SL
Glossary

52 terms — a starting set, growing.

Standard, well-established industry terminology, written accurately — not padded to a round number with filler entries.

Performance Marketing

ROAS

Return on ad spend — revenue earned per dollar spent on ads.

Performance Marketing

CAC

Customer acquisition cost — total spend divided by new customers gained.

Performance Marketing

CPC

Cost per click — what you pay each time someone clicks your ad.

Performance Marketing

CPA

Cost per acquisition — what it costs to get one conversion.

Performance Marketing

CTR

Click-through rate — the percentage of people who see an ad and click it.

Performance Marketing

Quality Score

Google's 1–10 estimate of ad relevance, expected CTR, and landing page experience.

Performance Marketing

Ad Rank

The score determining an ad's position and whether it shows at all.

Performance Marketing

Conversion Rate

The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action.

Performance Marketing

Attribution Model

The rule for deciding which touchpoint(s) get credit for a conversion.

Performance Marketing

A/B Testing

Comparing two versions of something to see which performs better.

Performance Marketing

Lookalike Audience

A new audience Meta or Google builds by matching traits of your existing customers.

Performance Marketing

Performance Max

A Google Ads campaign type that runs across all Google inventory from one campaign.

Performance Marketing

UTM Parameter

Tags added to a URL to track where traffic came from.

Performance Marketing

LTV

Lifetime value — the total revenue expected from a customer over the relationship.

Performance Marketing

Frequency Cap

A limit on how many times the same person sees an ad in a given period.

Technical SEO

Core Web Vitals

Google's three metrics for measuring real-world page experience: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

Technical SEO

LCP

Largest Contentful Paint — how long until the biggest visible element renders.

Technical SEO

INP

Interaction to Next Paint — how quickly a page responds after a user interacts with it.

Technical SEO

CLS

Cumulative Layout Shift — how much visible content jumps around while loading.

Technical SEO

Canonical URL

The "official" version of a page when multiple URLs show the same or similar content.

Technical SEO

Crawl Budget

The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period.

Technical SEO

Indexation

Whether a page has been added to a search engine's index and is eligible to rank.

Technical SEO

Structured Data

Machine-readable markup that tells search engines what a page is about.

Technical SEO

Schema Markup

The vocabulary (from schema.org) used to write structured data.

Technical SEO

Backlink

A link from another website pointing to yours.

Technical SEO

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — Google's framework for judging content quality.

Technical SEO

Meta Description

The short summary shown under a page's title in search results.

Technical SEO

Robots.txt

A file telling search engine and AI crawlers which parts of a site they can access.

Technical SEO

XML Sitemap

A machine-readable list of a site's URLs, submitted to help search engines discover pages.

Technical SEO

Hreflang

A tag indicating which language/region a page targets, for sites with multiple language versions.

Technical SEO

Topical Authority

The degree to which a site is seen as comprehensive and trustworthy on a specific subject.

Technical SEO

Pillar Page

A comprehensive page covering a broad topic, linked to narrower supporting content.

Technical SEO

Entity SEO

Optimizing for how search engines recognize a person, brand, or concept as a distinct, corroborated "thing."

AI Automation

Human-in-the-Loop

An automation design where a person reviews or approves outputs before they take effect.

AI Automation

LLM

Large Language Model — an AI model trained on text to generate and understand language.

AI Automation

Prompt Engineering

Crafting instructions to get better, more reliable outputs from an AI model.

AI Automation

RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation — an AI answering questions using retrieved real documents instead of relying only on trained memory.

AI Automation

Workflow Automation

Using software to handle repetitive tasks without manual intervention.

AI Automation

Lead Scoring

Ranking leads by likelihood to convert, using behavioral and firmographic signals.

AI Automation

Webhook

An automated message sent from one system to another when a specific event happens.

AI Automation

API

Application Programming Interface — a defined way for two pieces of software to talk to each other.

Web Development

Server-Side Rendering

Generating a page's HTML on the server before sending it to the browser.

Web Development

Static Site Generation

Pre-building a page's HTML at build time rather than on each request.

Web Development

Headless CMS

A content management system that stores content but doesn't dictate how it's displayed.

Web Development

Responsive Design

A layout that adapts to different screen sizes.

Web Development

CDN

Content Delivery Network — servers distributed globally that serve a site's assets from a location near the visitor.

Business Growth Systems

CRM

Customer Relationship Management — software for tracking sales pipeline and customer data.

Business Growth Systems

ERP

Enterprise Resource Planning — software integrating core business processes like finance, inventory, and operations.

Business Growth Systems

Lead Routing

The rules that determine which sales rep or queue a new lead goes to.

Business Growth Systems

Sales Funnel

The stages a prospect moves through from first contact to closed deal.

Business Growth Systems

Churn Rate

The percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a period.

Business Growth Systems

Workaround-Cost Test

A decision framework for choosing a standard platform vs. a custom system.