Dictionary of SEO, AI and business
Marketing and startup glossary
A no-nonsense dictionary of what people say in meetings, in Google Ads and in funding rounds: marketing, SEO, AI search and startups. Every term in two or three sentences, with an example where it helps.
Terms with the letter A
A/B testing
Also: split test
An A/B test is an experiment that shows two versions of a page, an ad or an email to randomly chosen groups of users, to see which gets more conversions. It is only reliable with enough traffic and one change at a time; otherwise the winner may be chance.
Accelerator
Also: startup accelerator
An accelerator is a programme of a few months that helps early-stage startups grow fast with training, mentors, contacts and often some investment in exchange for a small stake. It usually ends with a demo day in front of investors. Y Combinator is the best known.
AEO
Also: Answer Engine Optimization
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) means optimising content so that answer engines, such as Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Perplexity, use it and cite it when they reply. It favours a direct answer up front, a clear structure and the authority of the source.
AI agent
An AI agent is a system that does not just answer but acts: it gets a goal, decides the steps, uses tools such as a browser, email or a spreadsheet, and checks the result. The difference from a chatbot is that it does the work instead of explaining how to do it.
AI crawler
Also: GPTBot, ClaudeBot
An AI crawler is the bot an AI company uses to read websites, to train its models or to answer in real time. OpenAI’s GPTBot and Anthropic’s ClaudeBot are two of them. They can be allowed or blocked in robots.txt; blocking them all can leave you out of the answers.
AI Mode
Also: Google AI Mode
AI Mode is Google’s conversational search mode: instead of a list of results, it gives an AI-written answer, takes follow-up questions and cites its sources. To answer, it runs many searches at once (query fan-out), so a page can show up for questions nobody typed word for word.
AI Overviews
Also: Google’s AI summaries
AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google shows above the results for many searches, with links to the sources it used. They answer without a click: they cut traffic from informational searches and reward being one of the cited sources.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. Google uses it as a hint about the page it points to, so a descriptive anchor (“SEO audit”) helps more than “click here”. Always using the same exact anchor in external links looks manipulative.
ARPU
Also: average revenue per user
ARPU (average revenue per user) is the average revenue per user or customer in a period: revenue divided by number of users. Raising ARPU, with higher plans or better-designed pricing, matters as much for growth as winning more customers.
ARR
Also: annual recurring revenue
ARR (annual recurring revenue) is a subscription business’s yearly recurring revenue: MRR times twelve, or the sum of annual contracts. It is the benchmark metric for valuing SaaS companies, which are often sold or funded at a multiple of their ARR.
Terms with the letter B
B2B
Also: business to business
B2B (business to business) describes companies that sell to other companies. Decisions are made by a group of people, the sale takes weeks or months and each customer is worth a lot, which is why B2B marketing is measured in leads, opportunities and pipeline.
B2B2C
Also: business to business to consumer
B2B2C (business to business to consumer) describes a company that reaches end consumers through another company: an insurer selling its policies through a bank, a payment system built into an online shop. It has to win over two customers at once.
B2C
Also: business to consumer
B2C (business to consumer) describes companies that sell to end consumers. One person decides, often in minutes, and the business depends on volume, conversion and repeat purchases.
Backlink
Also: inbound link
A backlink is a link from another site to yours. For Google it is one of the strongest signs of authority, but quality counts, not quantity: one link from a relevant industry publication is worth more than a hundred from directories. Buying links breaks its guidelines.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is comparing your results, processes or products with those of the best in your industry or your direct competitors, to know where you stand and what you can improve. It only helps when like is compared with like: another industry’s average CTR says nothing about yours.
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping is growing a company with its own revenue and savings, without outside investors. It forces you to be profitable sooner and to grow more slowly, but the founders keep control and all the ownership. Many profitable software businesses were built this way.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the share of visits that leave without interacting. In Google Analytics 4 it is the opposite of engaged sessions: a session bounces when it lasts under ten seconds, views no second page and records no key event. A high bounce rate is not always bad: someone who finds the answer also leaves.
Branding
Also: brand
Branding is the work of building a brand: what it stands for, how it speaks, how it looks and what customers feel when they think of it. It is not just the logo. A strong brand gets you chosen even when you are not the cheapest, and makes the rest of marketing cost less.
