It’s quite often I sit in the office in between two teams; web development and online marketing and it’s a cross pollination of terminology, slang and inference. And when a client comes to our door, there is always an element of apprehension as we talk shop and whether or not the client actually hears something.
Around the office, there is a deep understanding of the terminology, but for you as a client or a potential client, online marketing and web development terminology might as well mean you could quite easily be in Kabul, Brazil, or Italy and have absolutely no idea what is being said or implied.
So, we’ve put together a list to help remove some of apprehension through education and provide you with a little nous for your next conversation with us, or at a minimum show your friends and family that you know what you’re talking about when it comes to the online world!
Over the next two months we’ll bring you a summary list of some of the terminology or terms from the online marketing world and the world of web development (Dev) – there’s a whole new world out there!
Today, it’s the turn of the Online Marketer. In no particular order, here is a list of some of the key terms to get your head around.
This is by no means an extensive list, but our aim is to continually update this list over time as and when we identify important terms and words that continually crop up in our discussions with you.
So here we go…
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
One of the most important pages to a business is the SERP. This page features a list of the results that are returned when a person searches for a particular keyword using a search engine such as Google.
The goal is for a business to be positioned as high as possible on this page – research[1][2]shows that those higher ranked results will receive the majority of visits, and visitation levels trail off significantly as you move lower down the page (and on to subsequent results pages).
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
You’ll hear us bandy this word around a lot – after all it is in fact core to our business – and yours! SEO is the process (and a big part of our job) to ensure that your website is visible to potential customers when they complete a search via a search engine (i.e. trying to get your business to display prominently in the SERPs). Using a multitude of different tools, strategies and activities, we take steps to improve the overall quality of a website – from what can be seen on page (design and content) and everything behind it (code), not to mention how the user interacts with it (user experience).
Better SEO = Higher quality websites = Improved positioning in the SERPs.
Organic Results
Part of what will be shown on a SERP, are organic (non-paid) results that are often localised (local results) or paid for adverts in the form of Google AdWords ads or similar depending on the search engine you’re using.
The Organic Results are those that are determined by a complex algorithm that generates the results of a search engine.
Local pack
’Local’ search results are another subset of results displayed on a SERP. The local results come about through geolocation. The key goal of a search engine to provide relevant and high quality results to the user, so if your based in Christchurch and search for a plumber, the plumbers (that your search engine determines are quality) that are located within Christchurch will be shown within what we call the ‘Local Pack’ –an area in the SERP solely dedicated to location specific search results.
AdWords
AdWords is an online advertising platform that makes it possible for you to pay to get your business listed at the top of a SERP. With AdWords you bid against other businesses on specific keywords and phrases.
The idea here is that those higher on the page will receive greater visibility, more clicks on their ads, and as such a greater opportunity to generate enquiries and ultimately sales.
While AdWords is a relatively simple platform to get started with, it’s a very tricky beast to master and the implications of getting it wrong can be huge! To do it right and prevent wasting money, give the team at Limelight Online a call to see if AdWords is suitable for your business and discuss how we can help implement a profitable campaign as part of your Online Marketing Strategy.
Example of SERP Rankings
If we use the search phrase of Chrsitchurch Plumbers, our SERP or results page looks like the following:
NAP
Not quite the afternoon siesta, NAP actually stands for Name, Address and Phone Number. Why is this important? In terms of citations of your business (citations are simply online references of your business’ name, address and phone number), it is important that any reference to the business within any online directory is consistent in terms of (you guessed it) – its name, address and phone number. The greater the consistency, the more trust Google (or your search engine) has in the business’ location and contact details and the more likely it is to feature your business prominently in their SERPs.
Bot (Robot)/Crawler/Spider
It sounds like something out of Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, but these terms refer to pieces of software used by search engines to follow links throughout the Internet and in doing so gather the content of your site for inclusion in the search engine’s index
The aim of Limelight Online is to ensure that your website’s content is of a high quality and is easily accessible to Bots that are crawling the Internet.
Duplicate Content
A search engine’s main function is to deliver the most relevant and high quality results to users. Duplicate content refers to identical content that can be found across multiple sites throughout the web. Google and other search engines dislike duplicate content because it goes against their goal of trying to provide the user with relevant, quality and unique results in response to their search query. As a website owner your aim should be to create unique, high quality content that will enhance your web presence over the long term. The presence of duplicate content (whether it is content you’ve possibly ‘borrowed’ from elsewhere or duplicate content that results from the limitations of a less than satisfactory content management system) is something you need to be aware of and you need to take steps to eradicate it. At its most extreme level, the presence of duplicate content can even result in your site being penalised by Google.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that remains relevant no matter how much time passes since its creation. It keeps away from trends, fads, fashions, or current events where interest in the topic or content may fall away.
Keyword(s)
A keyword is the basis of all search functions. When we search for a particular service, product or information, you’ll use a keyword or group of keywords to generate a list of search results (SERPs). Keywords are an essential component of the search engine landscape and as such part of the work Limelight Online does is to ensure that the right keywords are being targeted on your site in the right way.
Links
Links are simply the pieces of text or images you click on a website that take you to another page on the same site (internal links) or another website (external links). In the bad old days of SEO the quantity of links you had pointing at your website from another website was one of the key determinants of how well your site performed in the SERPs. Nowadays this is no longer the case, it’s much more about the quality of links you have pointing at your website from other reputable and on-topic websites.
Link juice
The term ‘link juice’ refers to the value or the quality of authority that is passed to your site by having other websites linking to yours. All other things aside, the more links you have pointing at your website from other credible and relevant websites, the more prominently your site will be shown in the SERPs.
PPC
PPC or Pay-Per-Click is an online advertising model whereby advertisers pay a fee each time their advert is clicked.
“In a way, PPC advertising works like a silent auction. Advertisers place bids on keywords or phrases that they think their target audience would type in a search field when they are looking for specific goods or services. When a web user types a search query into the field of a search engine that matches the advertiser’s keyword list or visits a web page with content that correlates to the keywords or phrases chosen by the advertiser, the PPC ad may be displayed on the page. In search engines, a PPC ad is generally just above or to the right of the search results where they can be easily seen.” [3]
Concluding…
We hope that you find this list helpful in regards to learning more about online marketing and some of the more common terminology and understanding that you may acquire during your time working with Limelight Online.
Feel that we’ve missed something or you’d like to know more about a particular word or term you’ve come across? Let us know in a comment below and we’ll update our list.
[1] http://training.seobook.com/google-ranking-value#2
[2] http://www.accuracast.com/news/seo-7471/first-page-listings-on-google-even-more-important/
[3] http://www.brickmarketing.com/what-is-pay-per-click.htm