This is a plain-English glossary of the marketing, SEO and advertising terms agencies use in proposals and reports, written for business owners rather than marketers. A&B Consulting Group is a marketing agency in Burr Ridge, Illinois, serving Chicago and the western suburbs and clients in 17 states.
Marketing has an unusual amount of jargon for a field that is mostly common sense, and some of it is used specifically to make straightforward work sound complicated. A few of these terms are genuinely useful shorthand. Several are worth knowing mainly so you can tell when a proposal is avoiding a question.
Where a term is commonly used to obscure something, the definition says so.
A few words appear in proposals mainly to make routine work sound proprietary. None of these are technical terms with agreed meanings.
Proprietary algorithm, in an SEO context, usually means ordinary SEO. Nobody outside Google has an algorithm that ranks sites. Holistic or synergistic approach generally means the deliverables have not been specified, and the right response is to ask what will be produced each month. Brand awareness campaign can be genuine, and is also where unmeasurable spend goes to avoid being judged — ask what would count as it working.
Guaranteed rankings is the one to treat as disqualifying. Nobody controls search results, and the guarantee is normally met by ranking you for a term nobody searches.
Most reporting can be ignored in favour of four figures, in this order of usefulness.
SEO earns organic positions and keeps producing after you stop investing, but takes months to build. PPC rents position at the top of results and produces enquiries in days, stopping the day the budget stops. Most businesses run both, weighted toward paid early and shifting as the organic work matures.
Less than people assume. It tells you what an enquiry costs, not what a customer costs. A $60 lead is excellent at one-in-five on a large job and poor at one-in-thirty on a small one, so it only becomes meaningful alongside your close rate and ticket size.
No. The map pack is the three local businesses shown with a map, decided largely by proximity, your Google Business Profile and your reviews. Organic results sit below it and are decided by different signals. A business can rank well in one and be absent from the other.
Not directly. What it does is let search engines and AI assistants read your business details, services and FAQs with confidence, which affects how your listing can appear and how likely you are to be quoted in an answer. Worth having, not a ranking lever.
What will be produced each month, and what would count as this working. Both questions are answerable by anyone doing real work and awkward for anyone selling a reporting subscription. If the answer to the second is a ranking or an impression count rather than enquiries, ask again.
Tell us what you have now and what you are trying to fix. We will scope it honestly — and if you do not need us yet, we will say so.