Break-even
Also: break-even point
Break-even is the level of sales at which revenue covers all costs: no profit, no loss. It is fixed costs divided by the margin each sale leaves. Below it you lose money; above it, every sale adds profit.
Burn rate
Burn rate is the money a company spends each month beyond what it brings in. If a startup has €600,000 in the bank and burns €50,000 a month, it has 12 months of runway left. It is the number investors watch most closely between rounds.
Business angel
Also: angel investor
A business angel is a person who invests their own money in early-stage startups, usually in exchange for a stake. Besides money, they often bring experience and contacts. They come in before venture capital funds, when there is little more than a team and an idea.
Business Model Canvas
Also: business model
The Business Model Canvas is a nine-block template, created by Alexander Osterwalder, to describe how a company creates, delivers and captures value: customer segments, value proposition, channels, customer relationships, revenue, resources, activities, partners and costs.
Business valuation
Also: valuation
A company’s valuation is the estimate of what it is worth. For mature companies it is worked out from profits or cash flows; for a startup without profits it is mostly a negotiation based on the team, traction, the market and what has been paid for similar companies.
Buyer persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional portrait of the ideal customer, built from real data and interviews: their role, goals, worries and how they make a purchase decision. It gets marketing, sales and product talking to the same customer. Made up without data, it is just a character.
Terms with the letter C
CAC
Also: customer acquisition cost
CAC (customer acquisition cost) is what it costs to win a new customer: marketing and sales spend over a period divided by the customers won in that period. Compared with LTV, it tells you whether growth is profitable.
Call to action
Also: CTA
A call to action (CTA) is the text or button that tells the user what to do next: “Book a demo”, “Download the guide”. It works best when it says what the person clicking gets and when there is a single main one per screen.
Canonical URL
Also: canonical
The canonical URL is the version of a page you tell Google is the right one when several have the same content, for example with and without parameters. It is set with the rel=”canonical” tag. Google treats it as a strong hint, not an order.
Cap table
Also: capitalisation table
The cap table, or capitalisation table, records who owns which part of a company: founders, investors and employees with options. It is updated at every round and shows how each shareholder is diluted. A mistake in it can sink an investment during due diligence.
Cash flow
Cash flow is the money that comes into and goes out of a company in a period. It is not the same as profit: you can invoice a lot and run out of cash if customers pay late. Many profitable companies close for lack of cash.
Churn
Also: churn rate
Churn is the share of customers who stop paying in a period. If you start the month with 200 customers and 6 leave, monthly churn is 3%. In a subscription business, high churn cancels out growth: you are filling a bucket with a hole in it.
Content marketing
Content marketing is creating and distributing useful content for a specific audience, with the aim of earning its trust and eventually turning it into customers. What separates it from publishing for the sake of it is the goal: each piece answers a real question from someone who could buy from you.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the share of visits that do what you want: buy, sign up, book a demo. If 2,000 people visit a landing page and 60 leave their details, the rate is 3%. It only makes sense compared with the same page or channel over time.
Convertible note
Also: SAFE
A convertible note is a loan from an investor to a startup that, instead of being repaid, turns into shares at the next round, usually at a discount. It allows investing without agreeing on a valuation yet. The SAFE, created by Y Combinator, is a simpler version with no interest and no maturity date.
Copywriting
Copywriting is writing text that makes someone act: ads, landing pages, emails, buttons. Unlike content writing, every word has a conversion goal. Good copy talks about the customer’s problem before the product.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to measure page experience: LCP (how long the main content takes to appear), INP (how long the page takes to respond to an interaction) and CLS (how much the layout shifts while it loads).
CPA
Also: cost per acquisition
CPA (cost per acquisition) is the average cost of each conversion in a campaign: a sign-up, a lead or a sale. It is spend divided by conversions. It is more useful than CPC because it measures what matters, but it depends on how the conversion is defined and tracked.
CPC
Also: cost per click
CPC (cost per click) is what you pay on average each time someone clicks your ad: spend divided by clicks. In Google Ads it is set by an auction that weighs your bid and the quality of the ad, so a more relevant ad can pay less to rank higher.
CPL
Also: cost per lead
CPL (cost per lead) is what it costs to get each interested contact: campaign spend divided by leads generated. In B2B it is the most common metric for acquisition campaigns, but it misleads on its own: a cheap lead that never buys is expensive.
