Glossary

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. It tells search engines & visitors to go to a different site page instead.

A 302 redirect is a temporary detour. It tells search engines & visitors that a page has been moved to a new location, but it might come back later.

A 403 error is a forbidden error that says you're not allowed to see that page on the website. This can indirectly harm your rankings through bad customer experience or blocking search engine crawlers from ranking high-value pages.
Think carefully about if it's necessary to block the content, if it is unavoidable then use robots.txt so search engines don't crawl the page & create a customer-friendly 403 page which offers them support.

A 404 redirect tells your customer that this website page no longer exists. 404 errors can impact your overall rankings through bad customer experience so it's best practice to put redirects in place & keep an eye on broken links through your Google Search Console.

A 500 error means that something went wrong on the website server & it cannot take you to the webpage.

This is where you manage your digital marketing ads & billing information. Your ad account can have multiple campaigns & ads. Each ad account has a unique ID number.

An adset is a group of ads that share the same targeting parameters, budget & schedule. This means you can create specific ads for different target audiences within one overall campaign.

AI is a technology that has been made to think & learn in a similar way to a human. It can do things like understand what you're saying from natural language, find patterns, learn from mistakes & solve problems.

An audience, in terms of digital marketing, is a group of people who might be interested in your product or service. You can define audiences by their age, location, interests, or online habits. Knowing your ideal audience helps you target your marketing efforts & reach the right people.

Bids are the maximum budget you're willing to pay for a click on your ad.

Bounce rate in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the percentage of people who leave your site after only viewing one page.
A high overall bounce rate can mean there's an issue with your site.

Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) is automatically turned on by Facebook. It adjusts your budget for each ad set to get the best results on your bidding strategy.

They act as signpost for search engines. A snippet of HTML code that tells search engines which version of a page is preferred to show in results.

A computer program that is made to simulate conversations with people over devices, providing personalised & contextual information.

Conditional generation is an AI technique that creates new content based on your input. For example, you could ask it to create an image of a cat in the style of Van Gogh or write a rap song about a robot.

A content audit is a review of all the content on your site to see how well it's working.
We look for where we can improve, consolidate or delete existing content or identify missing content. This is to better meet your customer needs & drive business success.

Content marketing is the creating & sharing of content online. It encourages people to visit your website to find answers, information, or simply for entertainment. It is a key part of your digital marketing strategy.

Contextual links aka internal links are links that you add to your content to link to other pages on your website. Search engines like these links because they are chosen by a person, not automatically generated.

Core web vitals is a set of important factors Google uses to measure how good your website is for visitors. Core web vitals are about how fast your website loads & how easy it is to use. The three parts for measurement are: Largest contentful paint, First input delay & Cumulative layout shift.

A crawl is the search engines use automated programs called "bots" to read (index) the pages on your site & follow links to other pages to repeat the process over & over again. The data from a crawl is fed back to the search engines & is used when ranking your site.

Cumulative layout shift is how stable a page is as it loads or how much your site layout changes after it loads (aka “visual stability”).

A custom audience is a group of people you select to show your ads to. You can pick them based on interests, age & locations. This helps your ads reach the people most likely to be interested in your business.

Your daily budget is the amount of money you're willing to spend on a specific ad set each day. You can have separate budgets for each ad sets. Your ads will stop showing once your daily budget has been met for that day.

Information we use to describe a group of people. For example, age, gender, location, income, education. This information can be used in your customer persona.

Duplicate content is a page that is very similar or exactly the same as another page.

Email marketing is a digital marketing channel, using email to connect with your customers, promote your products & bring awareness to your brand. It's cheap & can be really effective if done well.

An engaged session in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is at least 10 seconds long, has at least one conversion, or at least two page views.
GA4 has a focus on engaged sessions.

Engagement rate is a percentage rate of engaged sessions (engaged sessions divided by sessions).
This is a key metric in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Events are something a visitor does whilst on your site or app. For example, a purchase event happens when a customer completes a purchase on your site. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracks your events.

First input delay measures the time it takes for a customer to actually interact with your page.

Gen AI is a type of AI that can create new things like text, images or music. It's a creative robot that can use natural language to understand & produce new content.

Helpful content is written with the customer in mind - never for search engines.

An impression is the number of times people see your ad or content.
It tells you the amount of exposure you've had, but not who's noticed it or clicked it.

Key events are events that are important to your business. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4) you can choose which ones to mark as conversion events. For example, a newsletter sign-up, a download or a purchase.

Keyword research is a way to find & learn about the words people use when searching online.
When doing your research stick to terms that directly relate to the products & services you offer.

Keywords are the words or phrases that people use to search for something online.

LLM is an intelligent computer program that Generative AI uses. It is able to understand & generate human language text as it has been trained on vast amounts of data. For example the LLM called GPT-4 is used in Bing & ChatGPT.

Largest contentful paint is how long it takes a page to load from the point of view of an actual customer.

Low-value pages simply take up space & offer no value for site performance, thin content & duplicate pages are common examples of low-value pages.
Always think if the page should be indexed by search engines as indexing low-value pages can negatively affect your rankings.

A meta description is a clear & catchy description of your website page. It won’t directly help your search ranking, but it can encourage people to click on your link.

NLP is AI's ability to understand our natural spoken or written language. This makes it easy for us to interact with AI as we can talk to it like a person.

Navigation links are links that appear in your navigation menu, footer, or breadcrumb trail.

A new user is a new person visiting your site for the first time, within a specific time period. You can use Google Analytics tracking code & browser cookies to help identify users. People who clear their cookies or use a different device will be counted as a new user.

Noindex tags are used if you don't want Google to show your website page in search results, you can add a 'noindex' tag to it.

Orphan pages are on your website but are not linked to or from any other page. These pages can often struggle to rank as they aren't well connected to the other pages on the site.

A page title is the title of your website page that people see in search results. It’s a key component of content marketing & one of the most important things for your website’s ranking.

Performance metrics are often called KPIs. It is data that shows how well your digital marketing is doing.

A redirect chain happens when a webpage keeps redirecting to other pages, over & over again. This can make the website load slowly & waste time for visitors. It can also hurt the website's ranking in search results.

In relation to Google Analytics referral traffic is traffic that comes to your website from links on other websites.

The robots.txt file is the first file a search engine crawler will look at. It acts as a gatekeeper for your website telling search engines which pages they can & can't access.

Search Engine Results Page (SERPs), is the page you see after you search for something online. It shows you a list of websites that may have the information you're looking for.

SGE is a search engine using AI to provide a quick summary of the search. It's commonly displayed at the top of search results (position 0) & makes it very quick & easy for searchers to find the information they are looking for, without having to click on multiple website links.

Semantic markup is a way of writing & structuring your HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to make it easier for search engines to understand meaning of the content rather than its appearance. Typically seen in H1 and H2 tags.

A session is how Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracks the amount of time a visitor is active on your site or app.
Once a visitor has been inactive for more than 30 minutes any future activity is considered a new session. If a visitor leaves your site & returns within 30 minutes then it's part of the original session.

Structured data is a standard way to help search engines understand & index your content better. This can help your website appear higher in search results & even be used in things like voice search & maps.

Thin content is a page that can have a lot of words but doesn't offer much value to customers. This is seen as low-quality content & is not good for your search rankings.

A user is essentially a unique visitor to your site. One user can visit your site many times, creating multiple sessions, each session can have multiple page views or events. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) counts a user from their unique browser cookie. So, if the same person visits your site from a different device it might show up as 2 users in GA4.

An XML sitemap acts as a map of your website. A file that lists your website's important pages, making sure search engines can find, crawl & understand all the pages on your site.