.

Search Volume – The total number of search queries a specific keyword or phrase receives over a given time period. 

Secondary Keywords – Additions to your primary keywords which add more detail and help to reduce keyword stuffing, for example adding ‘shorthair’ to the keyword ‘cat’.SEO/Site Audit – The process of assessing your website’s performance on search engines and locating issues that can prevent a website from appearing on the search engine results pages.

Search Intent – Looking at a SERP, you can understand the searcher’s intent. The searcher’ query can be answered in various forms of content and media.

Search Operators – These are a range of input parameters you can add to your search query to get specific results.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing is digital marketing channels that run off of search engines. These can include SEO and PPC.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the practice of improving a website’s ranking in a search engine for given keywords. It is also about following webmaster guidelines to create a better website.

Session – A session constitutes a users visit to a website. The duration of that session starts when they land on the website and ends when they leave the website. More metrics can be tracked throughout that User’s journey.

Skyscraper – In content, The Skyscraper Technique by Backlinko means creating content x10 better than the content on the search engine results page.

Site Structure – Website structure is the hierarchy of web pages from the home page, about page, blog archives right down to subcategories and contact page. It’s good practice to be able to reach most pages within 3 clicks from the home page as this helps with crawl.

Sitelinks – The links listed on SERP results.

Site-Wide Links – These links are usually in the footer and carry across to every page on the website – they’re sitewide.

Sitemap – A file that maps the website’s pages and URLs to help users and Bots. These can be as HTML and XML. They can often be found in the footer.

Slug – Slugs are a part of the URL structure. These can be keyword rich.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) – SMM is a channel of marketing on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. This can be creating posts and managing paid social media.

Snippet – The snippet is the meta description that is shown on the search engine results page below the headline of the website.

Social Bookmark – A bookmarking service online that allows you to bookmark websites using a bookmarking account.

Social Sharing – Sharing content on social media platforms.

Spam – A spammer will write comments or ‘use’ a website for their own gain. This can involve adding irrelevant backlinks as comments and continuously abusing a website.

Spam Score – A metric by Moz, spam score is on a scale of 1-20, 20 being total spam. You can assess how potentially dangerous a site is for SEO with the spam score.

Spinning Content – Content that has been taken from multiple sources and combined to seemingly appear unique content, even though it’s stolen.

SSL – An SSL certificate can be installed on a website to ensure all data on that website is secure and encrypted, meaning hackers would struggle to steal or see any data. Google’s algorithm is bias towards websites having an SSL so make sure yours does.

Structured Data – This is Schema. Structured data can be inserted into your codebase to help search engines understand your content.

T

Text Link – Links with anchor text on them. These are the most popular with alternatives being media like image links.

Technical SEO – SEO that is unrelated to content. These are technical website issues that should be overcome.

Thin Content – Written content that lacks much depth or words. This typically doesn’t provide much use to the user.

Thumbnail – a preview of an image that is smaller.

Title Tags – This is the headline on the search engine results page. Title tags can be changed with a tool like Yoast or done in the code itself.

Traffic – Web traffic is visitors on a website. When we talk about driving traffic, we mean we can use marketing to get the website more visitors.

Transactional Keywords – These are purchase search queries. These can be more expensive to bid on but, the Searcher’s intent is to buy something.

Trust Flow – Trust is an important metric on Google. Trust can be measured using this metric.

Troll – A web troll is an online bully that harasses users online.

U

URLs – This is the website domain and the page address, for example, ‘https://www.example.com/example/’.

User – An individual using a website.

User Engagement – This is how a user behaves on a website and can be assessed using analytics, heatmaps and other web tools.

User Experience (UX)  – Coupled with User Interface or UI, this is how the content of a website is laid out to be easy to read, navigate and use by a user.

User Generated Content (USG) – These are comments and other types of content that users have added to a website.

User Intent  – The same as search intent except this focuses on an individual’s intent when searching for something and what they want to achieve or find with a search query. This may differ from other users.

User Journey – A users interaction from start to finish with your website – this spans across every session they have had with your website since their first interaction to their very last.

V

Venice Update – Google update that affects local search intent.

Voice Search – Search engines like Siri and Cortana that are spoken to in order to search. Websites can be optimised for voice search.

Viral – A growth hacking method to gain mass exposure very quickly. When something goes viral its often seen as ‘the next craze’ or fad. This is usually for short-term.

W

Web 2.0 – Web design platforms where a website can be created using other domains. Such as Weebly, Wix and others. These can be used to create backlinks. A Web 2.0 looks something like this “https://www.examplewebsite.weeby.com”.

Webmaster – The owner and editor of a website that controls what is done with a website.

Web Marketing – Also known as digital marketing or internet marketing, web marketing encompasses all internet marketing channels.

Webmaster Tools – A set of tools usually given by a search engine to help webmasters monitor their websites on that search engines platform.

White Hat – Considered best practice SEO, this is following Google’s guidelines fully to optimise a website.

Whois – A web tool for discovering domain name information.

Widget – Widgets are content blocks that can be embedded into a website’s content.

Word Of Mouth – The promotion and recommendation of your business from social interactions your customers have about your business.

WordPress – An open source CMS that most websites are built upon. There are 2 variations of WordPress, one being WordPress.org the other being wordpress.com. WordPress.org is installed onto a domain name.

X

XML Sitemap – These sitemaps can be generated for a website using a sitemap generator and are to aid Bots crawling websites

Y

Yandex – The largest search engine in Russia.

YMYL – Your Money or Your life pages are pages that if were to display incorrect information, could negatively impact a person’s life. these are commonly healthcare websites or finance.

Knowing these digital marketing & SEO terms not only helps you within your marketing team, but also with web designers, web developers, and of course, the sales team. You now understand technical aspects of websites with error codes; The monetary drive a business website has with ROI; And the design choices of above the fold content and user experience.