CPM
Also: cost per thousand impressions
CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is what it costs to show an ad a thousand times, whether anyone clicks or not. It is the usual pricing for awareness campaigns, social media and display. Comparing CPM across channels tells you where being seen is cheapest, not where people buy.
Crawl budget
Crawl budget is the number of pages Google is willing to crawl on a site in a given time. Google says it only matters for very large sites: over a million pages, or over 10,000 that change every day. On a small site, Google gets to everything.
CRM
Also: Customer Relationship Management
A CRM is the system where a company stores and manages its relationship with customers and prospects: contacts, companies, conversations, opportunities and sales. It is the sales team’s memory. Without an up-to-date CRM you cannot tell which campaigns bring customers, only which bring form fills.
CRO
Also: Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is the work of getting more visits to convert, instead of bringing more visits. It combines data, user research and A/B tests to find what holds people back and try fixes. It is often the cheapest way to grow once there is traffic.
Cross-selling
Cross-selling is offering a customer products that complement what they buy: insurance with the car, the payroll module with the invoicing one. It works when the second product solves a real problem for the customer, not when it only raises the order value.
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is financing a project with contributions from many people, usually through an online platform. It can be in exchange for a reward or the product itself, for shares in the company (equity crowdfunding) or for interest, like a loan.
CTR
Also: click-through rate
CTR (click-through rate) is the share of people who click out of those who see a result or an ad: clicks divided by impressions. A low CTR in a good position usually means the title or the description is not convincing.
Customer journey
The customer journey is a customer’s whole path with a company, from realising they have a problem to buying, using the product and recommending it, with every touchpoint: ads, website, sales, support. Mapping it shows where people drop off.
Customer success
Customer success is the team, and the way of working, that makes sure customers get what they wanted when they signed up. Unlike support, it does not wait for a problem: it gets ahead of it. In SaaS it is key because it cuts churn and drives upselling.
Terms with the letter D
DAU and MAU
Also: daily and monthly active users
DAU and MAU are a digital product’s daily and monthly active users. Their ratio, DAU/MAU, measures how often it is used: 50% means the average user comes back every other day. It is one of the best signs that a product has become a habit.
Dilution
Dilution is the drop in ownership shareholders suffer when a company issues new shares, for example in a funding round. If you held 50% and an investor comes in with 20%, you now hold 40%. You own a smaller share, but of a company that, if all goes well, is worth more.
Due diligence
Due diligence is the thorough review an investor or buyer carries out before closing a deal: accounts, contracts, intellectual property, team, legal and tax matters. It checks that what has been said is true and uncovers hidden risks.
Terms with the letter E
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the criteria Google’s quality raters use to judge content. It is not a factor anyone can measure, but a guide to what Google tries to reward: content by someone who knows what they are talking about.
Early adopters
Early adopters are the first customers of a new product: people or companies with a problem so pressing that they accept an incomplete solution. For a startup they are gold, because they give feedback, put up with bugs and act as references to win over the next ones.
Earn-out
An earn-out is the part of a company’s sale price that is paid later and only if certain targets are met, usually for revenue or profit. It bridges the gap when buyer and seller cannot agree on what the business is worth.
EBITDA
EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. It measures what the business earns from its operations, regardless of how it is financed. It is widely used to compare companies and to value them as a multiple of EBITDA.
Elevator pitch
An elevator pitch is the explanation of a business or an idea in the time of an elevator ride, thirty seconds to a minute: what problem you solve, for whom and why you. If it cannot be explained that way, it usually is not clear yet.
Engagement
Engagement is how much an audience interacts with a brand or a piece of content: comments, shares, clicks, time spent. On social media it is measured as interactions over reach or followers. It is a good sign of interest, but high engagement pays no bills if it leads to no conversion.
Equity
Equity is ownership of a company, expressed in shares. In the startup world, “giving equity” means paying with part of the company instead of money, whether to investors, co-founders or employees.
ESOP
Also: Employee Stock Option Plan
An ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plan) is the plan in which a company sets aside part of its equity to share out among employees as options. In startups it is usually around 10 to 15% of the company, though the sensible thing is to size it from the hiring plan for the next 12 to 18 months.
Exit
An exit is the moment founders and investors turn their stake into money, usually by selling the company to another or taking it public. Venture capital funds invest with the exit in mind, because that is when they get their money and their return back.
