Every marketing term,
explained simply.

The test is only worth running if you change one thing at a time and wait for enough traffic to tell the difference from noise. Most small-business A/B tests are called far too early.

There is no correct answer, only models. Last-click attribution over-credits search, because search is usually the last step before someone who already decided takes action.

Raising it is often cheaper than finding more customers, because the person is already buying. Bundles and a sensible upsell move it more than a discount does.

Content aimed here answers questions rather than selling. Pushing a booking link at someone in the awareness stage is the most common reason good content converts badly.

Relevance beats volume. One link from a respected site in your industry is worth more than fifty from directories nobody reads, and bought link packages tend to do damage.

A high bounce rate is not automatically bad. On a page that answers one question — opening hours, a phone number — someone leaving satisfied looks identical to someone leaving annoyed.

It is defined more by exclusions than inclusions. Deciding you will never use exclamation marks or the word 'excited' does more for consistency than a page of adjectives.

Useful when built from real customer conversations, useless when invented in a meeting. If the persona has a stock photo and a name but no real quotes behind it, it will not change any decision.

One per page, stated plainly. 'Learn more' asks for nothing and gets it; 'See the pricing' tells someone exactly what happens when they click.

Matters most on e-commerce sites, where filters and sort orders generate dozens of URLs for one product. Without it, those versions compete with each other in search results.

At five per cent monthly churn, the average customer stays twenty months. At ten per cent, ten. Halving churn does more for revenue than doubling ad spend.

A high rate on the wrong audience costs money without producing customers. Read it next to conversion rate, never on its own.

The value is less in the planning than in removing the daily decision. Businesses that stop posting almost never decide to stop; they just run out of days where somebody chose a topic.

Always state what it converts from and to. A three per cent conversion rate means nothing until you know whether it is of all traffic, of ad clicks, or of people who reached the checkout.

A cheap click is not a cheap customer. Legal and insurance keywords cost many times what most terms do precisely because the customers behind them are worth it.

It only means something beside lifetime value. Spending £300 to win a customer is reckless at a £200 lifetime value and a bargain at £3,000.

Knowing it sets your ceiling on acquisition spend. Most small businesses underestimate it because they count the first sale and ignore repeat business and referrals.

Invented by SEO tools, not by Google, so treat it as a rough comparison between sites rather than a number to optimise. It is useful for judging whether a link is worth pursuing.

Simple to build and easy to leave running past its usefulness. Re-read a drip sequence once a year, because it will still be referring to last year's offer.

An immediate return suggests the page did not answer the question. Whether search engines measure it directly is debated; writing pages that hold attention is a good idea regardless.

Usually the highest-return work in email, because the message arrives when the person is already thinking about you. A welcome sequence typically outperforms every newsletter you send.

Saves and shares are the signals worth watching. A like costs nothing; a share means somebody put their own name behind your content.

It compounds. A guide that answers a question customers ask every week will still bring traffic in three years, while a post about a platform update is dead in a month.

It became the valuable kind as tracking restrictions tightened. Anything that depends on third-party cookies has been degrading for years; an email list has not.

The metaphor is tidier than reality — people loop, leave and come back — but it earns its place by forcing the question of which stage is actually losing you money.

For a business that serves one city, it is the single highest-return setting in the account. Check it monthly; platforms quietly widen targeting when a campaign struggles to spend.

For any business with a location or a service area, this outperforms most of what people spend on SEO. Complete it fully, post to it, and answer every review.

Their reach has fallen sharply as platforms moved to recommending content by interest instead. A handful of specific, relevant tags is now worth more than thirty broad ones.

One H1 per page, describing what the page is about. Headings are how both a screen reader and a search engine work out the shape of an article without reading every word.

The most inflatable number in marketing. Ten thousand impressions across two hundred people is a different story from ten thousand across ten thousand, and the headline figure hides which.

Slower to start and cheaper to sustain. The work compounds, which is why it suits businesses that can wait two quarters and badly suits those that need bookings this month.

Audience fit beats audience size. A creator with 8,000 followers who all live in your city will usually outperform one with 400,000 scattered across the world.

It tends to find the real problem. Plenty of businesses buy more traffic when what they have is a booking form that fails on mobile.

New sites should ignore high-difficulty terms entirely for the first year. Specific, lower-volume phrases convert better anyway, because the person searching them knows what they want.

