A
A/B Testing – sometimes you need to compare two different alternatives to decide which one works best for your audience. Users may be directed to two different sites or sent two different emails, then analytics will determine whether “A” or “B” works better.
Above the fold – in newspapers, any story that was considered the most important on the front page was put above where the paper was folded in half to be stacked. Similarly, saying something is “above the fold” on a website is the area that is visible without having to scroll down.
AdSense – an advertising program offered through Google. Targeted advertising is picked based on your site’s content. AdSense is a revenue-generating program and is quite popular for your more basic sites.
Advertorial – content-focused advertisements, they’re usually written like an editorial piece.
AdWords – another advertising program offered through Google, AdWords makes sure that advertisements appear that relate to the user’s specific search query.
Affiliate Marketing – a type of performance-based marketing in which a business/school rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
Aggregated content – content that has been taken from several sources and has been accumulated into one piece. Several different methods exist, including just an easy reuse of external content, to content curation and news aggregation services.
ALT-tags – short for ‘alternative tag’, which is a short written description of an object or image on a web page. Search engines utilise ALT-tags to find images.
Analytics – a program by Google utilised to analyse data to acquire information. It takes this information and provides you with data and statistics on the site such as the number of visitors, the origin of traffic and income generated.
Anchor text – the text used in a hyperlink. Users hover over the words that are usually underlined and in blue, and they are taken to a new page. Anchor text is also used by search engines in terms of rankings and pulling search results.
Article – any type of written piece. Usually, articles are considered more informative in terms of journalism, explaining a specific area or topic.
Attribution – when you have success in a specific marketing strategy, practising attribution or identifying what marketing channels or actions brought you that successful result is key.
Audit – a stage in the marketing strategy where you audit the school/business’ content against your customer persona’s needs and wants to identify any gaps that might exist and the need for any changes in terms of content marketing.
B
Backlinks – point a user back to a website from another external site. Another term often used for backlinks are incoming or inbound links. Backlinks are one factor utilised by search engines in determining ranking.
Banner ads – advertisements you see embedded into a web page’s design. These advertisements are determined by the visitor’s search history.
Blog – a short-form publishing platform used by both individuals and schools/businesses. They started off as more of a diary format for individual users, but they have quickly developed as a way for schools/businesses to share news, content, information and editorial pieces to their audience.
Bottom of the funnel – the last stage to getting a lead to become a customer.
Bounce rate – when a viewer comes to your website only to quickly click out of your site, this is known as a “bounce.” We want to keep the bounce rate as low as possible.
Brand awareness – measures how well the public knows your brand. You can measure this by how many visitors come to your site through a search query by searching terms that include the actual brand name versus general words.
Brand engagement – the perceptions, opinions or connections customers have with your brand is otherwise known as brand engagement.
Brand visibility – the type and amount of exposure a brand gets. You want to increase your brand visibility, and this can be accomplished by producing good content and diversifying your online marketing strategies.
Breadcrumb links – the more pages you click into a website, the deeper you get into its structure. Breadcrumb links are trails of links found either at the top or bottom of the page that direct the user as to where they are in terms of the entire site’s structure.
Buyer journey – a visitor to your site goes through many different stages from finding your school/business online to becoming a loyal customer. Devices exist to measure and gather data on these stages to trace out the buyer’s journey, as a means to help market better to similar future customers.
C
Calls-to-action – a technique utilised in marketing to turn potential or hopeful customers into actual customers. When designing a webpage/leaflet/social media post, marketers will ask their clients what the goal of their site is and what kind of customer they would like to attract.
Click through rate – the measurement of how many readers or viewers will “click-through” the link given on a piece of content and perform the desired action intended by this link.
CMS – short for ‘content management system’, which is whatever program or product is used to manage the content on a site.
Content marketing – the strategy of creating content and publishing it with the purpose of marketing activities, promoting a product or service and reaching your ideal audiences.
Content strategy – planning content creation and promotion for purposes of making sure that it is effective in reaching users and meeting user needs.
Contextual advertising – a technique used in pay-per-click advertising where the advertisements that show up on a given page are designed to be related to the content on that page.
Conversion rate – measures how successful a marketing activity is. It can depend on what type of measurement is being accumulated but typically is considered the number of site visitors who later became leads.
Copywriting – producing written marketing content or advertising content is otherwise known as copywriting.
D
Digital marketing – the component of marketing that utilises online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.
Domain authority – the measure of a website’s trust by a search engine. If a site has high domain authority, it is more likely to be trusted.
Duplicate content – content that shows up on more than one site or page is known as duplicate content. It is not looked upon favourably by search engines in terms of rankings.
Dynamic content – continually changing due to visitors to the website. It determines what is shown up in terms of products each time a visitor comes to your page.
E
Email marketing – the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.
Entry page – the page through which a user enters a site or the first page they visit on that site.
Evergreen content – high-quality content that remains of good quality throughout the course of time is considered “evergreen content.” This type of content contains information that does not typically go out-of-date.