Terms with the letter F
Featured snippet
A featured snippet is the excerpt from a page that Google shows above the results to answer a question directly. It is won the same way as a citation in an AI Overview: with a clear, short answer right under the heading that asks the question.
FFF
Also: family, friends and fools
FFF (family, friends and fools) is the money that relatives, friends and acquaintances put into a startup at the start, before professional investors arrive. The “fools” is half a joke: they invest in the person more than the business. It is worth formalising properly, because it ends up on the cap table.
Flywheel
The flywheel is a growth model in which every happy customer brings in more customers, like a wheel that gets easier to turn each time. Jim Collins popularised it, and HubSpot put it forward in 2018 as an alternative to the funnel, which ends at the sale.
Fractional CMO
Also: part-time CMO, interim CMO
A Fractional CMO is a marketing director who works for a company part time, a few days a month, instead of being on the payroll. They own the strategy, the team and the results like a CMO, at a fraction of the cost. It suits companies that need marketing leadership before they can hire it full time.
Freemium
Freemium is a business model with a free, limited version of the product and a paid one with more features or capacity. The free version brings in users cheaply; the business depends on some of them paying. If the free version gives everything away, nobody pays.
Funding round
Also: Series A, Series B
A funding round is each time a startup raises money from investors in exchange for shares. They are named in order: pre-seed, seed, Series A, Series B… Each round is usually bigger than the last and demands more proof: from a promising idea to a growing business.
Terms with the letter G
GEO
Also: Generative Engine Optimization
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the set of techniques for getting content to appear and be cited in the answers of generative models such as ChatGPT, Gemini or AI Overviews. The term comes from a 2023 academic study and measures citations and mentions rather than rankings.
GMV
Also: Gross Merchandise Value
GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) is the total value of what is sold through a marketplace or platform in a period, before fees, returns and costs. It is not the platform’s revenue: that is only the part it keeps, the commission or take rate.
Go-to-market
Also: GTM strategy
A go-to-market strategy is the plan for taking a product to market: which customers you target first, with what offer, at what price, through which channels and with what sales and marketing team. A good product with a bad go-to-market fails all the same.
Google Search Console
Also: Search Console
Google Search Console is Google’s free tool that shows how it sees your site: which searches you appear for, how many clicks and impressions you get, which pages are indexed and which errors it finds. It is the most reliable SEO data there is, because it comes from Google itself.
Growth hacking
Growth hacking is looking for growth with fast, cheap experiments across the whole funnel, not just advertising: product, pricing, referrals, onboarding. Sean Ellis coined the term in 2010. Today people talk more about growth marketing, with fewer tricks and more method.
Growth marketing
Growth marketing is marketing focused on measurable growth across the whole customer lifecycle, from acquisition to retention and referral. It works with hypotheses, experiments and data, and shares goals with product and sales instead of being judged on leads alone.
Terms with the letter H
Hallucination
A hallucination is an answer from an AI model that sounds sure and is false: a made-up number, a quote that does not exist, a source that does not say that. It happens because the model generates plausible text, not checked text. That is why any figure from an AI must be verified before it is published.
Hreflang
Hreflang is an attribute that tells Google which version of a page belongs to each language or country, so it shows every user their own. Each version must link to all the others and to itself; if the return link is missing, Google ignores the annotation.
Terms with the letter I
ICP
Also: Ideal Customer Profile
The ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) describes the kind of company that gets the most value from your product and brings you the most value: industry, size, country, technology, problem. Unlike a buyer persona, it describes companies, not people. In B2B it is the filter for everything: who to advertise to and which leads come first.
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is the strategy of attracting customers with useful content, such as articles, guides or videos, instead of interrupting them with ads: the customer finds you when looking to solve a problem. HubSpot popularised it. It works in the medium term and combines SEO, content, email and social.
Incubator
Also: business incubator
An incubator is an organisation that supports projects in their earliest stages, sometimes before they are a company, with workspace, training and advice. It stays with them longer than an accelerator and usually takes no equity. Many are run by universities, city councils or chambers of commerce.
Indexing
Indexing is the step where Google stores a page in its index after crawling it. Only an indexed page can appear in the results. Crawling a URL does not mean indexing it: Google may drop it as a duplicate, for low quality or because a noindex tag asks it to.
