Every essential web and digital marketing term, explained in plain English.
SEO, or organic search, covers all the techniques used to improve a website's position in Google's search results without paying for advertising.
SEA is paid advertising on search engines. Google Ads is the most widely used SEA platform, letting you place ads at the top of the search results.
A landing page is a web page built specifically to turn visitors into leads or customers, with a single goal and one clear call to action.
The conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action: a purchase, a sign-up, a quote request. A good conversion rate sits between 2% and 5%.
Responsive design is a web design approach that makes a site adapt automatically to every screen size: mobile, tablet and desktop.
A brochure website is a site that presents a company's business, its services and its contact details. It acts as an online business card, with no e-commerce features.
A backlink is a hyperlink from another website that points to yours. Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors in SEO.
A CTA, or call to action, is a button or a link that prompts the visitor to take a specific action: 'Request a quote', 'Buy now', 'Book an appointment'.
A CMS is software that lets you create, manage and edit the content of a website without needing any programming skills.
UX, or user experience, is the quality of the experience a visitor has when browsing a website or using an application.
UI, or user interface, covers all the visual and interactive elements of a website: buttons, menus, colours, typography and layout.
ROI, or return on investment, measures how profitable an investment is by comparing the gain obtained with the cost incurred. It is expressed as a percentage.
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing a single page, without taking any action at all.
The Core Web Vitals are a set of Google metrics that measure the loading performance, the responsiveness and the visual stability of a web page for the user.
Link building is the SEO strategy of earning inbound links (backlinks) from other websites in order to improve the authority and the rankings of your own site.
Meta tags are invisible HTML tags that give search engines information about the content of a web page (title, description, keywords).
Google Ads is Google's advertising platform, used to place ads in the search results, on YouTube and across millions of partner websites.
Meta Ads is Meta's advertising platform, used to run ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp in front of tightly targeted audiences.
Local SEO is the set of search optimisation techniques used to improve a business's visibility in location-based search results and on Google Maps.
E-commerce covers all commercial transactions carried out online: selling products, services and subscriptions through a website or an app.
Web hosting is the service that stores your website's files on a server connected to the internet, making it available to visitors 24 hours a day.
A domain name is your site's web address (for example convertilab.fr). It is the unique identifier that lets people find your site on the internet.
Email marketing is the practice of sending targeted emails to a list of contacts in order to inform, retain or convert them. A newsletter is a regular informative email format.
A/B testing is an experimentation method that compares two versions of a web page or an email to work out which one produces better results.
The conversion funnel maps the journey a visitor takes from their very first contact with your brand through to the purchase or conversion.
Google Analytics is Google's free tool for measuring and analysing your website traffic: visitor numbers, traffic sources, on-site behaviour and conversions.
Indexing is the process by which Google crawls, analyses and stores your site's pages in its database so they can appear in search results.
HTTPS is the web's secure communication protocol, switched on by an SSL/TLS certificate that encrypts the data exchanged between the user's browser and the server.
A CRM is a tool that brings your contacts, enquiries and quotes together in one place, and reminds you what to do and when: chase a quote, confirm an appointment, get back in touch with a past customer. For a small business it is, above all, a machine for never forgetting anything again.
Lead nurturing means keeping the relationship alive with someone who has contacted you but has not bought yet: useful messages, well spaced out, personal, until they are ready. It is not sales chasing, it is support over time.
An automated follow-up is a message sent with no human involvement, at a time decided in advance, to a contact who has not replied: a quote with no answer after three days, an appointment to confirm the day before, a basket abandoned an hour earlier. You set it up once, and it runs on its own from then on.