Digital marketing glossary

Search

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the practice of improving a website so that it appears more prominently in the unpaid results of search engines such as Google and Bing. It covers technical health, content quality and external signals such as links. Unlike paid advertising, traffic earned through SEO is not bought per click, though the work behind it takes time and resource.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the work of making a website easy for search engines to crawl, render and index, as distinct from writing its content. Typical tasks include fixing broken redirects, managing XML sitemaps and robots.txt, resolving duplicate URLs with canonical tags, and improving page speed. Much of it overlaps with ordinary web development quality.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of improving visibility for searches with a geographic element, such as “plumber in Oldham” or searches made on a mobile device near a business. It focuses on the Google Business Profile listing, consistent name, address and phone details across directories, local reviews and location-relevant pages. It matters most to businesses serving a defined catchment area, and is a common focus of local search work.

Keyword research

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases people actually type or speak into search engines, then estimating their demand, competitiveness and commercial value. It informs which pages a site needs and how they should be framed. A UK business might find, for example, that “trainers” and “sneakers” describe the same product but attract very different volumes of British search traffic.

Backlink

A backlink is a hyperlink on one website that points to a page on another website. Search engines treat backlinks as a signal of credibility, on the reasoning that editorially given links from trusted sites suggest the destination is worth showing. Relevance and genuine editorial intent matter more than raw volume, and links bought purely to manipulate rankings breach Google’s spam policies.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, a set of qualities described in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. It is not a score a page receives, but a framework human raters use to judge whether content is helpful and dependable. Practical signals include named authors with relevant credentials, clear sourcing, and transparent contact and ownership details.

Search intent

Search intent refers to the underlying goal behind a search query: what the person actually wants when they type it. It is commonly grouped as informational, navigational, commercial investigation and transactional. Matching intent decides page format as much as topic, so a query like “best CRM” usually rewards a comparison article rather than a product page, whatever the keyword volume suggests.

Paid Media

PPC

PPC, or pay-per-click, is an advertising model in which the advertiser is charged only when someone clicks the advert rather than when it is merely displayed. It covers search ads, shopping ads and many social placements. Because budget is spent on clicks, PPC campaigns can be switched on quickly and measured directly against enquiries or sales.

Google Ads

Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform, through which businesses bid to show adverts on Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and partner sites across the Display Network. Advertisers set budgets in their own currency, such as GBP, and choose campaign types and bidding strategies. It is the largest single source of paid search traffic for most UK advertisers.

Quality Score

Quality Score is a diagnostic rating in Google Ads, reported from 1 to 10 at keyword level, estimating how relevant an advert, keyword and landing page are to the searcher. It is built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. It is a guide rather than a live auction input, but the underlying qualities do affect ad rank and cost.

ROAS

ROAS, or return on ad spend, is revenue generated by advertising divided by the cost of that advertising, usually expressed as a ratio or percentage. Spending £2,000 to produce £8,000 of revenue gives a ROAS of 4:1. It measures top-line efficiency only, so profitability also depends on margin, delivery costs and returns, which ROAS does not account for.

CPC

CPC, or cost per click, is the amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks one of their adverts. Average CPC is total spend divided by clicks. Rates vary widely by sector and competition, so a comparison across industries is rarely meaningful. CPC is an input cost, not a result: a low CPC is only useful if those clicks convert.

Remarketing

Remarketing, also called retargeting, is advertising shown to people who have already interacted with a business, typically visitors to its website or app or members of an uploaded customer list. It aims to bring back users who did not convert first time. In the UK, the cookies or similar identifiers used for it generally require consent under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, known as PECR.

Performance Max

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that uses a single campaign to serve adverts across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, with placement and bidding handled automatically towards a chosen conversion goal. Advertisers supply assets, audience signals and a product feed rather than managing individual placements, which suits ecommerce catalogues but offers less granular control.

Analytics & Tracking

GA4

GA4, or Google Analytics 4, is the current version of Google Analytics and measures website and app activity as a stream of events rather than the session-and-pageview model used by its predecessor. Universal Analytics stopped processing new data in July 2023. Setting up GA4 properly means defining which events count as conversions, since almost nothing of commercial value is tracked by default.

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager, often shortened to GTM, is a free tag management system that lets marketers add and update tracking code on a website through a web interface, without editing the site’s source each time. Tags fire based on triggers such as a page view or form submission. It deploys tracking; it does not itself report data or replace an analytics tool.

Conversion tracking

Conversion tracking is the practice of recording when a visitor completes an action a business considers valuable, such as submitting an enquiry form, ringing a tracked number or placing an order. Without it, advertising and SEO can only be judged on traffic. Accurate conversion definitions are the foundation of every other performance metric, including cost per acquisition and return on ad spend.

Attribution

Attribution is the method used to assign credit for a conversion across the different marketing touchpoints a customer encountered before converting. Last-click attribution credits only the final interaction, while data-driven and position-based models distribute credit across the journey. No model is objectively correct; each is an assumption, which is why reported channel performance changes when the model does.

Bounce rate and engagement rate

Bounce rate is the share of sessions in which a visitor leaves without a further recorded interaction, a metric defined by Universal Analytics. GA4 instead reports engagement rate: the share of sessions lasting over ten seconds, containing a conversion event or including at least two page views. Bounce rate in GA4 is simply the inverse of engagement rate, so the two are not comparable across platforms.

UTM parameters

UTM parameters are tags appended to a URL’s query string, such as utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, that tell analytics tools where a visit came from. They are added to links in emails, social posts and paid adverts. Consistent lower-case naming matters, because analytics platforms treat differing capitalisation as separate sources and fragment the reporting.

