Do you currently have an Internet marketing campaign, but want to learn more about the terminology used in the industry? Or is your business interested in creating an internet marketing campaign, but aren’t sure about the slang used by the professionals? We’re here to help.
Here’s our guide to 27 Internet marketing terms you should know – including their definition and their importance in the world of Internet marketing.
Let’s start with the basics of Internet marketing
In this section, we’ll cover the different kinds of Internet marketing, so that the more detailed terms make sense later.
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of improving a site’s ranking and visibility in SERPs. SEO is done through enhanced tactics, which improve the quality of your site in the eyes of searchers and search engines.
There are also different kinds of SEO, including:
Local SEO: SEO that focuses on improving local business rankings and helps businesses better promote their products and services to local searchers
On-page SEO: SEO that takes place on a site’s individual pages and improves elements such as content and internal linking
Off-page SEO: SEO that takes place outside of a site’s domain and improves elements such as external or backlinks
2. Pay-per-click (PPC)
Pay-per-click, or PPC, ads are listed on the side or top of SERPs. If you implement a PPC strategy, you will pay each time a searcher clicks on your ad. PPC is a way of paying Google in order to get higher rankings in SERPs by way of ads, in contrast to using SEO and earning organic results.
3. Content marketing
Content marketing is an important part of SEO for your site. Content marketing helps you gain conversions through creating and sharing posts, images, blogs, videos or other informative elements that are considered by searchers to be valuable.
4. Email marketing
Email marketing involves creating and sending out emails to current or potential customers. This form of direct marketing revolves around creating and updating a database of contact information, which can be collected when visitors to your site fill out a form or directly subscribe to your emails. Wanting to improve your email marketing strategy? Try sending out welcome emails when someone new subscribes to your email list or send out emails during the holiday season to highlight your seasonal specials.
5. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a form of marketing that allows users to interact through different social platforms. This form of marketing is a great way to gain traffic to your site by encouraging followers to share and comment on your posts. It’s also an easy way to reach large groups of people at once!
6. Web design
Creating an organized and user-friendly web design is an important part of any internet marketing strategy. Building a site that promotes your products or services can be done by creating an engaging and strong architecture. Try different layouts, colors, fonts and interactive features and see what visitors to your site like the most. Remember to keep SEO in mind when creating and updating your web design.
Other important terms
Now that we’ve covered the different kinds of Internet marketing, let’s dive into the more detailed terms that you should know.
7. AdWords
AdWords is Google’s online advertising network. Through this service, you can set a budget and pay for your ads as they are clicked (at the cost-per-click amount). Your ad placement is based on a variety of factors including click-through-rate, bid, quality score and keywords.
8. Analytics
Analytics is Google’s proprietary program for tracking and data collection. The service collects all the information metrics for your business such as demographics, traffic channels, page views, conversions, and goals. It’s extremely useful to any marketing campaign because it allows you to see how pages on your site are performing, how many people have visited your site, the bounce rate of each page, the time spent on each page, and more.
9. Anchor text
Anchor text is text in a hyperlink that you can click on to take you to another page or another site. Anchor text affects your SEO, so it’s important to make sure your anchor text relates to the page or site you are linking to when optimizing your content pages.
10. Backlink
Backlinks are links located on pages outside of your domain that point to your site. Creating quality backlinks is an important part of off-page SEO. An important note to remember is that Google values the quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks.
11. Blog
A blog is a type of content that you can use to market your business. Including a blog on your site is great for increasing the amount of up-to-date content on your site – and Google loves them because it acts as a steady flow of new information on your website. Blogs can be published directly on your site and can be about anything. They also normally include ways for users to interact such as an area to comment or share the content on social media.
12. Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of searchers who visit your site and leave it with only have visited one page. Paying attention to bounce rates can help you see when your content is out of date or does not match the searcher intent. If your pages have a high bounce rate, see what you can update or change to keep users on your site for a longer period of time.
13. Breadcrumb navigation
Breadcrumb navigation refers to the visual trail of different pages that a user navigates through such as “Home > Products > Shoes > Women’s Sneakers”. Good breadcrumb navigation plays a part in creating an overall great structure for your site. It also helps users navigate back to pages they have already visited without having to start from your homepage again.
