Vocabulary SEO Quiz. Define the following words: “SERPs,” “B2B & B2C,” “CTA,” “Above the fold,” “CPM.” If you got all of these words right, then you’re on your way to becoming a fluent digital marketing conversationalist.
To many, digital marketing may seem like a minefield of technical jargon. Marketers, just like lawyers, doctors, teachers, mathematicians, and so on, have their own professional dialect that they use whenever they’re communicating with each other.
The internet itself is filled with glossary-themed posts explaining the core concepts of inbound marketing. Some of these statements are jargon-laden. And while they may be clear as day to some people, some find them totally unintelligible.
Also, what you’d be quick to pass as ‘jargon’ is just a regular speech to the people in this field. All these terms, no matter their level of sophistication, are just part of a regular ‘industry speak’ to a digital marketer.
Some of these terms can be difficult for a newbie or an outsider to follow, but they’re nothing out of the ordinary. They may be a little overwhelming though – ever tried reading something online, and it felt alien?
Well, no need to fret. Once you immerse yourself into the digital culture, this alien language will automatically begin to make sense. Plus, most of these words are self-explanatory and super easy to blend into regular conversations once you get to understand the underlying key concept associated with each.
But until then, let’s fast-track your learning process by helping you learn the digital lingo today, from a single post. Of course, we won’t be covering everything, but what we have is enough to give you a head start and set you up on the right track.
Now without further ado, let’s cut to the chase and get to our gigantic glossary of digital marketing terms any aspiring digital marketer needs to know:
You’ve probably heard someone talk about algorithm and how they’re at the centre of SEO. It’s almost impossible to have a decent conversation about SEO without mentioning algorithm, more specifically, the Google Search Algorithm.
In which case, the algorithm is nothing more than a coded set of rules that search engines use to determine which websites are quality enough to appear in their search results (the pages that appear every time you run an online search), and in what particular order.
Google and other search engines have to rank sites based on consistency and what’s more relevant to the underlying user.
Analytics are like the eyes of inbound marketing. It applies to almost every aspect of digital marketing. In the context of web traffic, it refers to the process of collecting, analysing, and interpreting web traffic data.
In most cases, analytics offers crucial information on the number of people visiting your site, what part of the world you are visiting it from, and which pages are enjoying the highest number of visitors.
With this info, you should be able to tell which parts of your website are more effective with regards to attracting more readers and customers, and which parts require major improvements.
There several analytics tools that you can use in this case; with Google Analytics being the most popular and advanced of these tools.
As the name suggests, KPIs are nothing more than an adopted performance measurement metric that marketers use to evaluate the success level of any marketing activity. Marketers use KPIs to track the progress that they’re making toward their marketing goals.
Successful marketers are thought to be successful because they’re constantly evaluating their performance against industry standards and the goals they’ve set for themselves.
KPIs come in different forms and shapes, with examples including Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Home Page views, blog traffic sources, and so forth.
The KPIs you choose will always vary depending on what you hope to achieve as a marketer. So as a marketer, you’re expected to choose KPIs that clearly represent how your business is doing and if you’re making any progress towards your goals.
Search engines rank you for ‘keywords’ or ‘keyword phrases’ as some people like to refer to them. It’s one of the most commonly used terms in the digital marketing space, and one that never misses in any conversation that touches on search engine optimisation.
Keywords are the topics or phrases that search engines uses to index webpages. It could also mean the phrases that users enter into the search engine bar whenever they’re running an online search query.
Choosing keywords to optimise your site or webpage is a two-part effort. First, make sure the keywords you’ve chosen have a significant volume of searches. Secondly, make sure you’ve analysed everything and established that it’s not too difficult to rank your site or webpage for these keywords.
The next thing is to make sure that it aligns with the audience you’re targeting.
It’s after you’ve identified the keywords that you can go ahead and optimise the pages that you wish to propel up the search engine ladder (read: rank high). In which case, you’ll be using both on-page and off-page SEO tactics to achieve this.
Now that you know what keywords are, the next most logical thing to know is SEO. Essentially, SEO is the process of enhancing your position in the result pages of search engines. It’s the practise of adjusting your web content and everything involved to influence search engines decision to rank you higher over those you compete with.
Several forces are at play here. To improve your SEO score, which translates to a higher ranking in the search engine’s result pages, you have to begin by churning out calculated web copies and posts that are crafted as per the standards and guidelines set by Google and other search engines.
While ranking websites and determining their position in their result pages, search engines have a series of elements that they’ll be looking at and using to evaluate their ranking order. These elements include image tags, internal link structure, title tags, keywords, and inbound links – to name a few.
