The Beginners’ Guide: Digital Marketing Glossary

Impression’s digital marketing glossary underpins our collection of Beginners’ Guides. We aim to define terminology in all articles. However, there are some words and phrases that we use on an everyday basis that we have defined below.

Content writing

Content

Information made available by a website, apps or social media.

Copy

Copy refers to written material, in contrast to photographs or other elements of layout,
The purpose of copy is usually to encourage consumers to buy goods or services or increase brand awareness.

Long-Tail Keywords/Search Queries

This refers to keywords that are very specific to your products or services, typically made up of three or more words. Long-tail keywords or search queries also refers to inquisitive phrases that people might search such as “top trends for 2019”. Long-tail keywords typically receive less search volume, yet the search intent around them can be greater than short-tail (more generic) keywords.

Style Guide

A document provided by an agency or company for when they are writing copy to closely adhere to the brand’s personality and tone of voice.

Mobile optimisation

User Engagement

An assessment of a website visitors’ response to a product or service page, or articles and blogs, on a website.

Mobile-First

A digital marketing strategy that assumes that smartphones, tablets and brand-specific apps are consumers’ primary tools to visit a company’s website.

Googlebot

Google’s web crawling bot (sometimes known as a “spider”). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to add to the Google index.

SERPs

Search engine results pages.

Keyword Research

Conversion Rates

The percentage of visitors who take the desired action of a business’ preset goal. This varies from business to business, such as signing up to a newsletter or downloading a menu. The main goal might be to purchase something on the website or turn a visitor to the site into an offline business lead

Conversion Funnel

A phrase used in e-commerce to describe the journey a consumer takes through a search engine, navigating an e-commerce website (perhaps through blogs or articles) and finally converting to a sale. There are main stages to the conversion funnel are:

Acquisition: acquiring interested users and building awareness
Behaviours: engaged users who interact with a business
Conversion: Users who become customers and transact with a business

Local SEO Checklist

Structured Data Markup Code

A type of code that makes it easier for search engines to crawl, organize, and display your content.

Rich Snippets

Bits of text, data or visual content that appear in the abstracts or summaries of a Google search engine results page. Rich snippets are pulled from a website on the SERP, usually from one of the pages ranking in positions 1-3.

Click-Through Rates (CTRs)

Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a link to view a page or advertisement to the total number of people who saw the link.
Inbound Links
Links that appear on other domains that lead to your site.

Ranking Signals

The criteria applied by search engines when evaluating web pages in order to compile the rankings of their search results. They can relate to a website’s content, technical implementation, user signals, backlink profile or any other features the search engine considers relevant.

Sitemaps

Site Navigation

The movement from one web page to another web page within the same domain.

Content Categorisation

The organisation of web pages into their categories of purpose

Broken Links

A broken link or dead link is a link on a web page that no longer works because the website is encountering a problem. This can include an improper URL if the website has removed the linked web page, if the website no longer exists, or if the user has implemented a firewall.

Site Speed

HTTP Requests

‘Hypertext Transfer Protocol’ is a protocol that allows info to be shared and passed between your browser and the website.

Image Optimisation

Ensuring an image is high-quality and compressed enough so it loads quickly on a webpage.

Have we missed anything out? We regularly update this page as we create more beginners’ guides so let us know in the comments!