March 24th, 2010 by Susie

We say a fair bit about SEO technical terms and jargon in this blog, but the chances are high that if you are working out (or carrying through) a search engine optimisation campaign, you’ll encounter a quite a lot of marketing jargon too. That’s especially true if you’re looking at buying some paid advertising. So, as we at searcheingineoptimization.co.uk like nothing more than helping our faithful readers out, here are some marketing terms that crop up in search engine optimization discussions.

ROI stands for Return On Investment. If you put something in, whether it be money or time and effort, you expect to get something out of it- a return on your investment. For example, if you decide to spend some hard earned cash and buy some services from an SEO company, they should make some improvements to your website, put in place link building strategies, and do some social media optimization on your behalf. That should lead to increased website traffic and increase your turnover, getting you a good ROI.

ROI is related to the concept of Cost-Benefit Analysis, which is the process of thinking through how much gain you can expect to get from a particular action and offsetting that against what it will cost in time, resources, and money.

The term Market Share is used to express how much of a given market- let’s say total searches performed in the UK- belongs to a particular company. Google has a more than 80% market share in that case. You’ll also hear people say that Google ‘owns’ more than 80% of the UK search market. It means the same thing.

Conversion is a very important theme. It is what you really want customers to do on your website- usually buy a product. Conversion could also be setting up an account, donating money, signing up for a newsletter or joining a group. Clicking on a banner ad is another type of conversion, this time for the ad, not the website. In SEO, not everything is about conversion, particularly when thinking about social media, but it is the primary goal of SEO and marketing in general. Conversion is winning, everything else is strategy allowing you to win next time. The Conversion Rate is the percentage or fraction of traffic that converts on any one page or from any one incoming link.

An Affiliate website or company markets products that are actually sold by a different company in a different location or part of the web. There is actually money to be made as an affiliate site. The main point of sale can track where incoming buying customers come from and allocate the referring site a share of the profits or a small fee as a reward. SEO for affiliate marketing sites is a bit tricky and warrants a whole discussion to itself.

Contextual advertisements are those directly related to what the user is looking at. If you search for anything through any of the major engines, the banner ads that pop up will be related to your search- contextual advertising. The same goes off the web. A poster advertising a swimwear shop at the local pool is contextual advertising.

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