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What’s a backlink?
What does SEO stand for?
What’s a CRO and how does it make me more money?
Tired of nodding your head along pretending you understand?
It can be pretty frustrating when people around you are using buzzwords and business-speak that you have never once heard before, but everyone else expects you to be able to understand with a snap of your fingers.
We’ve all been there, and being busy marketers there’s always an increasing trend to use more and more abbreviations and in-the-know phrases and buzzwords so that we can get back to strategising and delivering sales-generating campaigns.
So, in the fashion of cutting things short to make them fast to say and easy to memorise, we’ve included as many of the most common abbreviations and phrases we use on a daily basis so that you too can avoid looking blank-faced and confused the new time someone says that they “need to work on the 301 redirect so that link equity and CF is preserved, which should make the site easier for Googlebot to crawl and for visibility to be increased“. Confused? You won’t be for much longer. Read on.
Most Commonly Used Marketing Abbreviations and Phrases Used by Ninjas
301 – A status code from the server which declares that the user is to be redirected from Page A to Page B permanently.
302 – A status code from the server which declares that the user is to be redirected from Page A to Page B temporarily.
404 – A status code from the server which declares that the page cannot be found.
Above The Fold – Content on a page that is immediately visible without having to scroll down.
AdWords – Google’s own advertising network, found as advertisements at the top of the SERPs.
Analytics – Code running on a page which records user activity, including time on page, actions and pages per session.
Anchor Text – The text used to link one page to another. For example, “Click Here” is anchor text.
Avg. Session Duration – The average session duration is calculated by dividing the total time of user sessions against the total number of sessions.
Backlink – Description of a hypertext link from website A to website B. In this case, a link from website A to your domain.
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Bounce Rate – The percentage of users who leave a domain or page without taking an action on the page.
Broken Links – Internal and external links that result in a 404 page. These result in bad user experience and need to be fixed.
Canonical – A method in which on-page code can tell a spider (such as Googlebot) that Page B is a legitimate copy of Page A.
CDN / Content Delivery Network – A “cloud” network which enables faster website load times for the end user.
CF / Citation Flow – A grading system by Majestic.com used to measure the authority of links from one website to another on a scale from 0 to 100.
CMS / Content Management System – A software system used to build and maintain a website.
Content Marketing – Content made by a team of writers to either provide the answer to a user’s search needs, or to highlight a business, or to tell a story. Also see: Digital PR.
Conversion – The completion of a goal by a user on a website, usually tracked using analytics.
Conversion Rate – Calculated by dividing the total number of users who convert on a website by the total number of website visitors.
Crawler / Robots / Spider – A software program used by search engines to discover websites and explore their on-website content by following the internal linking structure.
CRO / Conversion Rate Optimisation – A specialised process of improving the conversion rate of a website through on-website design changes, often continuously.
CTA / Call To Action – Text or a button on a page which is intended to encourage a specific action from a user, such as clicking on a button, typically as part of a submission form or lead generation process.
CTR / Click-Through Rate – The percentage of users who click on a hyperlink to another page — in particular from Google’s SERPs to a domain.
DA / Domain Authority – A grading system by Moz.com to measure the authority of a domain on a scale from 0 to 100.
Direct Traffic – Traffic that navigates to a domain directly, typically by typing the domain into the address bar, using a bookmark and other potential routes.
Disavow – A process of telling Google to ignore a list of submitted domains due to their spammy or untrustworthy nature, so that Google doesn’t count them within the domain’s potential ranking calculation.
DPR / Digital PR – Online press relations orchestrated through the use of publishing content on the subject of a brand or industry, or through directly working with journalists.
Duplicates – Content, page titles, or page descriptions which are deemed to be a direct copy of another page. These have negative ranking consequences and should be avoided.
Goal Tracking – Monitoring of goals using analytics to track and record when a user completes the goal journey, such as signing up for a newsletter.
Googlebot – The crawl spider/robot engineered by Google, built to examine a website and put the information found into its algorithm.
Keyword – A word or phrase used by a user when searching on search engines. Pages and meta should be optimised for these so they match user expectations.
Landing Pages – The first page a user sees when they navigate to a website.
Link Equity – The authority and “link juice” passed by links and accumulated by domains.
Local SEO – Search Engine Optimisation around localised user searches. For example, “accountant leeds” is a localised search. Local SEO works to rank high for these terms in the SERPs.
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Manual Penalty – A negative ranking penalty handed to a website by Google following a manual assessment of a website, usually flagged as spammy by their Googlebot crawler.
Meta / MTDs – HTML code tags on a page which signify the title and description of a page. These meta tags are then displayed to users by search engines.
Organic Traffic – Traffic that navigates to a website through organic means, in particular through search engines such as Google and Bing.
Outreach – A campaign of directly working with publishers and journalists to promote a website or brand, orchestrated by a Digital PR Specialist.
Pages per Session – The total or average quantity of pages seen by a user (or users) during one session on a website.
Panda – A significant update to Google’s algorithm. Focused on promoting websites with high-quality and/or long-form content.
Penguin – A significant update to Google’s algorithm. Focused on preventing link manipulation by websites and spammy website owners.
PLA / Product Listing Ads – Adverts run using Google Shopping which sell products within the SERPs.
PPC / Pay Per Click – Adverts which charge on a “per click” model, rather than a “per impression” model. Successfully used by Google’s AdWords program.
Ranking – The position held by a website or website page within Google’s search pages. Calculated by the ten-links-per-page system, up to the 100th position.
Referral Traffic – Traffic to a website from other websites. For example, a user clicks a link on website A and is taken to website B.
Search Console – One of Google’s Webmaster Tools. This system enables monitoring of Google’s crawling and ranking of a website within their search pages.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation, or optimisation of a website’s content and off-website linking profile so that it will rank highly in SERPs.
SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages. The pages of Google that you see when you search for a term.
Sessions – A period of activity by a user on a website. For example, a user browsing a website for ten minutes is one session. If they return an hour later, it would be their second session.
Social Traffic – Traffic to a website from social media networks. In particular, visits by users from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and several more.
TF / Trust Flow – A grading system by Majestic.com used to measure the trustworthiness of a website on a scale from 0 to 100.
Trust Ratio – A calculation of Majestic’s two grading systems (Trust Flow and Citation Flow) to find an overall authority score for a domain.
URL – Universal Resource Locator, or a text address that enables a user to navigate directly to a specific page of a domain.
Usability / User Experience / UX – The way in which a user uses a website. The user journey should be as smooth and optimised as possible so the chances that they convert on the page is increased.
Users – People recorded to have been on a website and (potentially) to have taken an action on it.
Visibility – The percentage out of 100 that a domain ranks for a singular keyword or collection of keywords. Usually calculated from the first 100 positions of the SERPs, with 1st being 100% and 100th being 1%.
Can you think of any we’re missing? Get in touch and let us know!
