For all those times someone dropped a website/marketing acronym that made you think “What…?” here are the six website acronyms that will keep you in the know and feeling confident.
CTA: Call to Action
A Call to Action, in laywoman’s terms, is the intention you set in encouraging your website visitor to take a particular action. For example, on my homepage, a primary CTA is via a button that says “View my Portfolio.” A CTA can look like a button, a sign-up, a subscription, a free consultation, or just about anything else. It’s all about what you want your website visitor to do.
CMS: Content Management System
If your website is a house, then your Content Management System is the foundation, walls, and roof of that house. In other words, a CMS is what holds your website together. Some common CMS are WordPress (my personal favorite), Squarespace, and WIX to name a few. If someone asks you what CMS you use, they’re basically asking you what you used to build your website.
GIF: Graphics Interchange Format
Have you ever been witness to a conversation where two people debated whether GIF is pronounced with a G- or a J- sound? This should clear it up. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It’s similar to a static image file (like a JPEG), except for that it contains a series of image files, all working together to create an animation that repeats over and over. As Mr. Bean demonstrates so gracefully in this GIF below:
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the process of maximizing your website’s potential to show up high on the list of results for a targeted search phrase on Google (or another search engine). There are lots of ways to go about improving your site’s SEO, and once you go digging into this process, you’ll soon realize it’s quite the rabbit hole 🙂 If you’re looking to get your feet wet with SEO and are overwhelmed about where to start, check out my previous post 5 Easy Ways to Improve SEO.
UX: User Experience
User Experience is exactly that. It’s the overall experience that has a person has while using your website: how easy/difficult it is for them to navigate your website and all the pages on it, scroll from one section to another, find what they’re looking for, and a thousand other small considerations. A lot of people like to talk about fancy design in websites or optimizing lead generation – but when you hear someone mention UX, they’re talking about none else than how the website experience is for the end-user.
KPI: Key Performance Indicators
When it comes to your website, another way of describing what your Key Performance Indicators are is quite simply: how do you know if your website is doing a good job? Your KPIs are the things that answer that question. Depending on your industry and your goals, your KIPs may be the number of website visitors you attract per month, the number of contact form submissions, the number of qualified leads, the number of new subscribers or sign-ups, or something else.
So, how’d you do with these six new acronyms? Were they all new to you, or did you know a few already? Let us know in the comments below!
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