The Glossary of Web Marketing Terms for Financial Advisors

The vocabulary of any financial web marketer can take a little time to catch onto. Digital marketing lingo dominates forums, social networks, and blogs from around the web, so it’s important that advisors have a grasp on the basics. We have compiled a list of some of the most popular web marketing terminology to keep you up-to-date.

A/B SPLIT TEST

This term is used to when you test two different variables and compare the results. For instance, if you want to see which blog posts performs better, conduct an A/B Split Test. This is important when you want to see what content is working the best.

ADWORDS

AdWords is Google’s online advertising service that places advertising copy at the top or bottom of, or beside, the list of results Google displays for a particular search query.

ANALYTICS

Analytics refer to the measurements that gauge the success of a website. Google Analytics is a free tool that generates detailed information and statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources.

BACKLINK

Are incoming links that come from another website. For Example, Investment News links to your website by referring to you through an article. The significance of Backlinks is that it influences search engine optimization purposes.

BOUNCE RATE

The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page of content. For example, if 10 visitors arrive on your website and 6 leave without navigating to another page, the bounce rate is 60%.

CALL TO ACTION (CTA)

A call-to-action is a text link, button, image, or some other type of web link that encourages a website visitor to take an action on that website, such as visiting a landing page to download a piece of content. These little buttons direct your audience towards taking the next logical step. Example: “Book a meeting with me”

CLICK THROUGH RATE (CTR)

CTR is essentially the number of times your ad shows up divided by the number of times it gets clicked. This is a great resources for measuring the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. For Example, if you ad showed up 500 times and got click 10 times, then your CTR is 0.02%.

CONVERSION RATE

Conversions turn simple web visitors into interested prospects. A conversion rate is the proportion of web visits to a site who take action (from a call to action) to go beyond a casual content view or website visit.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM)

In the digital space, CRM usually points to a piece of software that allows you to better organize and understand your customer base.

IMPRESSIONS

This is the number of web visitors who viewed a web advertisement online.

KEYWORDS

These are the individual words that consumers use to define a search in a search engine like Google.

KEYWORD DENSITY

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or key phrase shows up on your website.

LANDING PAGE

This is the section of a website that’s accessed by clicking a hyperlink on another web page. Oftentimes, people use landing pages as the destination for PPCs (pay per click advertisements).

LONGTAIL KEYWORDS

When marketers refer to the term “long tail keywords” they are talking about a targeted search phrase that contains at least three words. Long tail keywords are what searchers usually search for.

ORGANIC SEARCH RESULTS

Organic search results are free, or natural web traffic, opposed to pay-per-click (paid) web traffic. One huge goal of SEO is to increase the amount of organic (free) traffic that a website receives.

PPC (PAY-PER-CLICK)

Unlike organic results, PPC links are paid advertisements that appear at the top of search engine results. PPC advertisements are used to generate traffic. Bidders pay every time a web visitor clicks on the ad, hence the name pay per click. We wrote a simplified guidebook for advisors interested in PPC.

SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)

Optimizing a website for search engines makes it easy for search engines to scan and evaluate the content on the site. As a result, optimized websites received an increase traffic. Important factors are fresh content, relevant keywords, and inbound links. (Bonus” check out our ebook, “SEO for Advisors.”)

TRAFFIC SOURCES

Website visitors find your website in several different ways (search engines, referring sites like social media and by typing in the URL directly). Traffic sources is a term that refers to the channel in which web visitors find your website, which is an important analytical measurement.

This guest post was provided by Mike Renton of Advisor Websites. Originally published July, 2014 here. Reprinted with permission.