14. Broken link
Broken links are links that are linked to other pages or sites, but no longer work. Reasons for broken links include changed URLs or the site no longer exists. Lots of broken links in your site’s content can negatively impact your SEO.
15. Click-through-rate (CTR)
Click-through-rate refers to the number of searchers who click on your ad per the number of impressions. CTR is a great way to measure the success of your ads – the higher the CTR, the more effective your ad is to searchers.
16. Content management system (CMS)
A content management system refers to the type of software your site uses to create and easily manage all of your content. Commonly used content management systems include WordPress and Magento.
17. Conversion rate
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of users who convert on your site. Conversions can be based on anything you deem to be valuable, such as the number of users who fill out a contact sheet. If you have 10 visitors out of 100 fill out a contact sheet, your conversion rate is 10%. The higher the conversion rate, the better!
18. Cost-per-click (CPC)
Cost per click is the amount you pay each time a searcher clicks on your ad in the search engine results pages. Cost per click is a way to measure the effectiveness of your ad budget in your PPC campaign.
19. Crawler
A search engine crawler crawls your pages on your site in order to index them for the search engine results pages. It’s important to make sure your site can be crawled by crawlers, also known as spiders or bots. This can be done by creating or updating your Robots.txt page.
20. External link
External links are links in your site’s content that send users to another site rather than another page on your site. The more quality external links you have, the better your SEO.
21. Headings
Headings, also known as H tags, are an important part of HTML. Ranging from H1 to H6, creating descriptive and keyword-rich headers will help your SEO.
22. Indexing
Indexing is the process of search engines crawling pages on your site and collecting and analyzing the data in order to determine the SERPs. You can create lines in your robots.txt file to specify which pages you want to be indexed or not.
23. Internal links
Internal links are links in your site’s content that send users to another page on your site. The more quality internal links you have, the better your SEO.
24. Keywords
Keywords are the word or phrase that searchers type into the search bar in order to find the information they are looking for. Keywords can be either short-tail, such as “shoes” or long-tail, such as “women’s Adidas running shoes.” It’s important to have an ongoing list of target keywords and use them in multiple areas of your SEO strategy in order to increase the amount of qualified traffic to your site.
25. Landing page
A landing page is the page that searchers land on when they click on a search result or ad. It’s important to make sure your landing page matches user intent. For example, if a searcher clicks on a result that says “shop playground equipment” it should take them to page on your site where they can shop your playground equipment.
26. Lead generation
A lead is someone who has an interest in a product or service that your business has to offer. Lead generation is the process of identifying and implementing ways to increase the number of people who have interest in your business. Lead generation is also a popular metric to use when creating and tracking goals.
27. Local search
Local search shows results to searchers based on their location. For example, local search helps searchers find restaurants and other business listings in their local area without having to type in their specific location.
28. Meta description
A meta description is the description shown on the SERPs and tells searchers what to expect if they visit your site. Including keywords and action phrases such as “click here to learn more” are two good practices for improving your meta descriptions and in-turn your SEO.
29. Quality score (QS)
Quality score is a variable used in Google AdWords that plays a role in how your ad shows up in SERPs. One way to increase your quality score is making sure your landing page matches searchers’ intent.
30. Return on investment (ROI)
ROI shows if your investment is profitable or not. ROI is calculated by dividing the cost by revenue.
31. Robots.txt
Your site’s robots.txt tells search engines what they should and should not crawl. It’s important to make sure your site has a robots.txt and that it’s up-to-date in order to improve your SEO.
32. Search engine results page (SERP)
Search engine results page is the page that generates after a searcher types in their search query. Your site’s ranking on the SERPs can be controlled by SEO and PPC strategies.
33. Title tag
Title tags act as the name of your site. They are shown as the headline for your site in the SERPs and are listed in the tab in your browser. Creating descriptive and keyword-rich title tags is good SEO practice.
Do you have any terms to add to our list?
Did you find our list of marketing terms helpful? Do you have any important marketing terms to add to our list?
Let us know in the comments below, or contact us for more information on inbound marketing!