50+ Digital Marketing Terms I Wish I Knew When I Started

I’ve been a professional copywriter, full-time, for almost 5 years now, and I’ve written for clients in lots of spaces, but when I first started I was greener than an early spring fiddlehead. The truth is, though I was proficient as a writer when I started in digital marketing, I really knew next to nothing about digital marketing as a general entity. 

I’ve come a long way, and learning more about it from my coworkers has made me not only a better writer, but a more effective strategist, and made me much better at communicating with the clients whom I serve. 

I might have gotten off to a faster start if I knew some of these terms out of the gate. Hopefully this collection of digital marketing terms will kickstart your own efforts. 

SEO 

Search engine optimization, better known as SEO, is a collection of practices that improve ranking factors (see below) so that a website ranks higher in the search engine results (also, see below). SEO is broadly categorized into 4 main pillars, being content, technical SEO, and on and off-page SEO. 

In layman’s terms, the websites that show up in the organic search results when you type something into Google (right below the ads), those websites have “good” SEO.

SEM

Search engine marketing, an umbrella of all digital marketing channels that includes SEO and PPC, as well as all other channels that rely on a search engine to connect users with results.

PPC 

Pay-per-click; this is a channel through which users bid on keywords and pay for a position at the top of the search engine results pages, rather than earning it organically. Users pay when a visitor clicks on an ad or a listing. 

SMM

Social media marketing; a lot more obvious when the initialism is spelled out. 

ROI 

Return on investment; this metric gives a measurement (usually measured as a percentage) of how much money a marketer makes for each dollar invested. If a company earns 2 dollars for every 1 dollar spent on marketing, the ROI for that effort is 200%.

ROAS 

Return on ad spend, effectively the same as ROI except restricted to the dollars spent on a single ad campaign. If it is above 1, the campaign is profitable and is covering its costs. Usually it is represented as 1.5x, 2x, etc.

Conversion

Simply, a conversion is an action that you want a user to take. For many clients in eCommerce, a conversion is equivalent to a sale, but a conversion could also be a form fill, a download, or really, anything else. 

CRO

Conversion rate optimization, the process of addressing all the possible barriers to conversion that exist on an eCommerce website. This could include but is not limited to elimination of tech debt, improving page speeds, boosting security, and optimizing the checkout process. 

CTA

Call to action, a statement that spurs a user to do something. Could be as simple as “buy now” or “add to cart” but could also be much more complex or nuanced. 

KPI

Key performance indicators; this is one I actually knew starting out, but it is helpful to include here, anyway. These are the metrics that a company, agency, or its client uses to determine and measure the success of marketing efforts. 

Impression

An impression, usually used in SEO, is the number of users that see a listing. With respect to SEO, a listing gets one impression if a user searches and the listing populates in the results on the user’s device or screen. This is one of the ones I really wish I knew when I started as one of the first things to see improvements in an SEO is impressions. 

Click-Through Rate 

The portion of impressions that result in clicks, calculated by clicks divided by impressions. The average eCommerce click through rate (for organic listings) is somewhere between .5% and 2.5%, although this figure can vary significantly. 

Landing Page 

A landing page is a web page that a user lands on; if a user searches something and clicks on the result in the results, that page is a landing page. A landing page could also be the page to which an ad sends a user. 

LPO

Landing page optimization, or the collective process of improving a landing page to encourage a visitor to take a desired action, such as commit a purchase or download a guide. 

Backlink

A backlink is a link pointing from one third-party domain to another. The website receiving the link gets a boost in credibility from search engines like Google. In SEO, we call this “link juice” and it usually increases visibility and domain authority to the page (or website) receiving the link.

Ranking Signal/Ranking Factor

A ranking signal, also known as a ranking factor, is a criterion Google uses to assign organic rankings. Apparently, there are over 200 ranking factors, including but not limited to domain age, keyword density, page titles, internal and external links, speed, security, mobile accessibility, security, quality, age, and relevance of content, and many, many others. 

Current Position

The current position is the position, in the search engine results pages, that a page currently occupies.

Average Position 

The average position is the aggregated average of all positions for all pages on a website. For instance, an average position of 9.0 indicates that most pages on the website show up on page one for the keywords for which they are currently ranked. In other words, if every single indexed page on the website had the same ranking, it would appear on page one, spot nine.

SERP

Search engine results page; this is the page that populates when you type something into Google and search. 

Search Query

A search query is an entry into a search engine’s search bar. It could be a single keyword or a fully phrased question. 

