34 terms
Plain-English glossary
Jargon is often used to make a simple thing sound expensive. Here is what the words in our proposals — and everyone else's — actually mean.
- Web
- SEO
- CRM
- Automation
- E-commerce
A to Z
The terms, defined
If a term you have been quoted for is not here, email us and we will explain it — and add it.
- API
- An agreed way for two pieces of software to talk to each other. When we say a tool “has an API”, we mean we can connect it to your other systems without a person copying data between them. When it does not, integration is either impossible or fragile.
- Backlink
- A link to your site from someone else's. Search engines treat them as endorsements, which is why buying them is both tempting and a reliable way to acquire a penalty that costs more to undo than it produced.
- Bounce rate
- The share of visitors who leave without interacting further. A high bounce rate on a service page is usually a mismatch between what someone searched for and what the page delivers — not a design problem.
- Cache
- A stored copy of something so it does not have to be built again. Caching is one of the cheapest ways to make a site faster, and one of the first things missing from a slow one.
- Canonical tag
- A signal telling search engines which version of a page is the real one when several URLs show similar content. Getting this wrong is a common cause of pages mysteriously not ranking.
- CDN
- A network of servers around the world that serve your site from a location near each visitor. Essential if you sell internationally, modest benefit if all your customers are in Lahore. See the speed guide.
- CMS
- Content management system. Software that lets non-developers edit a website. WordPress is the best known. Worth having if content changes weekly; usually overhead if it changes twice a year. Compared here.
- COD
- Cash on delivery. For many Pakistani online stores it is the majority payment method, and it brings a refusal and return rate that has to be designed against rather than tolerated. See the conversion checklist.
- Conversion rate
- The share of visitors who do the thing you wanted — buy, enquire, book. Almost always more improvable than traffic, and almost always the cheaper place to spend.
- Core Web Vitals
- Three Google metrics for real-world page experience: how fast the main content appears (LCP), how quickly the page responds to interaction (INP), and how much the layout shifts while loading (CLS).
- CRM
- Customer relationship management. Software holding your leads, customers, conversations and where each stands. The useful definition: the place where a lead cannot be forgotten. Buying guide.
- CTR
- Click-through rate. The share of people who see a search result or an ad and click it. In search, it is heavily influenced by your title and meta description, which makes those two lines unusually valuable.
- Doorway page
- A page built purely to rank for a location or keyword variant, with no genuine content of its own. Google identifies and penalises them, which is why we will not build forty copies of one page with the area name swapped. How we do area pages.
- Headless
- An architecture where the content store is separate from what visitors see. Useful for publishing to several channels at once; frequently unnecessary complexity for a business site with fifteen pages.
- Indexing
- Whether a search engine has actually stored your page and can show it. Pages that are not indexed cannot rank, and “not indexed” is a far more common problem than businesses realise.
- Integration
- Connecting two systems so data moves automatically. Usually the most expensive part of a quote, because each one carries its own authentication, error handling and edge cases.
- Landing page
- A page built for one campaign and one action. Distinct from a website page in that it is designed to be arrived at from an ad, with a single intent and nothing competing for attention.
- Lead
- A person who has shown interest and given you a way to reach them. A lead with no owner and no next action is functionally not a lead.
- Local pack
- The map with three business listings that appears above normal results for local searches. Getting into it is a different job from ranking a web page. Local SEO checklist.
- Meta description
- The summary text under a search result. It is not a ranking factor directly, but it heavily affects whether people click — which makes it one of the highest-value hundred characters on a page.
- Multi-tenant
- Software where many separate companies use one system, each seeing only their own data. The architecture behind any subscription product. SaaS development.
- NAP
- Name, address, phone. These must be identical everywhere they appear online. Inconsistency quietly caps how far a local business can rank, and nearly every business has some.
- Progressive web app
- A website built so a phone can install it — home screen icon, full screen, offline support, push notifications — without an app store. Often the right answer instead of a native app. Compared here.
- Redirect
- An instruction sending one URL to another. Critical during a redesign or migration: dropping old URLs drops the rankings attached to them, which is the most common way a redesign loses traffic.
- Retainer
- A recurring monthly arrangement for ongoing work — maintenance, SEO, automation, creative. Ours are month to month with 30 days' notice. Pricing.
- Row-level security
- Database rules controlling which rows each user can see. It is how a multi-tenant system keeps companies genuinely separate, enforced in the database rather than in the interface, which is the only place it counts.
- Schema markup
- Structured data added to a page that tells search engines what things are — a business, a service, a question, an article. It is what earns the richer-looking search results.
- Search intent
- What someone is actually trying to do when they type a query. “CRM software” and “best CRM for small business Pakistan” are the same topic and completely different intents, and they need different pages.
- Service worker
- A script that runs in the browser alongside a site, enabling offline support and push notifications. It is what makes a progressive web app work.
- Staging
- A private copy of a site where work happens before it goes live. If an agency has no staging environment, ask where changes are being tested.
- Technical SEO
- The foundation work: indexing, speed, structure, redirects, schema, mobile layout. Usually where the first measurable movement comes from, and usually skipped in favour of blog posts.
- Time to first byte
- How long the server takes to start responding. Over about 600ms it becomes the ceiling on your page speed, and no front-end work will rescue it.
- Webhook
- A message one system sends another the moment something happens. The building block of most automation, and much more efficient than repeatedly asking “has anything changed yet”.
- WhatsApp Business API
- The version of WhatsApp built for businesses with more than one person answering — multiple agents, system integration and templated notifications. Distinct from the free Business app. Full guide.
Why this page exists
Vocabulary as a pricing strategy
If you cannot evaluate what is being proposed, you cannot evaluate what it should cost.
A proposal full of unexplained terms is not necessarily dishonest — specialists genuinely do talk this way among themselves. But a firm that cannot explain a recommendation in plain language to the person paying for it either does not understand it well enough, or would prefer you did not.
Ask. A good answer takes thirty seconds and does not require a diagram.
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