Exit page – the last page a user visits on a site before leaving that site.
Experimental content – any content that goes away from what is considered normal or predictable for a school/business is considered to be experimental content. It can be both risky and beneficial.
External linking – links that go between two different websites are external links. The number of quality external links can improve a site’s ranking.
F
FAQ – short for “frequently asked questions.” Many sites have this section to provide answers to visitors regarding the school/business.
Feature – a longer, more detailed content piece that usually gives more analysis and information on a certain topic than typical content sources.
Funnel – represents the various stages a lead goes through when first coming into contact with a school/business to when the prospect becomes a customer.
G
Goal – describes the ultimate purpose of a site or piece of content or the reason why the site is publishing the content.
H
H1 Tag – HTML tag that identifies the heading on a page and is used by search engines to find relevant content.
H2, H3 etc. Tags – these tags identify headings on a web page. They are hierarchically ranging from H1 to H6. The lower the number, the more important the heading.
Hard bounce – an email not delivered because of a static issue such as an email address entered in incorrectly.
Hashtags – used on social media to categorise content into a ‘hashtag’ meaning users can search for a particular type of content.
Home page – the main page of a website and is normally the first page a visitor will see when coming to a website.
Hosting – the storage of a website on a server. Hosting a site can allow other users to access it from many other locations.
HTML – the computer code that creates websites and is short for hypertext mark-up language.
HTML Sitemap – lists the page’s URLs or web addresses for a web site.
HTTP – short for hypertext transfer protocol and it controls the transfer of data between computers and servers.
Hyperlink – a link you can click on in a web page or document that will move the user from page to page or within the document.
I
Impression – each time a page is viewed by individual people.
Inbound link – a link coming from an external website to your site. Inbound links are used by search engines to help in setting rankings for search results.
Indexed pages – once a page has been visited by a search engine’s crawler or robot, that page has been indexed, meaning it will be able to be retrieved easily by search engines in the future.
Infographic – a visual display of complicated information, making it in a format that is easily understood.
Integrated marketing – a strategy that attempts to unify several different marketing techniques to make sure that a brand is presented consistently across the board.
Internal link – a link between two different pages located on the same domain or website.
K
Keyword ranking – where a certain keyword ranks amongst others in a search engine. You want a higher rank for keywords if at all possible.
Keyword research – searching for the most appropriate keyword with the highest ranking is known as keyword research.
Keyword stemming – involves adding prefixes or suffixes to keywords to produce different variations of that keyword.
Keyword stuffing – the practice of trying to stuff as many keywords as you can into a web page. This practise is frowned upon as it can make the content difficult to reach and considered low-quality.
Keywords – words typed into a search engine when a user is trying to find web pages involving a certain subject. Keywords are of extreme importance with content marketers when trying to create content that is useful for users.
L
Landing page – a page on a site that is intended to capture a visitor’s contact information or to get them to sign up for a feature on the site.
Lead – a prospective customer.
Lead generation – the effort of finding new potential customers.
Lead nurturing – once you get a lead it is important you nurture it, which means you communicate with them and attempt to convert these leads into actual, paying customers.
Link building – taking various techniques used by marketing professionals to create inbound links. You want to build these links to help your site’s ranking in search engines.
Load time – the time that it takes for a site or page to completely show when a user visits the site.
Long-tail keywords – when a user enters in longer, more specific keyword phrases when attempting a search this is known as a long-tail keyword search. These types of searches tend to produce more relevant results and narrow down the information for which the user is searching.
M
Marketing automation – the use of software to handle marketing and repetitive jobs or tasks. Analytical features are normally the main appeal of this software and can be used to improve efficiency in your marketing strategies.
Marketing plan – a written document or set of documents that detail how a school/business intends to market itself or a product and how it intends to measure objectives or its success.
Metadata – data that is describing other data. They can be used to describe images or videos that would be difficult to search for without these descriptions. They are not visible to the user but more so to the search engine.
Metric – a unit of measurement used to determine success. One example of a metric is the number of visitors to a web site. Metrics are important in evaluating the success of a web site or the brand.
Microblogging – posting short but frequent content. One well-known example of this method is Twitter, a platform that limits the characters used to 280 characters.
Middle of the funnel – the section of a sales funnel, a concept detailing the stages of a lead’s relationship with a school/business from a potential customer to the purchaser. The transitional stage where leads are evaluated and understood is known as the middle of the funnel.
Multipurpose content – content has been created for reuse and reformatting is considered multipurpose content.
N
Native advertising – a method where online advertisements are included in a way that is less intrusive, making it appear as if it is a natural and original part of the site on which they appear.
Negative SEO – unethical and malicious forms of SEO intended to damage a competing site’s search rankings. Creating inbound links through bad neighbourhoods or engaging in black hat SEO are considered negative SEO.
New visitor – a user who comes to your website for the first time is considered a new visitor.
Niche – a small and specialised market. People who create content in niche markets tend to be industry experts or those with special knowledge of the subject matter.
