The A-Z of digital marketing terms

As new technologies surface, the digital marketing glossary changes constantly and terminology is evolving in order to keep up with and to exploit the newest digital tools. The digital marketing language is filled with abbreviations, acronyms and terminology and sometimes it can be hard to keep up with the entire marketing lingo.

So, do you want to strengthen your marketing vocabulary? You are at the right place. Here I have created a list of the most common digital marketing terms and definitions in alphabetical order as a quick reference guide.

Backlinks

These are the links that go to your website from another website on the internet, that help earn authority in search engines. 

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visitors who left your website without taking an action. For example, if someone visited one of your pages and then left your site without visiting another page.

Citations

Also known as a “NAP”, a citation is an online reference to a local business’s name, address and phone number.

Conversion Rate

The ratio of website visits to conversions. For example, if 100 people click onto a product page but only 10 people buy it, the conversion rate is 10%.

Crawling

The process search engines take to discover new web pages.

Google My Business

A free local business listing available from Google.

HTML

This stands for “HyperText Markup Language”. It is the language used to create website pages.

Image Alt Text

The alternative text that describes the image, which is shown when an image fails to load.

Indexing

The storing and organizing of all the content found from crawling.

Internal Links

These are links on your own website that point to other pages on the same site.

Keyword Difficulty

The keyword difficulty is an estimate of how difficult it will be to rank in search results for a particular term.

Keyword Stuffing

Spamming keywords in your content to try and get a better ranking. This can lead to Google penalizing your website.

KPI

This stands for “Key Performance Indicator”. It is a measurable value that indicates how effectively a company is achieving a goal.

Link Building

The process of earning backlinks to your website in order to increase your site’s authority in search engines.

Long Tail Keywords

These are longer keywords, usually three or more words long, and they are more specific than generic keywords.

Meta Descriptions

HTML elements that describe the content of a web page. They appear in search results and are commonly used to entice the user to click onto your page.

Organic

An organic search engine ranking is earned, rather than being a paid advertisement.

Query

This is simply the words typed into a search engine to perform a search.

Ranking

Displaying search results in order of relevance to the search query.

Relevance

The “relevance” describes how much the content within a webpage corresponds to the search term.

Robots.txt

This is a file that lets search engines know which web pages they should and shouldn’t crawl.

Schema Markup

This is a form of microdata. When added to a webpage it creates an enhanced description which appears in search results.

Search Intent

The search intent is the reason behind why a user is making their search.

Search Volume

The amount of times a particular keyword is searched in search engines.

SERP

This stands for “Search Engine Results Page”. It is the page that displays the search results.

Sitemap

The sitemap is the list of pages published within a website.

SSL Certificate

SSL stands for “Secure Socket Layer”. This is used to encrypt and secure data passed between the website and the web browser.

Structure Data

Structured Data is a piece of code that gives search engines additional information about your web page. Helps to create rich results for your web page.

Schema.org is a vocabulary that can be used with many different markup languages, including Microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD.

Traffic

This is simply the amount of visitors a website receives.

URL

This stands for “Uniform Resource Locator”. It is used to specify the addresses for content on the web.

The above terms can help you optimize your digital marketing language and empower your knowledge to better understand the digital marketing landscape. As the digital language is evolving to suit the changing interests of the audience, stay tuned for future editions that will cover the most recent trends.