Digital Marketing Jargon Busting Part I – SEO
Welcome to SEO Jargon Busting with TWI’s Head of Digital, Andrew Butcher. This is the first in a series of blogs in which we will strive to demystify much of the industry slang, terminology and gobbledygook involved in marketing your business in the digital age.
We are proud to be a transparent marketing agency and we hope this blog series makes digital marketing simpler, for you.
Keywords and SEO :
Keywords are the words in your web copy that help people get from a search engine, such as Google, onto your site.
Keywords, or often keyphrases, are identified by analysing search query volumes and competition – and then included within your web copy in an attempt to drive traffic to your website from your industry’s most popular search queries.
This identification of, and optimisation for, keywords is the beginning of the process called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO.
Long Tail :
A long tail keyphrase is a longer, more specific keyphrase, generally consisting of three words or more.
Long tail keyphrases can be an extremely effective SEO tool. Due to the more specific nature of the search enquiry, long tail keyphrases regularly deliver higher value traffic to your website, despite achieving lower traffic than single keywords or shorter keyphrases.
SERP :
AKA Search Engine Results Page
You might hear someone talking about your SERP results or SERP performance or even SERP analysis. What does this mean?
SERP is the Search Engine Results Page, or the page Google returns after you have typed something into the search bar, and your SERP result is the information displayed on this page
An image might help me to explain here. For example, we Googled “Best marketing agency in the Universe” – that universe being the village of Brantham on the Suffolk Essex border (Right: SERP. Below: SERP result):
Whilst your position on the SERP is dictated by various SEO ranking factors, not every part of your SERP result contributes to your SEO ranking.
The description (above) is included by search engines to help its users to make a more informed decision about which result to click. This gives you the opportunity to sell what is great about your business without worrying about including your keywords (although in an ideal world your keywords will be synonymous with what you do). The description is your free advert placed in front of an audience searching for your product, service, industry or even the question you can answer better than anyone else – use it!
NAP :
AKA Name, Address, Phone Number
Name, Address, Phone Number. NAP is as simple as it sounds. Honestly! Including your business Name, Address and Phone Number is incredibly important for Local SEO, it features multiple times in the 2018 Moz list of Local Search Ranking Factors.
Whether it is built into your website header, footer, or into your on-page copy, if you want to rank well locally for a service it is vital you are including NAP.
Google pulls in examples of your business NAP from numerous sources from across the internet – such as Google My Business, Companies House, Business Registries etc. – to compare with your site content. What does this mean? NAP works as a citation which adds legitimacy to your website and, by extension, your business.
TOP TIP: As Google ranks individual pages (rather than whole websites) if you want to rank well locally for a service you must include NAP on all pages you are aiming to rank for – not only your Home, About and Contact pages.
Webmaster Tools :
AKA Google Search Console
The artist formerly known as Webmaster Tools, is Google Search Console, and who better to describe it than Google itself:
“Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.” Google Search Console is incredibly useful. By letting you see how visitors find your site through Google, you are able to assess the real performance of your SEO efforts and help you shape future strategy.
So, if somebody is talking to you about Webmaster, you can take it that they are singing from the same hymn sheet as people who still clean with Jif, groom using Immac and gain all sustenance from Marathon Bars and Opal Fruits.
Web Crawlers :
AKA Spiders
Crawler. Spider. Web Crawler. Web Spider. This common or garden bot exists under several guises, all a variation on the theme of its job of scuttling across the world wide web gathering information to report back to Google.
Its official job role is to crawl and index. What does this mean? In layman’s terms, crawlers turn the mountains of data on the web into something anybody can easily use, well almost anybody! Because the information accumulated by crawlers is what powers search engines. And what is a search engine other than a giant index of everything on the internet?
Keyword Stuffing :
To successfully define Keyword Stuffing, it is essential to have a basic knowledge of Keywords (see above).
Keyword Stuffing is the practice of including an identified keyword, or keyphrase, multiple times within the same webpage, often to the detriment of its overall human readability, in attempt to dupe a search engine into believing your page is more relevant to a search query than it is. In the past, this tactic often generated much success, despite not being great for search engine users.
Luckily, Google has got much smarter (and continues to do so) and now understands when keywords are included within relevant, well-written, human-friendly content. It also knows when they are not and punishes offending pages accordingly.
We hope the first in our Jargon Busting series of blogs has been useful to you. If you would like to discuss your website SEO, or any other aspect of marketing, get in touch today on 01473 326907 or email info@thewriteimpression.co.uk.
In our next edition of Digital Marketing Jargon Busting, we will turn our attention to digital advertising, where we will uncloak CTA, CTR, CRO and many more of the myriad acronyms which, from the outside, might seem dominate the Google, Facebook and LinkedIn advertising processes.
If there are any terms or topics you would like us to cover, feel free to drop us a line and we will be more than happy to help!
