A Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms

What Every Business Owner Should Know

Bounce Rate
This is one of the most important numbers that professionals use for gauging the first impression that a website makes with visitors. The bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors that leave the site before clicking on a link or visiting a second page. A high bounce rate usually suggests that either (1) visitors see nothing on the website that seems valuable to them or (2) for some reason, the search engines are misinterpreting the intent of the search phrase and are directing the wrong people to the site. This sometimes happens when a company name has a second meaning or the name is shared with other kinds of businesses.

Citations
Online citations are simply mentions of your company or links to your website that appear on other websites. They are important in building search engine rankings for your website. Citations often appear in online news releases, published articles, and directory listings.

Claiming a Business
It is common for some web properties to use information from large business directory services to populate business profiles on their websites. A good example is Yelp. If you own a business that fits within Yelp’s categories, it is likely that it appears there—even if you have never provided them with information. Claiming a business allows you to edit the information in the listing, enhance it with additional information and take control of it.

Conversion
Conversion describes whatever you ultimately want visitors to do while visiting your website. It could be an online sale, or just a request for information or a quote. Depending upon the nature of your business, the viewing of a particular page of your website or signing up for email notifications could also represent a conversion for you.

Engagement
Engagement is the term used to describe the way that visitors interact with a website. A highly engaging website is one that compels visitors to do things like view videos, submit forms, complete surveys, and visit multiple pages of the site.

Navigation
Good website navigation organizes information on your site in a way that makes it easy for visitors to find the information that they need. The navigation not only includes pages accessible through the main navigation bar appearing (usually) at the top of all pages, but also sub-directories that link to interior pages of the website. Good navigation is essential to engagement, conversion and to keeping the bounce rate low.

Organic Search
Organic search results are the unpaid website listings that appear for any keyword phrase on a search engine like Google or Bing. Rankings on page one of organic search listings are highly desirable.

Paid or Sponsored Search
These are paid ads that appear either above or beside organic search results. They usually are marked “Sponsored Results.” This is also known as pay-per-click (or PPC) advertising.

Page Speed
Also called “page load speed,” this designates how fast all of the elements of a page load into a browser. Page speed can be adversely affected by spikes in usage on a shared host server or by the type of device used to view the page (ie. a mobile phone). A common cause of a slow page download is a large, uncompressed image that appears on the page. Page speed is a factor weighted in search engine ranking algorithms.

Posting
A posting is simply any short or long article added to a blog or to a social media site. Postings should include images and links as well as text. A posting that is shared many times is said to “go viral.”

Responsive Website
A responsive (or mobile-responsive) website is one built around a design that adapts so that it is readable by visitors using any type of computer with any size screen—from a desktop or laptop to a smart phone or tablet. A responsive website allows all visitors to see the same content, but the elements (text and images) are re-ordered and stacked automatically so that they can be easily viewed on even small screen displays.

URL
A URL is the address for a web page. For example, the domain name for this website is 1stClickConsulting.com. URLs included on this website include http://1stclickconsulting.com/denver-online-marketing-company, the About Us page. Often URLs will include suffixes like “.html” or “.php.” Downloadable information often is found on URLs with the suffix “.pdf.”