NoFollow link – something that can be assigned to the HTML part of a link. It essentially tells the search engines to disregard the link when determining page rank. It can still be used by the search engines to discover and index the page, however.
O
Open rate – the measurement of how many emails that have been sent as part of an email marketing campaign are actually opened by recipients.
Organic search – one that returns web sites and pages based on how well they match the keyword or phrase entered into the search engine. The results returned are based on relevancy alone and not because of paid-for advertising.
Outreach – engaging with users, visitors and prospects by asking for their opinion. If a school/business wants to create relationships with potential leads, outreach methods can often be the best method for accomplishing this goal.
P
Page title – the heading that describes the page’s contents. You can locate it within the HTML H1 heading tag. Users can view it as well as search engines. Page titles are often used by search engines to rank and categorise pages.
Pageviews – how many times a page has been viewed by users or the number of times a page has been requested from a server.
Paid search – an advertising technique where search engine providers can pay advertisements on their search results. It is the opposite of natural or organic searches.
Persona – can be used in planning a site or marketing campaign. It is a personality type you hope to find in your prospective audience and helps plan how you market content by viewing how this person or “persona” will see it.
Podcast – an audio file normally part of a series. Podcasts are used for many purposes including informational purposes, education or news.
Popup – when a smaller window suddenly appears in front of the page you are currently viewing, this is called a popup. They normally involve advertisements or calls-to-action.
PPC – short for pay per click which is an advertising technique where sites are paid for advertisements included on their pages, paying each time an advertisement is clicked on by a user.
Q
Qualified lead – a potential customer who has given the interest in a school/business’ product or service.
Quality score – a score given in pay per click advertising. Quality scores will be applied by search engines to advertisements before determining where these advertisements will be displayed on search results pages.
R
Ranking – the position a web page is given when included in a list of search engine results. SEO techniques are used to improve a page’s ranking, ensuring that the page is easily viewable to a user attempting to locate information on that topic.
Referral – a visit to a site obtained through an external source, like another site or blog.
Remarketing or retargeting – a strategy that includes targeted advertisements on a website when these sites are viewed by previous visitors to your site.
Repurposing – taking existing content and allowing it to be used in other places is repurposing. One example of this is taking a blog piece and turning it into a blog post or tweet.
Responsive design – a method of ensuring sites are easily viewable on any type of device, including a desktop computer to Smartphone screen.
ROI – short for return on investment, which is a measurement of the income generated versus the cost needed to generate that income.
S
Segmentation – dividing current or potential customers into categories, using shared characteristics to make this division. This process allows those to target certain audiences specifically.
SEO – stands for search engine optimisation. It is the concept behind improving a site’s performance in search engines, reaching the largest audience possible.
Social media – online platforms through which content and communication can be shared between people who would not be connected in real life without the connection of this platform.
Social proof – the idea that people’s ideas of what is right and wrong can be influenced by the opinions and actions of others in their social circle.
Soft bounce – the failure to deliver an email for a reason that is not permanent, such as a full inbox or server error.
Split testing – the same thing as A/B testing or getting opinions from users about whether they prefer an option “A” over an option “B.”
T
Tags – descriptors attached to a page, image or video that summarises the content. They can be useful in helping users locate content through search engines.
Targeting – tailoring messages for a specific group of people. It involves a great deal of research in the audience and product to truly understand what the “target” is for a brand or product.
Title tags – HTML heading tags to inform users and search engines about the heading of a web page. It is visible to visitors to the web site and should include SEO keywords as well as describe the page’s content in a way that makes readers want to stay and read more.
Top of the funnel – the first step of this process and normally includes the school/business offering content to attract users to their page.
Traffic – the number of visitors a web site receives or the amount of data sent by or received by a web site. Keeping traffic at a high level is important in terms of maintaining the success of a web site.
U
Unique visitors – the number of different people who visit a web site once or more times are considered to be unique visitors.
URL – short for uniform resource locator, which is the address of a web site.
User experience – the experience and feel a user feels when working with a website or product. This user experience is often measured to see if a specific marketing strategy is effective.
USP – short for ‘unique selling point’, which is the part of a product or service that makes this product stand out from other similar products out there.
V
Video marketing – using videos instead of written content to market or advertise a product or brand. Videos can easily be shared and posted via social media and have stepped up over time as a positive way to reach larger audiences quickly.
Viral marketing – a version of word of mouth marketing. It is the process of spreading content or an idea quickly to a rather large number of people. Social media has helped viral marketing tremendously over the years.
Visitor session – the length of time a visitor has remained on a site from when they arrived to when they leave is known as the visitor session.
Visual content – images, photos, charts, graphics or videos.
W
Webinars – online versions of seminars and allow users to receive education through use of video conferencing.
Whitepaper marketing – lengthy content and in-depth reporting on a topic. It can be one excellent method to improve a school/business’ reputation and authority.
Word-of-mouth – spreading content from person to person and not from school/business to person.