Digital marketing is one of those industries that feels like it comes with its own language. From acronyms to platform and software names, there are plenty of terms to wrap your head around.
Luckily, we’ve picked out the top ten digital marketing buzzwords you need to know the meaning of to help make sense of online marketing.
Table of Contents
Impression & impression share
“Impression” is commonly used in PPC work and is attributed to the number of times your ad has been shown. In terms of digital marketing buzzwords, “impression” is one of those that can be easily confused for something else – reach. Reach is a metric that tells you the number of unique times your content or ad has been viewed.
Impression tells you the number of times the ad has been displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked on or even looked at by the user.
“Impression share” is something different. This specifies the percentage of times users have viewed an advertiser’s ad in relation to the total possible amounts of times the ad could have been seen.
PPC
PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is a form of digital marketing the focuses on the use of ads on websites and social media pages. When you place an ad, you are charged money every time a user clicks on it. It is most commonly used alongside Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. PPC is great for e-commerce companies who are looking to increase their conversion rate.
White/Black hat SEO
You may have heard this term and wondered what it means. Simply put, there are legitimate ways of organically improving your SEO rankings and scores – white hat SEO. If you are trying to cheat the system, such as paying for bulk backlinks, you are using a black hat SEO technique.
Of course, you should always aim to use white hat SEO methods as this is a sustainable, long-term way of growing your online presence. Black hat SEO may give you immediate results but as soon as you stop the work, you will notice a drop in performance.
Remarketing
As part of PPC, remarketing, sometimes referred to as retargeting, allows you to show ads to users who have already visited your site. When a user visits your site, a small piece of data is collected, these are called ‘cookies’. This then enables ads for your site to appear to the same user across different websites or pages.
It’s sometimes easier to imagine remarketing ads as little reminders to a user that they should go back and look at your site again.
Backlink
A backlink is when one website uses a hyperlink directing to another website. Backlinks are a huge factor when it comes to SEO and ranking in search engines. The more backlinks your site has, the more Google recognises it as being a trustworthy and reputable site. This is essential when it comes to organic search.
Backlinks can be gained by link building, press releases and guest posting, however, it’s important to stick to those all-important white hat SEO techniques.
Do/Nofollow links
Nofollow and dofollow links are crucial to any backlink campaign.
All hyperlinks in content will automatically be a ‘dofollow’ link which means that Google will pick up the link when performing a crawl. This helps your site to gain organic growth and traffic.
In contrast, a nofollow link is created manually using a piece of code. This code tells search engines to ignore the hyperlink. Therefore, this won’t count towards your SEO efforts as the algorithm is being told not to count it.
SERP
SERP is an acronym which stands for Search Engine Results Page. This tends to be the first few pages that appear in a search result inputted by a user. If you are trying to improve your search engine rankings, you should be optimising every page or post with SERP’s in mind.
Metadata
Metadata refers to any HTML snippets that are added to the code on a webpage. This code helps web crawlers and search engines to understand the information that is on your site. It also helps to add context to your site which will help to improve its overall rankings. For example, meta tags, post dates, page titles, authors, image descriptions etc.
Long-tail keyword
You may already be familiar with keywords, but do you know what long-tail keywords are?
Long-tail keywords are longer in length, typically a couple of words or a whole phrase. For example, “buy breathable running socks.” These tend to get fewer searches per month but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful.
Long-tail keywords are arguably better to target as the user already has higher search intent. If someone is just searching for “running socks”, they potentially aren’t even ready to make a purchase yet.
Featured snippet
You may have heard of featured snippet’s being referred to as ‘position zero’.
A featured snippet is a piece of information pulled from content on a site. This is considered by Google to be the best source of information to a user’s query.
A featured snippet appears at the top of the search result and will usually be a snapshot of a paragraph or a list of bullet points from the content that answers a direct question.
You cannot pay or use featured snippets as a function. It is picked up by the Google algorithm which automatically selects content from relevant articles or posts from an authoritative website.
Hopefully, this has helped to clear up a few of those niggling digital marketing buzzwords. If you’re looking for some digital marketing support, get in touch with us today on team@modo25.com.