Digital marketing glossary

Search engine optimisation: the work that gets a website found for the searches its customers make, and chosen when it appears. Technical health, content that answers the search, and authority earned from other sites, measured in enquiries rather than rankings alone.

The part of search that depends on where the searcher is: the map pack, "near me" searches and the Google Business Profile. Reviews, a consistent name, address and phone number, and pages for the places you serve are what move it.

Everything that lets Google crawl, render and index a site without friction: speed, mobile layout, clean URLs, sitemaps, redirects and structured data. Invisible when it is right; a ceiling on everything else when it is wrong.

The words and structure on a page itself: the title, headings, copy, images and internal links. It tells Google what the page is for, in the language a searcher uses.

Signals from outside your site, above all links from other websites and mentions of your brand. It is how Google judges whether the wider web vouches for you.

A link from another website to yours. Links from relevant, trusted, well-visited pages pass authority; links bought in bulk from pages nobody visits pass nothing and can cost you.

Google's original measure of a page's importance, based on the links pointing to it and the importance of the pages those links come from. Still used, now as distance from a set of trusted seed sites rather than a raw count.

A third-party estimate of how strong a site's link profile is, on a scale of one to a hundred. Useful for comparing sites; not a Google metric and not something Google reads.

The search engine results page: everything Google shows for a search, including the ads, the map pack, AI Overviews, featured snippets, videos and the ten blue links.

The boxed answer at the top of some results, lifted from a page that answers the question directly. Clear headings and a short, direct answer under each are what earn it.

The free listing that puts a business on Google Maps and in the map pack, with hours, photos, reviews and posts. For a local business it is often the first thing a customer sees.

The three map listings Google shows for a local search, above the normal results. Proximity, relevance and prominence (reviews, citations, links) decide who is in it.

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality raters look for and its systems are trained to reward. Real authors, real credentials, real contact details and content that shows first-hand experience.

Structured data added to a page in a format Google reads directly, describing the business, the article, the product or the questions answered. It is how prices, ratings and FAQs appear in results.

Crawling is Google fetching your pages; indexing is Google storing and understanding them. A page that is not indexed cannot rank, however good it is.

Google's three measures of how a page feels to load: how quickly the main content appears, how soon it responds to a tap, and how much it shifts about while loading.

Finding the searches your customers actually make, how often, and with what intent, before writing a word. It decides which pages a site needs and what each is for.

What the person typing a search actually wants: to learn, to compare, to buy, or to find a specific place. A page that matches the intent ranks; one that matches only the words does not.

The one address Google should treat as the original when the same content is reachable at several. It stops a site competing with itself.

A permanent forward from an old address to a new one. It carries the old page's authority and keeps its visitors, which is why every URL that changes needs one.

A machine-readable list of a site's pages for search engines. It helps them find everything; it does not make anything rank.

Answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation: being cited when an assistant such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity answers a question. An assistant does what a person would: it searches, reads the pages that rank, and builds its answer from them. That makes it a discipline of SEO, not a new service.

The generated summary Google shows above some results, built from pages it already ranks and cited beside it. Being one of the cited pages is the same work as ranking for the question.

How an assistant turns one question into several ordinary searches, gathers the pages that answer each, and writes one reply. Pages that answer a specific question plainly are the ones it picks.

Pay-per-click advertising: ads you pay for only when someone clicks them, on Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube. Fast to switch on, and only worth it when every click is measured back to an enquiry or a sale.

Google's advertising platform: search ads above the results, shopping ads with product images, display ads across the web and video ads on YouTube.

Cost per click: what you pay each time someone clicks an ad. Set by auction, so it depends on what you sell and who else is bidding for the same search.

Click-through rate: the share of people who see an ad or a result and click it. A measure of how well the message matches what they were looking for.

Google's one-to-ten rating of how relevant an ad, its keywords and its landing page are to the search. A higher score lowers what you pay per click for the same position.

The share of visitors who do the thing the page is for: enquire, book, buy. The number that turns traffic into a business result, and the one paid media lives or dies on.

Return on ad spend: revenue earned for every euro spent on ads. The measure that matters for a store; for a service business, cost per lead usually says more.

Showing ads to people who have already visited your site or engaged with you. Cheaper than reaching strangers, and effective when the message picks up where they left off.

Searches you tell Google Ads not to show your ads for. One of the fastest ways to stop paying for clicks that were never going to become customers.

The page an ad sends people to. It should finish the thought the ad started, load fast, and make the next step obvious; a homepage rarely does.

Advertising across Facebook and Instagram, targeted by interests, behaviour and audiences you supply. Strong for demand you have to create; search is stronger for demand that already exists.

Content management system: the software you log into to edit pages, posts and products without touching code. WordPress and Shopify are the two we build on.

The most widely used CMS in the world, open source, and the base for most of the websites we build. Right for content-led sites, service businesses and stores that need to be shaped around the business.

A hosted ecommerce platform that handles the shop, payments and hosting in one place. Right for stores that want to sell quickly and reliably without running their own servers.

Improving the share of visitors who enquire or buy, by testing what the page says, shows and asks. The cheapest growth a site can find, because the visitors are already there.

A site that lays itself out for the screen it is on, from a phone to a large monitor, from one set of pages. Google ranks the mobile version, so it is not optional.

The server your website lives on and the care it needs: updates, backups, security and speed. Cheap hosting is where slow, hacked and abandoned sites come from.