Glossary

Running two versions of something simultaneously to see which performs better. Half your audience sees version A, half sees B. Data decides the winner, not opinions.

Federal law requiring websites to be usable by people with disabilities. Originally written for physical spaces, now aggressively applied to digital properties. Plaintiff attorneys have built entire practices around suing non-compliant sites.

Software that performs tasks typically requiring human judgment: pattern recognition, language understanding, decision-making. The current wave is dominated by large language models, but AI encompasses everything from spam filters to autonomous vehicles.

The contract that lets two pieces of software exchange information. When your calendar knows about your email, or your CRM updates when someone fills out a form, that's an API doing the handoff.

MRR multiplied by 12, or the annual value of all subscriptions. The number investors and acquirers care about. The scale at which recurring revenue businesses get measured.

Using software to perform repetitive tasks without human intervention. The difference between doing something once and having it done a thousand times without additional effort.

Commerce where businesses sell to other businesses, not consumers. Longer sales cycles, higher deal values, more stakeholders, different psychology than B2C. Your customer has a boss they need to justify the purchase to.

A link from another website pointing to yours. Search engines treat backlinks as votes of confidence: more quality links, more authority. The currency of SEO, and the reason people send you terrible guest post pitches.

The percentage of visitors who arrive, see one page, and leave without doing anything else. High bounce rates usually signal a mismatch between what someone expected and what they found.

Unauthorized access to protected data. Could be a sophisticated attack or a misconfigured database. Either way, your customer data is now somewhere it shouldn't be, and you have obligations: legal and ethical.

The total cost of acquiring a new customer: advertising, sales commissions, onboarding, everything. The number that, compared to LTV, determines whether your business model works.

A global network of servers that delivers your website's files from locations physically close to each visitor. Faster load times, reduced server strain, better resilience against traffic spikes and attacks.

The percentage of customers who cancel or don't renew within a given period. The leak in your bucket. Acquiring customers costs money; losing them costs more.

Contacting prospects who have no prior relationship with you. Email, phone, LinkedIn: initiated without permission. Legal when done correctly, effective when done well, spam when done poorly.

The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action: purchase, form submission, signup, phone call. The metric that separates websites that exist from websites that work.

Google's three-part speed test for websites: load time (LCP), responsiveness (INP), and visual stability (CLS). Poor scores affect both rankings and user experience. Google will tell you exactly where you're failing.

The actual amount paid for a single click in a PPC campaign. Can be fixed or auction-based depending on the platform. The metric that determines whether paid advertising is sustainable.

Advertising pricing based on views rather than clicks. You pay for eyeballs, not actions. Common in display and video advertising where awareness matters more than immediate response.

When usernames and passwords appear in publicly accessible breach databases. Usually from third-party breaches, not your systems, but your employees reuse passwords, so it becomes your problem.

Software that stores everything about your leads and customers: contact info, conversation history, deal stages, purchase records. The single source of truth for revenue operations.

The percentage of people who click after seeing something: an ad, an email, a search result. The bridge metric between being seen and being engaged with.

Ownership and control of your business data. It lives on infrastructure you control, in formats you can export, with no vendor holding it hostage. If a platform disappears tomorrow, you still have everything.

The percentage of your emails that actually reach the inbox: not spam, not bounced, not silently dropped. The unsexy foundation of email marketing. If your deliverability is poor, nothing else matters.

A cryptographic signature added to outgoing emails proving they weren't altered in transit and actually came from your domain. Part of the email authentication triad.

A policy that tells receiving servers what to do with emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks: accept, quarantine, or reject. Also provides reporting so you can see who's spoofing your domain.

A score (0-100) predicting how likely a website is to rank in search results. Created by Moz, not Google, but useful as a relative benchmark. Higher authority sites pass more link value.

A sequence of automated emails sent over time, triggered by a specific action. Each message builds on the last, nurturing the recipient toward a decision without manual intervention.

A distinct, identifiable thing that AI systems recognize as unique: a person, company, place, or concept. When AI confuses you with someone else, you have an entity confusion problem.

The staged journey from stranger to customer. Wide at the top (awareness), narrow at the bottom (purchase). Every stage loses people. The goal is understanding where they drop and fixing the leaks.

European Union law governing how personal data can be collected, stored, and processed. Applies to any business handling EU residents' data, regardless of where that business is located.

The practice of ensuring AI systems: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini: represent your brand accurately. Traditional SEO is about ranking. GEO is about truth. Different problem, different solution.

Your free business listing on Google Search and Maps. Controls what appears when people search your name: address, hours, photos, reviews. For local businesses, often more important than your actual website.

When an AI states false information with complete confidence. It's not lying: it genuinely doesn't know it's wrong. The model predicted plausible-sounding text that happens to be fabricated.