The discipline is in keeping the list short. A dashboard with thirty KPIs has none; nobody changes a decision because the twenty-second number moved.

Sending ad traffic to a homepage is the most expensive habit in small-business advertising. The homepage has to serve everyone, so it persuades nobody in particular.

It should solve a small, real problem in one sitting. A vague 'newsletter signup' converts a fraction as well as a specific thing someone can use today.

Quality depends entirely on the source list. Feed it your best customers rather than everyone who ever bought, or you teach the platform to find more of your worst.

Around 155 characters before it truncates. Write it as an advert for the page, not a summary of it, and include the phrase someone actually searched.

Engagement rates run higher than on large accounts and the cost is a fraction. For local businesses this is where influencer spend generally works.

Its usefulness is that it is boring. Stripping out one-off work shows whether the base of the business grew, which a headline revenue figure can easily hide.

Disclosure is a legal requirement in most markets, not a courtesy. Undisclosed native advertising is the fastest way to lose an audience you paid to reach.

Adding 'free', 'jobs', 'cheap' and 'DIY' cuts wasted spend in most new accounts. Review the search terms report monthly and keep adding.

The number is less useful than the comment box under it. The reasons people give for a six are the roadmap; the score itself is a summary.

Most leads do not say no, they say not now. A sequence that stays useful for six months costs almost nothing and catches people at the point the timing changes.

Less controllable than on-page work and slower to move, which is why it is usually the part that has been neglected when rankings stall.

Do this before chasing links. A site with thin content and duplicated titles will not rank however many links point at it.

Mail privacy features pre-open images automatically, inflating the figure. Click rate and replies now tell you far more about whether an email worked.

It has declined on every major platform for a decade. Planning a strategy that assumes a fixed share of your followers will see a post is planning for 2014.

Fast to turn on and fast to waste money with. Set conversion tracking before the first pound is spent, or you will be optimising for clicks you cannot value.

Install it before you advertise, not when you start. It needs history to be useful, and an account with no conversion data optimises towards nothing.

Efficient at scale and opaque at small budgets. For most small businesses the fees and the lack of visibility outweigh the reach.

Agreeing the definition between marketing and sales settles most arguments about lead quality before they start, because both sides are finally counting the same thing.

It directly changes what you pay. A high score can cut click costs by half against a competitor bidding the same amount with a mismatched landing page.

Reach divided into impressions gives average frequency. When that climbs, you are showing the same thing to the same people rather than finding new ones.

Usually the best-performing campaign in an account, and the easiest to overdo. Cap frequency and exclude people who already bought.

It is revenue, not profit. At a 25 per cent margin, a ROAS of 4 breaks even exactly, which is why a healthy-looking number can still be losing money.

Earned by adding schema markup, not by asking. They take up more space in the results and reliably lift click-through, even at the same ranking position.

The prerequisite for rich results. It is invisible to visitors, which is why it is so often missing from otherwise well-built sites.

Ranking first no longer means being at the top. On many searches the first organic result sits below ads, a map pack and an answer box.

Useful as a relative measure over time. Falling share of voice while your own numbers hold steady means competitors are spending more, and it usually shows up in results a quarter later.

Specific beats glowing. A review naming the problem and the result persuades far more than five stars and the word 'amazing'.

If you cannot name someone it is not for, it is not a target audience. Copy written for everyone reads as written by a committee.

Judging it by conversion rate kills it every time. It exists to fill the stages below, and its payoff shows up in searches for your name weeks later.

It outperforms polished production on most social platforms because it looks like the rest of the feed. Get written permission before reusing any of it in ads.

Without them, traffic from your newsletter and your Instagram bio both land in the same undifferentiated bucket. Agree a naming convention once and stick to it.

The test is whether a change in the number would make you do something differently. If not, it belongs in a footnote rather than a report.

On short-form platforms this is close to the whole algorithm. The first two seconds decide it, which is why the hook gets rewritten more often than the rest of the script.

Registrations are not attendance; expect between a third and half to show up live. The recording sent afterwards often produces more sales than the event.

It has to be genuinely researched to work. A sales brochure in a serif font and a PDF wrapper is recognised instantly and costs you the email address anyway.

Still the highest-converting channel there is, and the one least helped by marketing spend. It is built by the product and the service, then amplified by making referral easy.

Now a majority of searches. It makes ranking for simple factual questions much less valuable and raises the value of queries where people need to compare, buy or book.