Keyword Volume 

Keyword volume is the number of times a keyword is searched, typically segmented by region and per month. 

Keyword Difficulty 

Keyword difficulty is a metric of how difficult (subjectively) it is to compete for a given search term, based on volume, how many other domains rank for the keyword, and other factors. Difficulty below 30 is often attainable for most domains that are unfettered by technical errors or stiff competition. 

Search Intent 

Every keyword has a search intent, which is what users expect to accomplish when they search. The main intents are navigational, informative, commercial, and transactional. In the latter two cases, users expect to purchase something when they search for the related terms. These are the search intents we focus on primarily in SEO. 

Metadata

Metadata is a catch-all phrase that encompasses meta titles and meta descriptions, which are the little snippets that appear underneath a listing in the SERPs and give a bit of context about the page. SEO experts talk about metadata because they are ranking signals. 

Crawling

Crawling is the process of a search engine using its bots or “spiders” to “scrape” a page, looking for ranking signals. Depending on what they find, they will determine whether or not to index the page, and for which keywords and queries. Websites are granted a “crawl budget” which is the number of times in a given window a search engine will crawl the website. If the website adds pages at a rate that exceeds the crawl budget, it will experience indexing issues and some pages may not show up in the search results. 

Indexing

Indexing is the process of a search engine crawling a web page or domain and assigning rankings. A page is indexed if it appears on the search engine for some search term. If a page is not indexed, it will not show up no matter what you search for. Some pages with issues will not get indexed. If your website chews up its crawl budget, you may need to go into Google Search Console, inspect the URL and manually request indexing. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that leave a page without taking any additional steps. If someone visits a page and then leaves without doing anything else, that is considered a bounce. Bounce rates for blogs are pretty high, around 70% to 80%, whereas bounce rates are generally lower for eCommerce websites, somewhere around 45% on average. With that said, for content driven sites, a high bounce rate is usually acceptable because the action you want users to take is simply to consume the content. 

UX

UX is short for user experience, which is a subjective rating of how good or bad of an effect a website produces on a visitor. A website will produce a good UX if it has pleasing visual elements, is not confusing, has portals/pages that are easy to access, loads quickly, is secure, and is easy to navigate. 

UI

User interface, or the manner in which a user interacts with a website. Websites with a good UI usually produce a good UX. UI is important because it can either make for a very positive or very negative experience. 

Organic Marketing 

Organic marketing consists of all the channels and strategies that don’t require a user to pay directly to play. Organic marketing consists chiefly of SEO, content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing. Paid search marketing, including PPC and paid social media advertising, is the opposite. Organic marketing channels usually take longer to generate results than paid marketing strategies but at the same time they often produce much higher returns. 

Retargeting/Remarketing

This is the process of advertising to users that are familiar with or have interacted with your website or its pages already. Ads are remarketed if the user has already seen the website or the ads, and may have interest. It is a form of warm marketing, as opposed to cold marketers, as the user is likely familiar with the brand already. 

CPC 

Cost-per-click, or how much one pays for each click to a web page, or through an ad, on average. Generally, digital marketers work to make cost per click as long as possible, as lower costs per click are usually associated with higher returns on ad spend or investment. 

CPA 

Cost-per-acquisition, or how much one must pay to acquire a single customer, all in. Like CPC, most digital marketers try to drive down CPA as far as reasonably possible. 

DA

DA, or domain authority is a subjective metric that accounts for how much “credibility” a domain has. The higher the domain authority, the easier it will be for that domain to come into ranking for any given keyword. When assigning rankings to domains, if every other aspect is a draw, the search engine will likely award the higher ranking to the domain with the higher authority. While domain authority varies considerably, most digital marketers would agree that anything between 30 and 50 is average, and about 50 is very good. It also takes a long time to build domain authority. 

Long-Tail Keyword

A long-tail keyword is a query that consists of multiple words. Some long-tail keywords are full questions. “Best hiking shoes for wet weather” is a long-tail keyword. Generally, the longer the tail of the keyword, the easier it will be to rank for the keyword. 

Short-Tail Keyword

A short-tail keyword is a query that is a single word or sometimes a few words. It is never a complete phrase or question. “Hiking shoes” is an example of a short-tail keyword. As a general observation, the shorter the tail of the keyword, the more competitive it will be, but shorter tail keywords usually correspond to higher volumes, too. 

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the process of adding keywords to a page, title, metadata field, or a piece of copy in the attempt to get it to rank. Back in the day this was an effective technique for getting more impressions but today it is recognized as a black hat technique (see below) and if Google catches you doing it your website will actually get a penalty. 