Terms with the letter K
Keyword research
Keyword research is the analysis of what your audience searches for, in which words, how often and with what intent. It decides what content to create and how to title it. Tools give volume and difficulty; which searches bring customers is decided by someone who knows the business.
KPI
Also: key performance indicator
A KPI (key performance indicator) is the specific metric that tells you whether you are on track to meet a goal. Not every metric is a KPI: visits are one only if the goal depends on them. A good KPI has an owner, a benchmark and a deadline.
Terms with the letter L
Landing page
A landing page is a page built for a single action: leaving your details, booking a demo, buying. It usually gets traffic from a specific campaign and removes distractions, such as the menu. The closer it matches the ad that brought the user, the better it converts.
Lead
Also: lead generation
A lead is a person or company that has shown interest and left their details: booked a demo, downloaded a guide or filled in a form. Lead generation is everything done to get them. A lead is not yet a customer: it has to be qualified and guided to the sale.
Lead magnet
A lead magnet is free content offered in exchange for an email address: a guide, a template, a calculator, a mini course. It works if it solves a specific problem for the audience you want to sell to; a generic PDF only fills the list with contacts who will never buy.
Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is guiding leads that are not ready to buy yet with useful content, usually automated emails, until they are. In B2B, where a purchase takes months, it is what keeps an interested lead from going cold and buying from someone else.
Lead scoring
Lead scoring is a points system that ranks leads by how well they fit the ideal customer (job title, industry, company size) and by what they do (visiting the pricing page, opening emails, booking a demo). Once a lead passes a set score, it goes to sales.
Lean Canvas
The Lean Canvas is a one-page template, created by Ash Maurya from the Business Model Canvas, to describe an early-stage business: problem, customers, value proposition, solution, channels, revenue, costs, key metrics and unfair advantage.
Lean startup
Lean startup is the method, popularised by Eric Ries in his 2011 book, for building companies with less waste: launch an MVP, measure how customers respond and learn, in short cycles. The core idea is to validate with data before investing big.
Link building
Link building is the work of getting other sites to link to yours: content worth citing, original data, media relations, collaborations. It is one of the slowest parts of SEO and the riskiest when done badly: bought or artificial links can end in a penalty.
LLM
Also: large language model
An LLM (large language model) is an AI system trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word and that, from there, writes, summarises, translates or answers. GPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama are LLMs. It does not look things up in a database: it can be wrong with total confidence.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a 2024 proposal for a Markdown file at the root of a site that summarises it and links to its main pages, so that language models can read it easily. It is not an official standard and its real effect is still unproven.
Long tail
Also: long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are long, specific searches, such as “invoicing software for freelancers” rather than “software”. Each one has little volume, but together they add up to a large share of searches, face less competition and usually convert better, because whoever types them knows what they want.
LTV
Also: customer lifetime value, CLV
LTV (customer lifetime value) is the revenue, or margin, a customer brings over their whole relationship with the company. It tells you how much you can spend to acquire one. The usual benchmark in SaaS is an LTV of at least three times CAC.
Terms with the letter M
Marketing automation
Marketing automation is using software to send the right message at the right time without doing it by hand: welcome emails, nurturing sequences, alerts to sales when a lead is hot. Done well it saves time; done badly it just sends more emails nobody reads.
MQL
Also: Marketing Qualified Lead
An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a lead that marketing considers ready for sales, because it fits the ideal customer and has shown enough interest. What counts as an MQL is agreed by marketing and sales; without that agreement, each team will blame the other for lead quality.
MRR
Also: monthly recurring revenue
MRR (monthly recurring revenue) is the sum of what all subscription customers pay each month, excluding one-off payments such as setup or consulting. Multiplied by twelve it gives ARR, the figure many SaaS companies are valued on.
MVP
Also: minimum viable product
An MVP (minimum viable product) is the simplest version of a product that lets you check with real customers whether the problem exists and whether they would pay to solve it. It is not a bad version of the final product but an experiment to learn while spending as little as possible.
Terms with the letter N
Noindex
Noindex is an instruction, in a meta tag or an HTTP header, asking Google not to show a page in its results. It is used for thank-you pages, internal searches or duplicates. To work, Google must be able to crawl the page: if robots.txt blocks it, Google never sees the noindex.
