One of my pet peeves is getting into a meeting and being thrown acronym after acronym. I liken it to travelling overseas and not being able to understand the waiter, as you don’t speak the language.
But every workplace has their own special set of coded acronyms, and digital marketing is no different.
But what’s worse with digital marketing, is that the acronyms are often short for techy, difficult to understand terminology. So, even when you know what the acronym stands for, you often still don’t understand!
My business Crisp Communications is all about reducing this stress, embarrassment and complexity away from business owners by taking marketing off their to-do list.
So, let's take a look at SEO
As a business owner, you know you need SEO – everybody is talking about it! But, what does that actually mean? And why do you need it?
Here’s a quick run through of the SEO terms that you need to know:
SEO: Search Engine Optimisation
First things first, let’s kick off with SEO.
SEO is basically tweaking and improving your website, so that it is more Google (and other search engine) friendly. Ie. It means optimising your website so you get the most organic and free traffic possible from search engines.
SEO: Search Engine Optimisation
Ok so what is a search engine? The easiest way to explain it is by giving an example: Google, Bing, Yahoo Directory, (previously: Ask Jeeves, Netscape, Baidu).
It is basically a software system designed to search for information on the internet. Every time someone enters a search term, the search engine automatically sifts through the whole of the web using search bots, which are designed to look for valuable information.
Search bots rank websites from most valuable to least valuable, and choose what results to show based on this.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page
A SERP is the page of web listings that you see after typing in a search word in a search engine (eg. after Googling something). Websites that are highly ranked by the search engine bots will appear higher up on the SERP.
SEM: Search engine marketing
But basically, SEM is paid or sponsored adverts that funnels traffic from the search engines to your website. If you’d like to know more about SEM and how it differs from SEO, read about it in my article here.
Funnel
A funnel, aka a sales funnel, or a lead funnel, is a fancy way of saying the process from moving a person from being a prospect through to being a paid client or customer.
PPC: Pay Per Click
This is a subset of SEM which involves being charged based on the number of people who click on your advertisement. This is common with Google and Amazon.
SMM: Social Media Marketing
This is basically the same as SEM, but instead of paying for advertising on search engines like Google, you pay for adverts on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn.
So, why is this relevant to you?
As a business owner, these acronyms are about boosting your businesses’ presence and visibility online, in order to increase the awareness of your brand.
Ie. SEO is about getting more people to know about your business, and consider it as a viable product / service / option for them to purchase.