Server-side tracking

Server-side tracking is a setup in which analytics and advertising data is sent from the website visitor’s browser to a server the business controls, which then forwards it to platforms such as GA4 or Google Ads. It improves data resilience against browser restrictions and gives more control over what is shared. It does not remove the need for valid consent, and implementation is more involved than a browser-only tag.

Web & Conversion

CRO

CRO, or conversion rate optimisation, is the practice of increasing the proportion of website visitors who complete a desired action, using research, testing and iteration rather than buying more traffic. It draws on analytics, session recordings, user testing and heuristic review. Because CRO improves the value of existing visits, gains compound with every other acquisition channel.

A/B testing

A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a page or element by showing each to a randomly split share of visitors and measuring which produces more of the desired outcome. Results need enough traffic and enough time to be statistically reliable, and tests that are stopped early frequently mislead. It is the most common form of structured experimentation online.

Landing page

A landing page is the page a visitor first arrives on from a specific campaign, advert or link, usually built around one objective with minimal distraction. Unlike a general homepage, it is written to match the promise of the advert or email that sent the visitor. Matching its message to the ad copy is one of the strongest influences on conversion rate.

Call to action

A call to action, abbreviated CTA, is the instruction that tells a visitor what to do next, expressed as a button, link or line of copy such as “Request a quote”. Effective calls to action are specific about the outcome and the effort involved. Vague wording such as “Submit” gives the reader no reason to act and no idea what follows.

User experience

User experience, usually shortened to UX, refers to the whole of a person’s experience of using a product, website or service, including how easy it is to understand, navigate and complete tasks. It encompasses information architecture, content clarity and accessibility, not just visual design. Poor UX shows up commercially as abandoned forms, repeat support enquiries and low return visits.

Schema markup

Schema markup is structured data added to a web page’s code, usually in JSON-LD format and following the shared Schema.org vocabulary, that describes the page’s content explicitly to machines. It can tell a search engine that a page is a recipe, a product with a price in GBP or a local business with opening hours. It may enable rich results, though it never guarantees them.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of Google metrics measuring real-world page experience: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability. They are assessed from field data collected from Chrome users. They form a minor ranking signal, but their bigger value is that slow, unstable pages lose visitors regardless of ranking.

Content & Social

Content marketing

Content marketing is the practice of attracting and retaining a defined audience by publishing genuinely useful material, such as articles, guides, videos or tools, rather than by advertising directly. The commercial return comes indirectly, through search visibility, trust and repeat attention. Sustained content programmes typically take months to show results, which is why they are often underfunded.

Topic cluster

A topic cluster is a content structure in which one broad pillar page covering a subject links to, and is linked back from, a group of narrower pages addressing specific aspects of it. The aim is to cover a subject comprehensively and signal that coverage through internal linking. It also stops several pages competing against each other for the same query.

Lead magnet

A lead magnet is a piece of content or a tool offered in exchange for a visitor’s contact details, such as a checklist, template, calculator or report. Its purpose is to convert anonymous traffic into identifiable prospects. Under UK GDPR, the details collected may only be used for purposes explained at the point of collection, and marketing emails to consumers require consent under PECR.

Organic reach

Organic reach is the number of unique people who see a piece of social media content without any paid promotion behind it. It is determined by each platform’s ranking algorithm rather than by follower count alone. Organic reach on the major established networks has declined substantially over the past decade, which is why most brands now combine organic posting with paid distribution.

Social listening

Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media, forums and review sites for mentions of a brand, its competitors, or topics relevant to its market, then analysing what those conversations reveal. It goes beyond replying to tagged mentions, capturing untagged discussion too. Findings commonly feed product decisions and social strategy as well as customer service.

AI & Automation

Large language model

A large language model, or LLM, is an artificial intelligence system trained on very large quantities of text to predict and generate language, which allows it to answer questions, summarise and write. Examples include the models behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Outputs are probabilistic rather than retrieved from a database, so a model can state something fluent and confident that is factually wrong.

AI Overviews

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google displays at the top of some search results pages, drawing on web sources and linking out to them. They answer the query directly within the results page. Their presence can reduce clicks to the sites cited, particularly for straightforward informational queries, while citation within an overview has become a visibility goal in its own right.

Generative engine optimisation

Generative engine optimisation, abbreviated GEO, is the practice of making content more likely to be surfaced and cited by AI systems such as AI Overviews, ChatGPT and other assistants, rather than only by conventional search rankings. In practice it favours clear factual statements, self-contained answers, consistent entity information and credible sourcing, and overlaps substantially with established search and AI visibility work.

AI chatbot

An AI chatbot is a conversational interface, usually powered by a large language model, that answers user questions in natural language on a website, app or messaging channel. Unlike older rule-based bots following fixed decision trees, it can handle unanticipated phrasing. Reliability depends on grounding it in the organisation’s own verified content and defining clearly when it should hand over to a person.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation refers to software that carries out marketing tasks and sequences automatically based on rules or triggers, such as sending a follow-up email when someone downloads a guide, or scoring and routing leads to sales. It reduces manual work and improves response times. Automated messages remain subject to UK GDPR and PECR, and the Information Commissioner’s Office enforces both.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file, placed at the root of a website, that offers AI systems a curated, Markdown-formatted map of a site’s most important content. It is a community proposal rather than an agreed standard, and support among AI providers is limited and voluntary. It is not a permissions file, so it neither blocks nor authorises crawling in the way robots.txt attempts to.