Digital marketing glossary

Agentic browsing is when an AI assistant visits websites for a user, reads pages, and compares options. It sometimes finishes the task too, like booking, instead of handing back a list of links.

This changes what a website has to do. An agent does not enjoy your hero video or your brand story. It reads text, structured data, and forms. Some sites hide pricing behind a call, bury service areas inside an image, or make you use a chat widget to get basic facts. An agent struggles with those, so it moves on to a competitor it can read. The practical steps are plain text answers to common questions, visible hours and service areas, schema on key pages, and forms that work without heavy scripts. It is early days. But the fixes are the same ones that help human visitors.

Answer engine optimization is the work of writing and structuring content so it can be lifted straight out as the answer to a question. Search features and AI assistants do the lifting.

The format does most of the work. Ask the question as a heading. Answer it in the first forty to sixty words, in plain complete sentences. Then add the detail underneath. Avoid answers that only make sense after three paragraphs of setup, because an extraction system will not read that far. FAQ schema, clear headings, and short paragraphs all help. AEO and GEO overlap. AEO is about the shape of the content. GEO is about being the source a model trusts enough to quote. For a local business, the questions worth answering are the ones people ask before they book.

Call tracking gives each marketing source its own phone number, so a business can see which ad, page, or listing produced each call. Most systems record the conversation too.

For a service business the phone is the conversion. Marketing without call tracking is guesswork. Dynamic number insertion swaps the number on your website based on how the visitor arrived. Direct visitors see your real number, and ad or search traffic sees a tracked one. Set up correctly, it does not hurt NAP consistency. The tracked number never replaces the primary number in your listings. The recordings are often worth more than the source data. They show which calls were price shoppers, which were the jobs you want, and how often the phone gets answered badly.

A citation is any online mention of a business name, address, and phone number. A directory listing, a chamber of commerce page, or an industry association profile all count.

Citations were once a volume game, and agencies sold packages of five hundred listings. That era is over. What matters now is accuracy on a smaller set of sources that really feed data around the web. Those are the major aggregators, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, and the directories specific to your trade. Wrong or duplicate listings do real damage. They send mixed signals about where you are and what you are called. Cleanup usually turns up an old address from a previous office, a tracking number left behind by a past agency, or a duplicate profile someone created years ago. Fixing those beats adding new listings.

A conversion path is the set of steps a visitor takes from first seeing a business to contacting it. It includes every page, click, and decision point along the way.

Mapping the path shows where people quit. A common one for home services runs like this. Google search, map listing, website service page, then either a tap to call or a bounce. If most visits die on the service page, the problem is on that page, not in the ad account. Paths also change with urgency. Someone with water on the floor calls within ninety seconds. They need a phone number in the thumb zone. Someone planning a kitchen remodel visits four times over three weeks. They need photos, price ranges, and a reason to come back. Design for both.

Conversion rate optimization is the work of getting more of your website visitors to call, fill out a form, or book. It uses research and testing instead of guesswork.

One service site turns two percent of visits into calls. Another turns five percent. The difference comes from choices you control. What the page says above the fold. How easy the phone number is to tap. How many fields the form asks for. Whether the page answers pricing questions. CRO usually starts with session recordings and heatmaps to see where people stall. Then you test one change at a time. It is the cheapest growth lever most owners ignore. Doubling your conversion rate does the same thing as doubling your traffic, and it costs far less. It also makes every other channel more profitable, paid ads included.

Core Web Vitals are three Google metrics that score the real user experience on a page. They measure how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds, and how much the layout shifts.

The three metrics are Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. Google measures them from real Chrome users, not a lab test. So the score reflects phones on cell networks, not an office desktop. Passing all three is a modest ranking factor. The bigger effect is on people. A page that takes five seconds on a phone loses a large share of visitors before it finishes drawing. Those are visitors you already paid for through ads or earned through rankings. On a service site the usual culprits are oversized hero images, too many tracking scripts, and heavy chat widgets.

Cost per lead is the total marketing spend for a channel divided by the leads it produced. It shows what each inquiry cost, before any of them turn into paying work.