Other than that, search engines are also interested in your website structure, the design, and how your visitors are interacting with your site. They also have a long list of off-site factors that they use to assign you a position in their result pages.
SERP is the page that opens up or is displayed every time you run an online query. It’s the Google, Yahoo, or Bing pages that show up with all the relevant links relating to your search query.
There’s no limit as to the number of pages that search engines can display. If anything, they can range from no page found to dozens of pages featuring loads of links.
Return on Investment is a measure of returns relative to your initial cost of investment. It’s calculated as Your Returns/Your Investment Cost x 100. In Marketing, ROI refers to the returns you get on your ad spend. It’s calculated as the amount of Returns that you make after Advertising a Product of Service/ The Amount You Invested in The Ad.
Usually, your ROI is shown as a percentage – and the higher your ROI, the more money you’ll be making having spend so little on investment. The same goes for ROI in the context of marketing. The higher the ROI, the more money you’ll be making, having invested so little on investment.
In which case, SEO and social media marketing has the highest ROI compared to other forms of online marketing.
PPC is an interesting advertising technique that you can take advantage of today as an online marketer. As an advertiser, you simply place an advert on Google and other major platforms, including Facebook. The ad is then displayed but is only charged when a visitor clicks on them.
In other words, you don’t pay for ad display but clicks only. So should your ad run for whatever duration of time, and it happens there’s no one clicking on it, then you don’t get to pay for it.
The PPC version of Google is Google AdWords. Your Ads get displayed on Google search as one of the results (only that your link will feature the ad symbol) to distinguish it from organic results.
Any person who lands on your site is a potential lead. But until you get them to perform an action that conveys interest, they’re all unqualified.
The first thing you want to do whenever a new visitor lands on your site is to qualify them. You have a new contact that just landed on your site. The most common thing to do is make them opt in to an email list to start receiving regular communications from you.
By making them opt-in, you stand a chance to educate them more about your products and services and even nurture their interest until they’re able to make the decision to go through with whatever action you have in place for them.
There are two versions of qualified leads – Marketing Qualified Lead and Sales Qualified Lead. Where a lead is being qualified by a marketer they’re referred to as MQLs and where your sales team is qualifying them, they’re referred to as SQLs.
This is a well-publicized concept. You want someone to design you a website, and the first requirement that comes out of your head based on what you were told or read somewhere is that the website should be responsive. This is a common practise among web designers and developers, and which has the capacity to hurt your online progress to a devastating scale should it be ignored.
Whenever someone talks about responsive design, what they’re simply implying is that the site should be designed in such a way that it can adapt to different screen sizes. That way, regardless of the devise in use, you can be sure your site will still be loading like it’s supposed to.
You don’t have to design distinct websites for the various devices. Instead, design the site such that it can automatically detect various devices and generate the most fitting webpage for that particular screen.
So, by creating a responsive website, what’s meant is that you’re creating a website that’s optimised for different screen dimensions.
On-page optimisation refers to the practise of optimising individual webpages, so they can rank up higher and drive more traffic from search engines. It focuses entirely on the content of that webpage and all the corresponding HTML elements without looking elsewhere, unlike off-page SEO.
It includes all the measures that must be taken within a webpage to make it rank better. Examples of these measures include title tags, the quality of the content itself, URL, image tags, and meta tags.
The key pieces of that particular webpage must also feature the desired keyword for it to appeal to search engines more and rank higher.
Off-page Optimisation
Unlike on-page SEO, this one has a more wandering eye. It refers to outside factors and incoming links that impact how search engines rank a webpage.
Factors that play right into off-page optimisation include social media and linking domains. And make no mistake; on-page optimisation is one of the most powerful ranking elements, and which falls out of your control as an inbound marketer.
Besides networking and befriending other business owners and bloggers, all you have to do to grow your off-page SEO is focus on creating useful and remarkable content that people will have an easy time sharing around or linking back to.
Newsfeed
You’ve probably heard about social media newsfeed, more specifically, Facebook.
Well, that’s nothing more than a platform homepage filled with news sources from users that you’re connected to or those on your friend list. It’s the page with the latest news from your friends that you’re connected to on social media.
The twitter version of Newsfeed is what’s commonly referred to as the Timeline. For a blog or news site, a newsfeed is the equivalent of a homepage.
A No-Follow
Web owners use no-follow links when they want to link another site without necessarily rewarding it with any SEO value. It allows you to link to other sites or other sites to post their links on your site without gaining any search engine authority.
