United States
A
Analytics
Analytics is the measure of how your content is performing, including how your content is being found and who is interacting with it. Using tools like Google Analytics or Instagram’s Insights, for example, allows you to see how users are engaging with your content quickly, and you can use this to steer your future content towards users.
Audience
This is who you’re writing for – you need to know what your target demographic is and best to cater to their needs and wants. Buyer personas are useful in capturing the right audience.
B
Backlinks
Otherwise known as inbound or incoming links, backlinks are hyperlinks to your website from another place on the internet. Link building is useful for giving Google a good indication that your content is popular, but we always recommend quality over quantity as too many low-quality backlinks will look like spam.
Blog
A blog is a collection of content that appears independently or as an extension of a company website to provide more valuable content around a subject matter. A blogger is a regular contributor to a blog, and blogging is writing a post for the blog.
Brand Identity
A brand identity is the personality you present to the public. The identity will represent your company values, the services that you provide and the ideas you present. Done well, a strong brand identity can build loyalty and trust from your readers and potential customers.
Buyer Personas
Knowing who you are writing your content for is vital. A buyer persona is an example profile of the person you are writing to, and keeping your buyer persona at the front of your mind will help you speak to their specific needs and tailor your content to their requirements.
Buyer’s Journey
An important element of inbound marketing, the buyer’s journey is split into three main stages – awareness, consideration and decision. Knowing where a prospect is on the buyer’s journey allows you to target your content more effectively.
C
Call to Action
Calls to action (or CTAs as they are more commonly known) are phrases included in content that encourage the reader to do something. Typical calls to action include asking the reader to contact you, visit your social media or navigate to another page on your website.
Case Study
A detailed explanation of a past project. Typically, case studies are used to display success stories and using figures and quantifiable data can help you show how your business has provided value to another customer.
Content Audit
Collecting and reviewing all of your existing content to see what is successful in your content creation and what is less successful. A content audit allows you to make your content effective.
Content Management System (CMS)
System or software that helps to organise and schedule your content. These allow you to line up posts in advance to keep consistency.
Competitors
This is anyone who provides the same service as you, or who is ranking highly for search terms that you would like to rank for. You can use competitor content as a guide for what search engines value and steer your content to be competitive.
Context
The circumstances surrounding a piece of content. No content is created in a vacuum – it will be affected by contextual things like seasons, world or national events, changes in the industry etc.
Copywriting
Copywriting uses words to actively sell something, where content writing focuses more on informing customers based on their stage in the buyer’s journey.
CTR
Stands for ‘click-through rate’ – this is the number of people who actually click through to your content to consume it, rather than simply scrolling past.
E
Editorial Calendar
Editorial calendars are really handy for content strategy. They are used to control the process of creating content in a structured and managed way. An editorial calendar can chart deadlines for a piece of content from the initial idea right through to publication.
Engagement
If a customer engages with your content, it means they have had a meaningful experience when coming across and reading it. Engagement in your work means your reader wants to be actively involved with it – perhaps via a nice little comment on how much they enjoyed reading it or sharing to pass on your information to their family and friends.
Evergreen Content
Just like the beautiful green leaves that grace those lucky trees throughout the year, a piece of evergreen content is useful and looks good whenever you read it. They provide lots of SEO value, so they’re a content marketer’s best friend.
F
Featured Snippet
A search engine results page (SERP) feature, featured snippets are small chunks of text that Google pulls from a piece of content to answer a searcher’s question without them having to trawl for it.
G
Guest Post
When one content creator posts a piece of writing by another content creator (with their consent) so that both can encourage their audiences to the other’s site.
H
Headings
Subtitles used to break up content into more manageable chunks. These help make the content more SEO friendly.
I
Inbound Marketing
A marketing style that puts the customer at the forefront, aiming to create a good relationship with them and promote trust and loyalty in your brand.
Influencer
A content creator with an audience who encourages people to live a certain way or use certain products. Influencers can be useful to work with to extend the reach of your business.
Infographic
A combination of information and graphic. A pictorial representation of content designed to present information in a visually engaging way.
Intent
Search intent is what the search engine results page (SERP) shows when you enter a term. This could be shopping results, images, videos or blog content – knowing what kind of results people are looking for can help you choose what form of content you should aim at that keyword.
K
Keywords
Keywords are the bread and butter for creating an effective content strategy. We use a carefully researched target keyword list when crafting our content as we know we will be creating content that is useful and valuable to our intended readers.
Keyword Tool
A useful piece of software that helps us marketers find out what keywords people are searching for month-by-month to help us write relevant content using keywords people are actively looking for.
L
Long-Tail Keywords
A longer keyword, usually comprising three or four words. These are typically more targeted keywords, meaning they often have lower competition and will be more specific to your product. Using long-tail keywords ultimately helps your readers find exactly what they were looking for.
Leads
Otherwise known as lead generation, a lead defines an enquiry into a company’s product or service. Producing high-quality content with a consistent tone and style should lead to a higher number of quality leads.
O
Optimised Content
Writing optimised content is the basic foundation for any effective content marketing strategy. Optimisation is a form of writing that helps to make your website or blog more visible to search engines such as Google and Bing. Using keywords and phrases in your content that people are actively searching for will help your content appear higher in the search results.
Organic
Essentially, any content that you do not pay to promote is organic. This can be anything from blog posts to social media – organic posts grow your audience more slowly, but prospects are more likely to be looking for you or your product when they find you.
Outreach
A form of content marketing that involves contacting and working with the right people to bring more awareness to your brand. For example, outreach marketing can involve guest posting or asking an influencer in your industry to write for your blog or take over your social media for a day.
P
Pay Per Click (PPC)
A model of marketing which involves pay for your content to be promoted – also known as ‘biddable media’. For more information about PPC marketing, check out our PPC glossary.
Personalisation
Using information gathered about a prospective client to target content towards them – this could include using their name in email marketing or targeting content towards a certain type of person.
Pillar Pages
When you have a lot of information about one topic, it is sometimes better to go into greater detail to be clear. Pillar pages are essentially the base for all of that information, providing an overview of the topic and links to each detailed piece of content.
R
Relevance
A measure of how likely your content is to affect a potential client. Content should aim to be relevant to the buyer persona, the buyer’s journey and the social context.
Republishing Content
Republishing content means to return to older content and review it to see if it needs any changes made or information updated. Republishing content means you’ll avoid having any old information on your site, and updating old content means you won’t have any duplicate content when trying to stay up-to-date.
S
Search Visibility
Search visibility is a combination of the search volume and the position of keywords that you are ranking for. Some software can show you how visible you are in the search results for certain keywords or phrases. This helps us determine what keywords we need to target to gain higher search visibility in an organic search channel.
SEO
SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’ and is the process of making your content more likely to rank in search results. For more on this, have a look at our SEO glossary.
If you’re struggling to create quality content, why not have a look at our guide to common content marketing mistakes and how to correct them?
Of course, our content marketing glossary can only show one side of the marketing spectrum. For more information about SEO and biddable media practices and how we can apply them to your brand, contact us today.
