Marketing Jargon, Translated Into Plain English.
Every industry hides behind vocabulary, and marketing is worse than most. This marketing glossary defines the terms a business owner in York PA, or anywhere we work, will hear from agencies, tools and reports — the way Get Us Listed would explain them across a table. Bookmark it, share it with whoever handles your marketing, and never nod along to jargon again.
The Glossary,
A to Z.
Each definition is how we'd actually explain it to a client — including why it matters to your phone ringing, not just what it technically means.
B
- Bounce rate
- The share of visitors who leave after seeing one page. High bounce isn't automatically bad — someone who lands, grabs your phone number and calls has 'bounced' — but a high bounce on a service page usually means the page didn't match what the visitor searched for.
C
- Citations
- Mentions of your business name, address and phone number on other sites — Yelp, BBB, Apple Maps, industry directories. Google cross-references them to decide how much it trusts your business data. Consistency matters more than volume.
- Conversion
- The moment a visitor becomes a lead: a call, a form submission, a booking. Traffic that never converts is decoration. Every marketing report you read should connect back to this number.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's three page-experience measurements: how fast the main content appears (LCP), how much the page jumps around while loading (CLS), and how quickly it responds to taps (INP). They're graded per page and affect rankings.
- CTR (click-through rate)
- Of everyone who saw your listing or ad, the percentage who clicked it. A low CTR with high impressions means you're being seen but not chosen — usually a title, review-count, or offer problem rather than a ranking problem.
G
- GBP (Google Business Profile)
- Your business listing on Google — the panel with your map pin, hours, photos, and reviews. For local businesses it's often more important than the website itself, because it's what Google shows first for local searches.
I
- Impressions
- How many times your listing or ad was displayed, whether or not anyone clicked. Useful as context, dangerous as a headline — an agency reporting impressions instead of calls is showing you the scoreboard from a different game.
K
- Keyword intent
- What the searcher actually wants when they type a phrase. 'How to unclog a drain' is a DIY-er; 'emergency plumber near me' is a customer. Pages rank best — and convert best — when they match intent, not just words.
L
- Landing page
- The specific page a visitor arrives on, especially from an ad. Sending ad traffic to your homepage instead of a focused landing page is one of the most common ways local businesses quietly burn ad budget.
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
- How long the biggest visible element — usually your hero image or headline — takes to appear. Google's 'good' threshold is 2.5 seconds. Most local business sites miss it because of oversized images.
- Local SEO
- Everything done to show up when nearby people search for what you do: your Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, location pages and the website behind them. Distinct from national SEO — different signals, different playbook.
M
- Map pack
- The block of three map results Google shows for local searches, above the regular results. It takes the majority of local clicks, which is why so much local SEO work is really map-pack work.
N
- NAP consistency
- Name, Address, Phone — written identically everywhere your business appears online. Mismatches (old address on Yelp, different phone on BBB) make Google trust your data less, which costs map-pack position.
O
- Organic traffic
- Visitors who found you through unpaid search results, as opposed to ads. It compounds: work done this year keeps paying next year — which is also why it's slower to start than ads.
P
- PPC (pay-per-click)
- Ads where you pay only when someone clicks — Google Ads being the big one for local businesses. Fast to start, precise to target, and expensive to run badly, which is why tracking conversions (not clicks) is non-negotiable.
R
- Retargeting
- Showing ads specifically to people who already visited your site. Cheaper than cold ads because the audience already knows you — but it needs enough site traffic to matter, so it's rarely step one.
S
- Schema markup
- Code on your site that labels your content for search engines — 'this is our address', 'these are our hours', 'this is an FAQ'. Invisible to visitors; helps Google display richer results for you.
- SERP
- Search Engine Results Page — everything you see after hitting Enter on Google: ads at the top, the map pack, organic results, 'People also ask' boxes. Where you appear on the SERP decides how much of the click traffic you get.
Marketing Glossary Questions
Usually Raises.
One number: conversions — calls, forms, bookings. Impressions, CTR and even rankings are supporting evidence, not the verdict. If a report doesn’t connect activity to leads, ask for that connection. If you want a second opinion, our free written visibility audit grades what actually drives calls.
Map pack, GBP, reviews and NAP consistency — in that order. For most local trades, the majority of new-customer calls start at the map results, and all four of those terms are about winning that block. Our free GBP checklist covers the do-it-yourself half. For the review side specifically, the free review response templates show what a good reply actually sounds like.
Yes: impressions. It’s the easiest number to grow and the least connected to revenue, which is exactly why it headlines so many agency reports. Treat it as context, never as the win.
Please do — the form below reaches a human. If a term confused you, it’s confusing other owners too, and we’d rather define it here than let jargon do its usual job.
See These Terms
As Your Numbers.
Send your business name and website. We'll return a written 12-point audit that grades your visibility signal by signal — using these exact terms, explained — within 48 hours. Free, and yours to keep.