These links are meant to inform search engine crawlers that you don’t want them to pass any SEO credit to a site you’re linked to. It’s also meant to safeguard you from spammy links or sites that you suspect have been violating search engine guidelines.
All search engines can recognise a no-follow link to varying degrees, though. Read this keeping in mind that not all links are created equal, and a no-follow link is what you use to circumvent any form of foul-play other sites may try to play on you.
CPA is a commonly used metric that helps you determine the cost of acquiring one customer. It lets you come up with estimates on the amount of money that you have to spend to acquire one client or customer.
Calculating your CPA is pretty easy. Just get the total cost of running your campaign and divide it by the total number of conversions that you’re getting.
CPA = The Total Cost of Running a Campaign/the total number of conversions.
You can use this metric to determine the amount of money that you should be willing to spend on your campaign to hit your target number of customers. It’s what you use to determine the amount of money to allocate to your campaign, and even estimate the returns or the number of sales that you’re likely to get at the end of it all.
Lookalike Audiences
A lookalike audience is a Facebook campaign feature that allows you to build your audience from a list of audience you already have. It uses your current audience to glean for similar prospects for you to target.
It builds the audience using your current email list. All you have to do is upload these emails on your Facebook Ad campaign and let Facebook work the magic and get you a similar audience.
Where you do not wish to advertise to current customers, you can even exclude these emails and channel all your marketing effort to the new audience.
You can start by acquiring quality emails from your current list of customers and use them to expand your list by finding new customers that are very similar to your current ones.
CPI is a metric measuring the number of times your ads appear on a website, without banking much on whether your target users are interacting with it.
It’s the marketing equivalent of “reach,” except that while ‘reach’ is all about the number of eyeballs your content is enjoying, CPI is more concerned about the number of times your ads or content is displayed.
Impressions are meant to build brand recognition. They’re meant to extend your brand and grow some awareness around it.
A/B Split Testing, as the name suggests, allows you to run two or more different ads at the same time and find out which one among them has a better performance.
You can use the same image and play around with the colour or the ad copy. With A/B Split Testing, you’re simply experimenting with different types of ads so you can choose between them and post the best performing of them all.
A/B Testing allows you to test your ads better by displaying the ads that your audience likes the most. Meaning, after you’re done with testing your ad, you’ll be left with the ad that’s likely to generate better results and capture more of your potential buyers.
CTR is the metric that you use to find out how many of the users that you’re targeting clicked through your ads. It’s popular with social media advertising, where you can view the number of people that viewed your ad and those that took it a step further by clicking on it.
Calculating CTR is pretty simple, as well. All you have to do is take the number of people that clicked through your ad and divide it by the number of impressions or eyeballs the ad got. Once done, multiply it by a hundred to convert it to a percentage, and you’ll have gotten your CTR.
CTR = (Number of Clicks your ad has received/ the number of people who saw the ad)*100
Conversion rate focuses on how many of your users or site’s visitors are taking action. It uses design techniques, tests, and key optimisation principles to get you even more customers.
As a marketer, your goal should be to create an online experience that entices your site visitors to take action.
A higher conversion rate means better quality of leads and a better conversion strategy, which in the end translates to more sales (or higher ROI).
B2B stands for Business to Business, while B2C stands for Business to Customers. They are two marketing terms describing your target customers.
Who are you trying to market to? If you’re marketing to other businesses, then you’re running a B2B campaign, or you’re a B2B business.
Where you’re targeting ordinary customers and not other businesses, then you’re running a B2C campaign, which makes you a B2C business person.
You need to define whether you’re marketing to customers or other businesses to figure out the most appropriate marketing strategy to target your audience.
A Call to Action (CTA) is a hyperlinked, attention-grabbing button that you use to spell out the course of action that you wish to see your users undertake. It’s meant to tell them what to do most convincingly and clearly.
It tells them whether to click, give their emails, make a purchase, or take any other action.
It’s a general rule of thumb that your CTA is big, bold, and attention-grabbing. It should be among the first things that people see upon landing on your site.
The CTA copy you come up with should be sweet, short, and straight to the point.
Final Thoughts
There’s one caveat for all this though – learn to use this jargon sparingly, only when you’re interacting with your fellow marketer. For customers learn to keep everything simple, and steer clear of any urge to impress them with buzzword-laden jargons that they’ll have a hard time comprehending.
Not only will the jargon and some of the clichés harm your credibility, they also have a way of sapping your prospects’ patience and making your message less clear and effective.
If you have more questions concerning these terms or there’s a term that you feel like we should include on the list, talk to the professionals at MediaOne. Talk to them about your digital marketing strategy as well, and let them help you manage your campaign or help you set up a new website.
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