Learning digital marketing can be an exciting adventure until it gets overwhelming. Which depending on your experience with blogging, content writing, or traditional marketing, it can happen pretty quickly.
Sometimes reading posts, articles, and tutorials on how to do digital marketing for your business can be like reading a different language entirely. When you’re writing something that you’re knowledgeable about, it can be easy to slip into industry jargon—we all do it, even
Unfortunately, it makes it harder for people to find their footing and get started. Nobody likes having to Google what a specific term means every sentence or two. It makes it harder to understand, and it makes it a whole lot easier for distraction to creep in.
If you’re in the beginning stages of your digital marketing journey (whether or not you’re putting it into practice yet), then this list is made for you. Here you will find all of the common terms in digital marketing, what they mean, and how they interact.
I’ve searched the internet to find the most commonly searched for definitions by beginner digital marketers. If you’re starting to look at your website with an eye for Google rankings but don’t know where to start, here it is!
Keywords
The term “keyword” is probably the most ubiquitous one a freshman digital marketer will see. You’re possibly even already aware of what it means, but because it’s linked so closely to so many other terms in this list, I’ll give you a refresher.
A keyword is a word or short phrase that describes the “key” topic of a page. Some examples of keywords might be “high heels” on a page about women’s high-heeled footwear, or “pencils” on a stationary website’s page about pencils. That same website might have another page focusing on pens—the keyword there would be, you guessed it, “pens.”
Keywords are integral to digital marketing. They play an important part in a lot of other terms, including the following ones.
SEO
When talking about digital marketing, content, in particular,
Search engine optimization (or search engine optimized content) refers to web content that has been written and edited in a specific way to climb the ranks of search engines. The first webpage that comes up in a Google search is likely there due to great
But What Is SEO ?
That’s where the link to keywords comes in. SEO content is targeted to a specific keyword or set of keywords. Although Google is pretty secretive when it comes to the details of its algorithm, digital marketers and other tech-savvy people like to keep on top of the trends. A long time ago,
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the practice of jamming your chosen keyword in as many times as you can per page. Back in the early days of
Here’s an example:
Now imagine an entire page of that!
Luckily for us regular researchers, Google realized that people hated this often unreadable content and started to penalize webmasters for it.
Now,
Long-tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are key phrases made up of two different elements, the head, and the tail.
The Head
The head of a keyword phrase is the main object (or a question) of the search. It’s what we could consider as a regular keyword.
We’ll take one from before—pencils.
The Tail
The tail is what’s added on to the head keyword to create a longer, more specific, version. Here are some individual tails we can add to our pencil search:
- for drawing
- colored
- graphite
- bulk
Long-tail keywords can become as long as necessary. Some of these can even be combined:
- colored pencils for drawing
- bulk graphite pencils for drawing
As you can see, they have a much clearer intent. If you were snooping on your audience’s search history you might not know why they searched for “pencils”, but you’d have a better idea if they then searched “erasable soft color pencils”.
Long-tail keywords are an invaluable tool for driving real relevant traffic to your website.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is naturally linked to keyword stuffing. The term refers to how often a phrase shows up on a web page. There are a lot of tools that will check keyword density, and they normally display it as a percentage.
Keyword density is often discussed as it plays an important part in
Google Ranking
Most new digital marketers focus on one simple goal: getting on the first page of Google.
Why?
According to SmartInsights 71.33% of people click on a link on the first page of Google. Websites listed on pages two and three only get 5.59% of clicks.
Those pages on the first page of any Google result have a Google ranking of 1 to 10. Google’s algorithm analyses each page on indexable websites to decide how relevant they are to the person’s search. The more relevant they are the better their ranking.
So if your goal is to get on the first page of Google, your goal is to improve your Google Ranking. Here’s some tips to improve your ranking.
CTA
CTAs are almost always referred to in articles about any kind of marketing; digital or traditional. A CTA is a “call to action”. It can be an image, line of text, or a link that encourages the viewer to perform an action. Actions in digital marketing can be almost anything, including:
- Buy
- Sign up
- Download
- Subscribe
- Share
- Read more
- Comment
- Click here
Although CTAs can look like anything, Hubspot says that there are 8 distinct types. These are:
- Lead generation
- Form submission
- Read more
- Product/service discovery
- Social sharing
- Leading/nurturing
- Closing sale
The general advice when it comes to CTAs is that they should be used on everything. If your content is written with intent this will be easy to do!
Is That It?
No! These are just a few of the first words you will come across as you start your digital marketing journey. They are great pillar words to begin with, helping you branch out as you learn more about the part they play in larger digital marketing concepts. There are hundreds (probably thousands) of digital marketing terms and they are constantly changing, moving in and out of use and relevance as community lexicon changes.
But for now, keep on learning about digital marketing techniques, best practices, and catapult your business to success.
man and digital marketing post it note -DepositPhotos