The number only means something next to two others. How many leads become customers, and what a customer is worth. A ninety dollar lead is expensive for a company doing one hundred fifty dollar service calls. It is cheap for a roofer averaging eighteen thousand dollars a job. To compare channels honestly, count ad spend and management fees together. Watch lead quality too, since the cheapest channel often sends the most price shoppers. Track cost per booked job when you can. That is the number that decides whether to spend more, and most owners have never worked it out.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google human quality raters look for these qualities when they judge whether content and its publisher deserve trust.

It is not a direct ranking score. It describes what Google systems try to get close to, and rater feedback shapes those systems over time. For a service business the signals are concrete. A real About page with real people. Licenses and certifications shown. Photos of actual jobs instead of stock images. Author names on articles, a physical address, and reviews that back up the claims. Google added experience in 2022, and it matters most here. A contractor writing about slab leaks after twenty years of crawling under houses should read differently from a generic article. Trust is the piece that carries the most weight.

An entity is a specific person, place, business, or thing that a search engine knows as its own item in the knowledge graph. It is separate from the words people use to describe it.

Search stopped being about matching strings of text years ago. Google ties your business to a real world thing. That thing has a location, a category, an owner, reviews, and links to other entities. The clearer that record, the more confidently Google shows you for relevant searches. It also makes an AI assistant more likely to name you. You strengthen the record in a few ways. Use the exact same business name everywhere. Publish the same contact details everywhere. Add LocalBusiness schema and link your profiles to each other. Earn mentions on sites that already have strong entity records, like a chamber of commerce or a local news outlet.

Generative engine optimization is the work of getting a business named and cited by AI tools when someone asks for a recommendation. Those tools include ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

AI assistants do not rank ten links. They pick a handful of sources and write one answer. Being the eleventh best page is worth nothing. So what gets picked? Content that answers the question directly in the first two sentences and states facts plainly. It also helps when other sites the model already trusts mention the business. Entity clarity matters too. That means a consistent name, address, and phone, clean schema, and a profile the model can tie to a real place. For service businesses this is early but growing. The generative engine optimization work overlaps heavily with good local SEO. It does not replace it.

Geogrid rank tracking checks a business map position from dozens of points across its service area. The result is a grid that shows where the business ranks well and where it disappears.

A single rank check tells you almost nothing in local search. The result changes with the searcher location. A geogrid scan runs the same keyword from a grid of points, often seven by seven across several miles. It then colors each point by position. The pattern is usually a bright center near your address that fades fast at the edges. That map is a planning tool. It shows which neighborhoods you already own, which are close enough to fight for, and which are out of reach without a second location. Run the same grid every month, so you are always comparing like with like.

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that controls how a company shows up in Google Maps and local results. It holds your name, hours, services, photos, and reviews.

It was called Google My Business until 2021. For most service businesses it is the single largest source of free leads. It is also the one asset that brings in calls without anyone visiting the website. You have to verify the profile, keep it accurate, and keep working on it. Categories carry heavy ranking weight, and the primary category matters most. Services, the description, photos, posts, and the questions section give Google more to match against a search. Google can also suspend a profile for guideline problems. A fake address or keyword stuffing in the business name will do it. So cleanup is often the first step before anything else pays off.

A lead generation system is the connected set of tools and steps that catches every inquiry and records where it came from. It also makes sure someone follows up, without anyone relying on memory.

Most service businesses lose more money to leaks than to a shortage of leads. A missed call at 4:50 on a Friday. A form that emails an address nobody checks. A quote sent Tuesday and never followed up. A system closes those gaps. You get tracked phone numbers, forms that write straight into a CRM, an automatic text reply when a call is missed, and a short follow up sequence for open quotes. It also gives you honest numbers, because every lead carries a source. Once you know which channel produced which booked job, budget decisions stop being arguments and start being math.

Local pack ranking factors are the signals Google uses to pick the three businesses shown in map results. They fall into three groups: relevance to the search, distance from the searcher, and prominence.

Relevance comes mostly from your Google Business Profile categories and services, plus the content on your website. Distance compares the searcher location against your address or service area. That is the one factor you cannot change. Prominence covers reviews, links, mentions, and how well known the business is offline. Distance carries so much weight that no amount of work puts a business first everywhere across a wide service area. That is the honest limit. What you can do is win the areas closest to you outright. Farther out, you improve your odds by building enough relevance and prominence to outweigh a competitor location advantage.

