Marketing, SEO, and Business Glossary

A detailed, semi-fictional profile of a target buyer based on real customer data.

How long it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer.

Total cost to acquire one new paying customer.

A standalone web page designed to convert visitors into leads or customers for a specific campaign.

Total revenue (or profit) a customer generates over the entire relationship.

The ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost.

The clickable text of a hyperlink.

A link from one website to another, treated by search engines as a vote of confidence.

An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the original.

An online mention of a business's name, address, and phone (NAP), with or without a backlink.

Google's metrics for measuring real-world page experience.

A standard link that passes ranking value (PageRank) from the linking site to the destination.

A third-party score (0-100) predicting how well a website will rank in search results.

Content that appears identical or very similar on multiple URLs.

Google's framework for evaluating content quality and credibility.

A summary answer Google displays at the top of search results.

Free Google business listing that appears in Maps and Local Pack results.

A link from one page on a website to another page on the same website.

The time it takes for the largest visible element to render on a page.

The map and three-result box Google shows for location-relevant searches.

Optimization focused on ranking in local search results (Google Maps, Local Pack, local organic).

Business name, address, and phone number — must be consistent across all online listings.

A page-level score (0-100) predicting how well a specific URL will rank.

How quickly a webpage loads and becomes interactive.

A file that tells search engine crawlers which pages they can or cannot access.

Structured data added to a webpage that helps search engines understand its content.

The practice of optimizing websites to rank higher in organic search results.

The page Google (or another search engine) shows in response to a search query.

A file listing a website's URLs to help search engines discover and crawl pages.

Topics that could impact a user's health, finances, safety, or wellbeing — held to higher quality standards by Google.

Google Ads' formula for determining which ads appear and in what order.

The percentage of people who see your ad or link and click it.

The cost to acquire one conversion (lead, signup, sale) through advertising.

The price you pay each time someone clicks your ad.

The cost per 1,000 ad impressions.

Google's advertising platform for search, display, video, and shopping ads.

An ad targeting model that finds new users similar to your existing customers.

An advertising model where advertisers pay each time their ad is clicked.

Google Ads' rating (1-10) of the quality and relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages.

Showing ads to people who have previously visited your website or interacted with your brand.

Revenue generated per dollar of advertising spend.

The process of assigning credit for conversions to the marketing touchpoints that contributed.

The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action.

Data a company collects directly from its own customers and audiences.

Google's current analytics platform, replacing Universal Analytics in 2023.

A free Google tool for deploying and managing marketing tags and scripts without code changes.

An experiment that compares two versions of a webpage, email, or ad to see which performs better.

The practice of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action.

A visual representation of where users click, scroll, or hover on a webpage.

A defined way for software systems to communicate with each other.

A network of distributed servers that cache content closer to users.

Software that lets non-developers create, edit, and manage website content.

A unified database that combines customer data from multiple sources for analysis and activation.

A query language for APIs that lets clients request exactly the data they need.

Software architecture where the frontend (head) is separated from the backend.

Cloud computing service that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet.

A cloud computing model where the vendor provides hardware and software tools over the internet.

A standard architectural style for designing APIs based on HTTP and resources.

Software delivered over the internet on a subscription basis.

An automated message sent from one app to another when a specific event occurs.

An iterative project management approach emphasizing flexibility and continuous improvement.

A visual workflow management method emphasizing continuous delivery.

The simplest version of a product that delivers core value and can be tested with users.

The single metric that best reflects the core value a company delivers to customers.

A goal-setting framework that pairs ambitious objectives with measurable key results.

The point at which a product satisfies a strong market demand.

The portion of TAM you can realistically serve with your current product and reach.

The realistic share of SAM you can win in the planning period (usually 3-5 years).

A goal-setting framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.

The total revenue opportunity available for your product or service.

MRR multiplied by 12 — the normalized annual value of recurring revenue.

The rate at which a company spends cash, typically expressed monthly.

The percentage of customers who cancel in a given period.

Revenue minus all variable costs, expressed in dollars or as a percentage.

Revenue minus cost of goods sold, expressed as a percentage of revenue.

The normalized monthly value of all recurring revenue contracts.

Recurring revenue from existing customers, including expansion and churn.

The percentage of customers (or revenue) retained over a period — the inverse of churn.

A SaaS health metric: revenue growth rate + profit margin should equal 40% or more.

The number of months a company can operate before running out of cash at current burn rate.

A measure of sales and marketing efficiency: net new ARR added per dollar of S&M spend.

A description of the type of customer that gets the most value from (and gives the most value to) your product.

A lead that has shown enough interest to be considered worth contacting by sales.

The total dollar value of in-progress sales opportunities at various stages.

The total time from first prospect touch to closed-won deal.

A lead that sales has confirmed is worth actively pursuing.

An AI system that can autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks to achieve a goal.

A numerical representation of text, images, or other data that captures semantic meaning.

The process of further training a pre-trained AI model on specific data to specialize it.

A neural network trained on vast text data to understand and generate human language.

The practice of crafting effective inputs to AI models to produce desired outputs.

A technique that combines LLMs with retrieval of external information to ground responses in facts.

A database optimized for storing and searching high-dimensional vector embeddings.