Social Proof 

Social proof is the collection of all instances/incidences of your brand making an appearance, in some form or other, on some social media platform. Comments on your posts, posts in which your brand is tagged, images of your products, reviews, or other engagements with your accounts are all forms of social proof. Bear in mind that social proof can be both positive and negative. 

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is the term SEO experts and other marketers apply to techniques that, while they might once have been effective, or even are still effective in the short term, will incur a penalty in the long term, or when the search engine finds them out. Examples of black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, publishing spam content, low quality backlinks or paying for backlinks, or using private blog networks. Do not engage in or pay for black hat SEO; it will cost you far more in the long run to clean up the aftermath. 

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is the term used for “appropriate” and effective SEO techniques. The single best white hat SEO strategy is publishing high-quality, informative, reputable, accurate content that answers a lot of high-volume search queries, but there are many others. White hat SEO is expensive and requires a great deal of effort and strategy, but the payoff is immense. 

Anchor Text 

Anchor text is the text used for a hyperlink. It matters because the keywords used in anchor text can transfer authority to the page to which they’re linking. For instance, by linking to our eCommerce SEO page using the exact match keyword “eCommerce SEO” I’m signaling to Google that the page I’m linking to is an authority relevant to that keyword. 

Alt Text 

Alt text, or alternative text, is the text that is used to verbally describe what an image shows. While the purpose of alt text is to increase accessibility by describing to individuals with disabilities what the image shows, Google also uses it as a ranking factor. Adding alt text to a page’s images increases the likelihood that the page will be indexed for those keywords, especially in the image results. 

Direct Traffic 

Direct traffic is traffic that finds a website by searching for a specific URL. If a user gets to 1Digital Agency by searching for “eCommerce SEO,” that’s organic; if he or she gets there by typing in the URL, that’s direct. 

Rich Snippet 

A rich snippet is a blurb that appears at the top of the search engine results pages by searching a query. Most rich snippets populate for long-tail keywords and questions in an attempt to answer them. If a page gets a rich snippet, that means the content on that page is not only relevant but well-optimized for SEO. 

People Also Ask

The “People Also Ask” section of the Google search engine results pages consists of expandable sections with questions similar to your that “people also ask,” hence the name. Like a rich snippet, if a page shows up in the People Also Ask section, that page is not only relevant but optimized for SEO. 

Google AI Overview

The Google AI Overview is an experimental new piece of the search engine results pages that uses an AI engine to synthesize a coherent answer to a user query by scraping and amalgamating information from several different sources. Oftentimes the answers are comically bad, inaccurate, or dangerously false, but we can expect it (hopefully) to improve with time. 

GSC

Google Search Console, an invaluable tool for search engine marketers, through which you can see organic impressions, clicks, click through rates, and average position, as a whole or by URL. You can also check for broken links, backlinks, and much more. In Google Search Console, you can also see the top keywords for which the main landing pages on your website are ranking. 

GA

Google Analytics, arguably the most important tool for any website admin or search engine marketer. The functionality of Google Analytics not only merits an entire post, but a series of posts, so I won’t get too involved here. Nonetheless, you can use it to see traffic to a website, by source and by page, by segment, along with conversion value, and other important metrics like pages per session, time on page, origin of traffic, and much more. 

PBN

A PBN, or a private blog network, is a privately owned content distribution system. These have often been used in the past by black hat marketers to create what appeared to be organically earned backlinks, when in reality they were really bought and artificially cultivated. Getting caught using a private blog network can incur serious SEO penalties for a website. 

Quality Score

Quality score is a metric used to qualify the relevance and efficacy of an ad used in Google AdWords. The higher the quality score, the better. 

Referral Traffic 

Referral traffic is traffic that lands on a domain through a backlink. It, along with higher domain authority, is one of the main reasons to build backlinks. 

Time on Page 

Time on page is a ranking factor that is exactly what it sounds like; how long a user spends on a specific page after clicking through to it. A higher time on page indicates that a user is interested in the content or otherwise interacting with the page and is a good thing. A higher time on page also usually results in higher organic rankings. 

Go Forth and Conquer 

Now that you know more than 50 digital marketing terms that I did not know when I started, get out there and impress your coworkers and clients with your newfound knowledge. I for one wish I knew these when I started! 

Also, please excuse the order of these entries. I added to and re-ordered this list and only realized after the fact that it could have been better arranged. That may be an effort for another time. For the present, I hope you picked up a thing or two.