SEO Consultancy- Ad Rank
- The score Google uses to decide whether and where an ad appears, based on bid, ad quality and context.
- AI Overviews
- AI-generated summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours. Relevant, editorially given backlinks help search engines judge authority.
- Bounce rate
- In GA4, the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions.
- Canonical tag
- An HTML tag telling search engines which URL is the preferred version of a page.
- Citation
- An online mention of a business's name, address and phone number, important for local SEO.
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage.
- Conversion
- A valuable action such as a form submission, call or purchase. GA4 calls these key events.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's metrics for loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Total advertising cost divided by the number of conversions.
- Cost per click (CPC)
- The amount paid for a single ad click.
- Crawling
- The process by which search engine bots discover pages by following links.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness — qualities Google's quality raters assess.
- Google Business Profile
- Google's free business listing for Maps and local results, formerly Google My Business.
- Indexing
- Storing a page in a search engine's database so it can appear in results.
- Keyword
- A word or phrase people type into a search engine.
- Landing page
- The page a visitor arrives on, often designed for a specific campaign.
- Meta description
- A short HTML summary of a page that may be shown in search results.
- Negative keyword
- A term that stops a PPC ad showing for searches containing it.
- Organic traffic
- Visitors who arrive from unpaid search results.
- PBN (private blog network)
- A network of sites built to create links artificially. Breaches search engine spam policies.
- PPC (pay-per-click)
- Advertising where you pay each time someone clicks your ad.
- Quality Score
- Google Ads' 1–10 estimate of ad and landing page quality for a keyword.
- ROAS (return on ad spend)
- Revenue from ads divided by ad cost.
- ROI (return on investment)
- Profit from an activity relative to its cost.
- Schema markup
- Structured data code that describes page content to search engines.
- Search intent
- The underlying goal behind a search: informational, commercial, transactional or navigational.
- SEO (search engine optimisation)
- Improving a website so it earns more visibility in unpaid search results.
- SERP
- Search engine results page.
- UTM parameters
- Tags added to URLs so analytics tools can attribute visits to specific campaigns.
Glossary
Digital Marketing Glossary: Essential Terms Defined
Digital marketing is full of jargon. This glossary explains the terms you are most likely to meet when working on SEO, PPC, analytics and AI, in plain English.
Published by SEO Consultancy · Last reviewed
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