CreataCo | Web Design, Branding & Digital Marketing
Glossary

Web Design and Marketing Terms Explained

A plain English reference for the words and acronyms that come up in conversations about websites, SEO, and digital marketing. Written for business owners, not for other agencies.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a business's online presence to rank for searches tied to a specific city, neighborhood, or service area, so nearby customers can find you when they need what you sell.

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Schema Markup

Schema markup is structured data added to a page in JSON-LD format that tells search engines exactly what the content represents, unlocking rich results like star ratings, FAQs, recipes, and business hours.

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Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are three Google-defined metrics that measure real-world page experience: how fast the largest element renders, how responsive the page feels to interaction, and how visually stable the layout is while loading.

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Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is the free Google product that powers a business's listing on Search and Maps, including the knowledge panel, the map pack, photos, hours, reviews, and the call and direction buttons.

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NAP and Local Citations

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. A local citation is any mention of those three pieces of information on the web, with or without a link, and consistency across citations is a foundational local SEO signal.

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Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is the discipline of using research, testing, and measured iteration to increase the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action like booking a call, requesting a quote, or making a purchase.

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Canonical URL

A canonical URL is the URL you tell search engines is the single, preferred address for a piece of content when the same or similar content is reachable at multiple URLs.

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Backlinks

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking signals in search because they function as a vote of confidence from one site to another.

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AI Overviews

AI Overviews are Google's generative answer summaries that appear above the traditional results for many searches, synthesizing an answer from multiple web pages and citing them as sources.

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Featured Snippets

A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google pulls from a web page and displays at the very top of the results, above the first organic link, to answer a question directly.

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Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that reports how your site performs in search: the queries you rank for, your clicks and impressions, indexing status, and any technical issues Google finds.

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Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is the practice of generating many similar pages from a structured data source and a template, each targeting a specific long-tail query, to capture search demand at scale.

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Domain Authority

Domain Authority is a third-party score, most associated with Moz, that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search. It is not a Google metric and does not directly affect rankings.

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Internal Linking

Internal linking is the practice of connecting the pages of your own website to each other with hyperlinks, which helps both search engines and visitors find and understand your content.

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SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

A SERP is the page a search engine returns after a query. Modern SERPs mix organic links with ads, map packs, featured snippets, AI Overviews, and other features that compete for attention.

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Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given period. It matters mainly for large sites, where wasted crawling can leave important pages undiscovered.

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Landing Page

A landing page is a focused page built around a single goal, usually one a visitor reaches from an ad, email, or campaign, designed to drive one specific action with minimal distraction.

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Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a system that ranks leads by how likely they are to become customers, using attributes and behavior, so sales can focus first on the prospects most ready to buy.

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If something came up in a sales call or a contract and you cannot find a clear answer, let us know. We expand this glossary based on real questions from real business owners.

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