A content management system that stores and delivers content via API, with no built-in front-end. You control exactly how content appears. More flexibility, more complexity, better performance.

U.S. federal law governing the protection of health information. If you handle patient data (even tangentially) you have compliance obligations. Violations carry serious fines.

An architecture pattern where websites are pre-built as static files, enhanced with JavaScript, and connected to services via APIs. Fast, secure, scalable, but requires different thinking than traditional CMS.

A structured database of entities and their relationships. Google's Knowledge Graph powers those information boxes in search results. AI models learn from similar structures to 'know' facts about the world.

A standalone page designed for a single purpose: usually capturing leads or driving a specific conversion. No navigation distractions, no alternative paths. Arrive, decide, act.

The process of appending additional data to a basic lead record. Someone submits their email; enrichment adds their job title, company, phone number, LinkedIn profile, and company size. Turns a name into a prospect profile.

Something valuable offered free in exchange for contact information. Guides, templates, calculators, audits: anything worth an email address. The opening move in the permission relationship.

The neural network architecture behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and similar tools. Trained on massive text datasets to predict what words should come next. Remarkably capable. Also remarkably confident when wrong.

The box of three local businesses that appears at the top of Google search results with a map. Prime real estate. Getting into the pack for your target keywords dramatically increases visibility and calls.

The total revenue expected from a customer over the entire relationship. The number that tells you how much you can afford to spend acquiring them.

Software that executes marketing tasks automatically based on triggers, rules, and schedules. Email sequences, lead scoring, list segmentation, campaign orchestration. The machinery behind scalable marketing.

Automated systems that watch your digital properties for problems: downtime, performance degradation, security anomalies, configuration changes. The alternative is finding out from customers. Or attackers.

The predictable revenue generated every month from subscriptions. The heartbeat metric for subscription businesses. Not total revenue: just the portion you can count on repeating.

Your business's name, address, and phone number listed consistently across directories, review sites, and data aggregators. Consistency signals legitimacy to Google. Inconsistency signals chaos.

Visitors who arrive through unpaid search results. They searched, you appeared, they clicked: no advertising cost per visit. The long game of SEO.

Visitors who arrive through advertising. You paid for the click or impression. Faster than organic, but stops the moment you stop paying.

The collection of active deals being worked at any given time. Unlike a funnel (theoretical stages), a pipeline contains actual opportunities with names, dollar values, and close dates attached.

Advertising model where you pay each time someone clicks your ad. The dominant model for search and social advertising. You bid on attention, one click at a time.

Advertising that follows people who've already interacted with your website. They visited, they left, now your ads appear as they browse elsewhere. Memory persistence through pixels.

The systems, processes, and data flows connecting sales, marketing, and customer success into a unified revenue engine. Not a department: an architecture. The plumbing that makes a business actually function.

The ratio between what you gained and what you spent, expressed as a percentage. Calculated as (Profit ÷ Cost) × 100. The only metric that ultimately matters to a business owner, and the one most often fudged in marketing proposals.

Software delivered over the internet, paid by subscription. You don't install it, you don't own it, you don't maintain it. You pay monthly and hope the vendor stays in business.

Code added to your website that explicitly tells search engines what your content means. Labels your data so machines can read it: this is a phone number, this is a price, this person is the author.

The practice of improving your website's visibility in search engine results. Encompasses technical performance, content relevance, and external authority signals. The goal: appear when people search for what you offer.

The page of results you see after entering a search query. Contains organic results, paid ads, featured snippets, local packs, knowledge panels. The entire battlefield of visibility.

A formal commitment specifying what level of service you'll receive: uptime guarantees, response times, resolution windows. The document you point to when things go wrong.

A DNS record that lists which servers are authorized to send email on your domain's behalf. Helps receiving servers verify that emails claiming to be from you actually are.

Encryption that protects data traveling between a browser and your server. The padlock icon. The 's' in 'https.' Not optional: browsers now actively warn visitors away from sites without it.

Tags added to URLs that track where traffic comes from. When someone clicks a link with UTM parameters, your analytics knows exactly which campaign, source, and medium delivered them.

The total experience of using a product or website: not just how it looks, but how it feels, how intuitive it is, how much friction exists between wanting to do something and doing it.

A security layer that filters malicious traffic before it reaches your website. Blocks common attacks: SQL injection, cross-site scripting, credential stuffing: without you having to think about them.

The international technical standard for web accessibility. Published by W3C, referenced by courts interpreting ADA requirements. Following WCAG is both good practice and legal protection.

A product or service built by one company, rebranded and sold by another. The end customer sees your brand. The builder remains invisible.

A defined sequence of steps that moves work from input to output. In software, usually triggered automatically: form submission kicks off email, email response updates CRM, CRM change notifies sales.