Top Ten Online Terms for SMEs to Understand

With so many terms floating about in the online world I understand that for small to medium business owners (or SME’s) it can be a pretty daunting prospect.  So to help you out and to extend some of the useful terms you can find in the Soup site here: http://www.soupdigital.co.nz/about/useful-online-terms/ I have taken it right back to basics:

1. SEO: Search Engine Optimisation or in simple terms; Google, Yahoo, MSN etc like your site and will feature its contents accordingly and to the right people. See below for where optimised content or natural search results are located in Google.
   

   Natural search results in Google.

2. SEA: Search Engine Advertising (SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the combination of SEA and SEO) seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages through the use of paid for advertising or sponsored listings. This is separate to natural listings as shown below.
   

   Paid for Advertising or Sponsorded Listings in Google

3. Page Impression: or Page View is simply a single request to load a website page on the Internet.  So if someone was to click on your business within Yellow.co.nz then that would generate 1 page impression
4. Unique Browser/User: An estimate or indication,  generally taken over a month which shows how many “individuals” have visited your site, information page etc based on information held in your cookie.  Remember this is just an indication as the same person can access the same site from both home and at work or indeed clear out their cookies (searching history).
5. PPC: Pay Per Click refers to the charging mechanism when you as a business undergo an advertising campaign online. People click on your ad, you pay the search engine/publisher. For an explanation of Google’s pay per click service or commonly known as Google adwords see our video resources page
6. CTR: Click Through Rate is a common but simplistic way of measuring the success of a Paid for Advertising campaign you may have carried out using something like Google Adwords. A CTR is calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if an adwords delivered your ad 50 times (impressions delivered) and 4 users clicked on your ad, then the resulting CTR would be  8%.
7. Domain name: basically this is the entry path into your businesses website so if your business is called Brown Builders then you would look to purchase the domain name www.brownbuilders.co.nz. However please remember that just because your business name is registered that this automatically gives you rights to the domain name.  Its first in, first serve with domain names so you might not get exactly what you were looking for.
8. Social Media: just a term used to described those sites out there that let you become part of a conversation by communicating online such as Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace.  For more information check out the definition in wikipedia by clicking here
9. Qualified Traffic: This is website traffic that has a higher propensity to purchase your product or service based on their search requirements. Basically you do not want to be spending money on driving generic traffic to your site. Its quality not quantity that will generate leads for your business in the online space!
10. Business Directory: reasonably self explanatory but essentially these guys love your content so utilise them as much as possible to promote your business.  Soup Digital utilises business directories to increase your exposure because when done correctly you can really harness their SEO to generate quality leads.

Tagged as: basic definition, small and medium businesses, smb, sme