Resources

Marketing & SEO Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the marketing, SEO, and AI terms we use with clients.

AI Overviews: Google's AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some search results. They compress multiple sources into a single answer and cite the pages they drew from. To rank in AI Overviews a page needs clear, fact-led passages, a topical authority signal, and crawl access for GoogleBot and Google-Extended.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): The total cost to acquire one paying customer, measured as total marketing + sales spend divided by new customers in a given period. For service businesses, CAC should typically be recovered within one to three months of recurring revenue.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): A Core Web Vital that measures how much visible content unexpectedly moves during page load. Google flags CLS ≤ 0.1 as Good, 0.1–0.25 as Needs Improvement, and > 0.25 as Poor. The most common causes are images without dimensions, web-font swaps, and animations on layout-affecting properties.
Core Web Vitals: A set of three Google-defined metrics used as ranking factors: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Field data from real users is gathered via CrUX and used for ranking; lab data from Lighthouse is used for diagnostics.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — the framework Google's Quality Rater Guidelines use to assess content quality. Pages that demonstrate first-hand experience, cite credentialed authors, earn mentions from authoritative sources, and disclose conflicts of interest rank better, especially in YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) categories.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): The practice of optimizing content to be cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Differs from traditional SEO by rewarding factual, citation-ready passages over keyword density. llms.txt, FAQ schema, and brand-mention volume are leading GEO signals.
GBP (Google Business Profile): The free Google product that powers Maps listings, map-pack rankings, and the "knowledge panel" that appears for branded searches. A fully optimized GBP is the single highest-impact lever in local SEO.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): A Core Web Vital that replaced First Input Delay in March 2024. INP measures the longest delay between a user's interaction (click, tap, key press) and the next visual update. Good ≤ 200ms, Needs Improvement 200–500ms, Poor > 500ms.
Klaviyo: An email and SMS marketing platform used primarily by e-commerce brands on Shopify. DEM builds Klaviyo flows (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back) and custom segments driven by purchase history and behavioural data.
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): A Core Web Vital measuring when the largest above-the-fold element finishes rendering. Good ≤ 2.5s, Needs Improvement 2.5–4s, Poor > 4s. Usually improved by CDN caching, image optimization, font preloading, and reducing render-blocking resources.
llms.txt: A proposed standard file (served at /llms.txt) that gives large language models a curated entry point to a website. It lists key pages grouped by theme (About, Services, Docs, Policies) in Markdown. Widely read by Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT agents.
LSI (Local Search Intent): When a search query explicitly or implicitly targets a geography — e.g. "dentist near me" or "marketing agency Toronto." Google resolves these with a map pack (the three-listing block with Maps results) before the organic results.
NAP (Name, Address, Phone): The three data points that must match exactly across a business's Google Business Profile, website, and directory citations. NAP inconsistency suppresses local rankings because Google uses it as a trust signal.
Pipeline-driven attribution: A reporting approach that tracks every lead from first-touch channel to closed-won revenue, rather than stopping at form submissions. Required for meaningful optimization in B2B and long-sales-cycle service markets.
Programmatic SEO: Generating large numbers of SEO pages from a structured data source — for example one page per city, product, or use-case. Done well it captures long-tail demand; done poorly it creates thin, doorway-style content that Google penalizes.
Schema (structured data): A markup format (usually JSON-LD) that describes the content of a page in a machine-readable way using Schema.org vocabulary. Used by Google to render rich results — review stars, FAQ accordions, business-hours cards, event listings — directly in the SERP.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The page a user sees after running a search. Modern SERPs include blue-link organic results, ads, the map pack, AI Overviews, "People Also Ask" boxes, images, videos, and knowledge panels. Ranking on page one is necessary but no longer sufficient — the above-the-fold real estate matters more than the ranking number.
TTFB (Time to First Byte): How long the browser waits for the first byte of the HTML response from the server. Good ≤ 600ms, Needs Improvement 600–1500ms. Improved by CDN caching, geographic proximity, and server-side optimization.