Local SEO is the work of making a business show up in Google Maps and local search results for the towns it serves. It helps nearby customers find you before they find a competitor.

Google decides local rankings on three things: relevance, distance, and prominence. You cannot move your building, so local SEO focuses on the other two. The work breaks into a few pieces. Set up a Google Business Profile with the right categories and services. Build real pages on your site for each service and city. Get every listing showing the same name, address, and phone. Keep a steady flow of new reviews coming in. Earn links from real local sources. This matters for a service business because most jobs start with a phone search from someone a few miles away. Ranking in the top three map results puts you in front of that person right when they are ready to call. You do not pay for every click either.

Local Services Ads are Google ads that run above the map pack for eligible trades and charge per lead instead of per click. To run them you have to pass a background and license check.

Businesses that pass screening show a Google Guaranteed badge, and that badge carries real weight with homeowners. Eligible categories include plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, garage doors, locksmiths, and a growing list of other home services. Some professional categories qualify under a separate check. You pay for a call or a message, not for a click. You can also dispute leads that are clearly out of area or the wrong service. Your rank inside the ad unit depends on review score, responsiveness, proximity, and your dispute history. Answering the phone quickly matters more here than in any other channel, because a slow response pushes you down.

The map pack is the block of three business listings shown with a map at the top of Google results for a local search. It sits above the standard blue links.

It also goes by local pack or three pack. It fills most of the first screen on a phone. That is where most local searches happen. Fourth place means you are invisible until someone taps to expand the list. Most people never do. Your position changes with the searcher location. You can sit first from your own office and fifth from a neighborhood four miles away. That is why one ranking screenshot proves very little. Geogrid tools scan from many coordinates across a service area and show the real picture. It is usually a patchwork of strong and weak spots.

NAP consistency means a business shows the exact same name, address, and phone number everywhere it appears online. Search engines then never have to guess which version is correct.

Small differences cause real problems. Suite in one place and Unit in another. A street name spelled out here and shortened there. Two phone numbers, because someone once used a tracking number in a directory. Each variation splits the signal. The fix is to write one master version of the name, address, and phone that matches the Google Business Profile. Then correct every listing to match it exactly. Do this before you build new listings, or you multiply the mess. Some businesses have moved offices or changed names. For them, this cleanup alone can unstick rankings that sat flat for a year.

Pay per click is advertising where a business bids on searches and pays only when someone clicks the ad. It buys visibility at the top of the results right away.

PPC turns on the same week. That makes it the fastest way to test whether a service and a city produce paying work. It also stops the day you stop paying. You are renting attention, not building an asset. Costs in Southern California trades commonly run twenty to eighty dollars per click, so wasted spend adds up fast. The money usually leaks in three places. Broad match keywords pull in searches you do not want. There is no negative keyword list. And the ads point at a homepage instead of a page about that exact service. Get conversion tracking right first, because none of the numbers mean anything until you do.

A pillar page is a long page that covers one broad topic end to end. It links out to shorter pages, and each of those handles a narrower piece of the topic in depth.

Think of a guide called Air Conditioner Replacement in Southern California. It walks through sizing, permits, costs, timelines, and rebates. Then it links to a separate page for each of those. The pillar earns links and competes for the broad phrase. The child pages catch the long specific searches and pass relevance back. For a service business the pillar doubles as a sales tool. It answers the questions a prospect would otherwise ask on a call. Pillars take real work, usually two to four thousand words with original photos and honest price ranges. So build one per core service rather than a dozen at once.

Reputation management is the ongoing work of earning new customer reviews on purpose and responding to the ones you get. It also means watching what people say about the business on public platforms.

Most owners treat reviews as something that happens to them. The businesses winning locally treat review generation as a process. There is a trigger, a script, and a follow up. Your star rating decides who calls you at all. Recent reviews also count for more than old ones, with customers and with Google. Answering a bad review in public is often worth more than that review cost you. The next reader is judging how you handle a problem. Asking only happy customers for reviews is called review gating, and it breaks Google policy. The safe method is to ask every customer at the right moment. Then fix service problems before they reach the review box.

Review velocity is the pace at which a business earns new reviews over time. You measure it as reviews per month, not as the total count sitting on the profile.

Picture a profile with three hundred reviews and nothing new in two years. To a customer it looks worse than a profile with sixty reviews that adds four a month. Recent reviews show the business is still active and still doing good work. Steady beats sudden. Twenty reviews arriving in one week after years of silence looks bought. It can trigger filtering, where reviews get removed with no warning and no explanation. For most service businesses, two to eight new reviews a month is a workable target. Tie the request to job completion, so it goes out while the customer still remembers the technician name.

Schema markup is code added to a web page that tells search engines exactly what the page is about. It can mark up a business, a service, a review, or a frequently asked question.

Most sites use the JSON-LD format from schema.org. For a service business the useful types are LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, and Review. Schema does not change what a visitor sees. It clears up confusion for machines, and that matters more every year as AI systems read pages to build answers. Mark up your address, hours, phone, and service area. That hands search engines and language models a clean statement of facts, instead of making them guess from paragraph text. It can also earn you richer search listings. The rule is simple. Only mark up what is true and visible on the page, because invented markup gets penalized.

A service area page is a page built for one city or neighborhood a business serves. It describes the work done there so the page can rank for searches in that specific area.

Done badly, these are the doorway pages that give local SEO a bad name. The same paragraph, with the city name swapped sixty times. Google filters those out, and they can drag down the rest of the site. Done well, each page carries detail only a company working in that city would know. The neighborhoods served. The housing stock and the problems that come with it. Permit quirks, drive times, and photos of real jobs. Build them for cities you actually serve and want more work in, in priority order. Ten strong pages beat sixty thin ones, and they are far safer.

A strategy call is a scheduled conversation between a business owner and a marketing partner. You review current results, agree on priorities, and decide what work happens next and in what order.

Before work starts, the call tells you a lot. You find out whether an agency understands your trade and your margins, or is reading from a script. Good questions to ask: which cities do you think are winnable, what does month one look like, and what would make you tell me not to hire you. Once work is underway, the monthly version keeps the plan honest. It should cover what moved, what did not, what changed inside your business, and what shifts next month. Bring your own numbers, especially booked jobs and average job value. Those decide what marketing is worth to you.

Technical SEO is the work of making a website easy for search engines to crawl, render, and index. It covers site speed, mobile usability, site structure, and problems in the code.

Technical problems are quiet. Nothing looks broken. The site loads fine for you, and rankings just never move. These are the common causes on service business sites. A stray noindex tag left over from a redesign, blocking pages. Two versions of the site loading, one with www and one without. Images ten times larger than they need to be. A sitemap listing pages that no longer exist. None of this creates rankings on its own. It removes the ceiling. Fix the technical issues before you write content. Publishing good pages on a site Google struggles to crawl wastes the content budget.

A topic cluster is a group of related pages built around one central pillar page. They all link together, so search engines can see the site covers the subject thoroughly.

Clusters replace the old habit of publishing loose blog posts and hoping one catches. Start with a subject you sell. List every question a buyer asks about it. Then decide which questions deserve their own page and which are just sections. Internal links do the work. Every child page links up to the pillar, and the pillar links down to each child. That structure spreads authority across the group. It also helps the right page rank for the right search, instead of two of your pages competing with each other. Plan a cluster around a service that makes money, not around a keyword with big volume and no buyers.

Topical authority is how deeply and completely a site covers one subject. Strong coverage helps search engines treat that site as a credible source for related questions in that area.

Picture a roofing company with forty pages. They cover tile, shingle, flat roofs, permits, insurance claims, and repair versus replacement. A search engine trusts that site on roofing far more than a site with one services page and a blog post about holiday hours. Authority comes from covering a subject the way an expert would, not from word count. For a service business the practical version is simple. Answer every real question a customer asks on the phone, one page at a time. Then link those pages together so the relationship is obvious. It builds slowly and holds up better than tactics aimed at a single keyword.

A visibility audit is a review of how easily customers can find a business online today. It covers map rankings, the website, listings, reviews, and how the business compares with local competitors.

It is the check up you do before anyone recommends spending money. A useful audit gives you specifics. A geogrid showing where you rank across your service area. The profile fields that are wrong or empty. The listings carrying a bad address. The pages that are slow or missing. The review gap between you and the three businesses currently above you. It should end with a short list in priority order, cheap high impact fixes first. Be careful with free audits that are really a keyword report with a sales pitch attached. Ask what data source produced each number on the page.