North Star Metric
The North Star Metric is the metric that best sums up the value customers get from the product and that, if it grows, pulls revenue with it. For a music platform it could be listening time; for an accommodation platform, nights booked.
NPS
Also: Net Promoter Score
NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures customer loyalty with a single question: “From 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us?”. The share of detractors (0 to 6) is subtracted from the share of promoters (9 and 10), giving a number from −100 to 100. The useful part is not the number but asking why.
Terms with the letter O
OKR
Also: Objectives and Key Results
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal-setting method: an ambitious, qualitative objective and three to five measurable key results that say whether it was met. They are reviewed every quarter and shared across the company. Google popularised them after adopting them in 1999.
Terms with the letter P
Pipeline
Also: sales pipeline
The sales pipeline is a company’s open opportunities, sorted by the stage they are at: first meeting, proposal, negotiation, close. Its value, weighted by each stage’s chance of closing, is the best forecast of revenue for the coming months.
Pitch deck
A pitch deck is a short presentation, ten to twenty slides, in which a startup explains to investors the problem, the solution, the market, the business model, the traction, the team and how much money it is asking for. Its goal is not to close the investment but to get the next meeting.
Pivot
To pivot is to change an important part of a startup’s business model, such as the customer, the problem, the product or how it makes money, after finding that the original approach does not work. It is not giving up but using what was learned. Many well-known companies were born from a pivot.
Pre-money and post-money
Also: pre-money valuation, post-money valuation
Pre-money valuation is what a company is worth just before an investment; post-money, just after: pre-money plus the money coming in. If an investor puts in 1 million at a pre-money of 4 million, the post-money is 5 million and the investor owns 20%.
Product-led growth
Also: PLG
Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy in which the product itself is the main engine of acquisition, conversion and expansion: users try it free, discover the value on their own and pay when they need to, without talking to a salesperson. Slack, Notion and Canva grew this way.
Product-market fit
Product-market fit is the point at which a product satisfies a specific market so well that customers ask for it, use it and recommend it without being pushed. Before that, scaling marketing only speeds up spending. Marc Andreessen popularised it in 2007.
Prompt
Also: prompt engineering
A prompt is the instruction given to an AI model. Prompt engineering is the craft of writing them well: giving context, saying what format you want, adding examples and separating instructions from data. With today’s models, tricks matter less than explaining the task as you would to a person.
Terms with the letter Q
Query fan-out
Query fan-out is the technique AI search engines such as AI Mode use to split a question into many related searches, run them at once and combine the results into a single answer. For SEO it means covering a whole topic well counts, not just the main keyword.
Terms with the letter R
RAG
Also: Retrieval-Augmented Generation
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is the technique by which an AI model, before answering, looks up information in an outside source, such as the web, a document base or a company’s catalogue, and uses it to reply. It is what AI search engines do, and why your content can end up inside an answer.
Remarketing
Also: retargeting
Remarketing, or retargeting, is showing ads to people who have already visited your site or engaged with your brand. Because they know you, they usually convert better and cheaper than a cold audience. Google calls it remarketing and almost everyone else retargeting; in practice it is the same thing.
ROAS
Also: return on ad spend
ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue a campaign brings in divided by what it cost. A ROAS of 4 means €4 of revenue for every euro spent. It is not profit: it does not take off the cost of the product, so a high ROAS can still lose money.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which areas they should not visit. It controls crawling, not indexing: a blocked URL can still appear in Google if other sites link to it. It is also where you decide whether to let AI crawlers in.
ROI
Also: return on investment
ROI (return on investment) measures what you gain, minus what you put in, as a share of what you put in. If you invest €1,000 and get €1,500 back, ROI is 50%. Unlike ROAS, it counts profit, not just revenue.
Runway
Runway is how long a company can keep going with the cash it has, at its current rate of spending. It is cash divided by monthly burn rate. With less than six months of runway, the priority usually becomes raising money or cutting costs.
Terms with the letter S
SaaS
Also: Software as a Service
SaaS (Software as a Service) is software used over the internet and paid for with a subscription, instead of installed and bought with a licence. The provider maintains and updates it. Its business is measured with its own metrics: MRR, churn, CAC and LTV.
Sales funnel
Also: marketing funnel
The sales funnel is the set of stages someone goes through from discovering a company to buying: awareness, interest, consideration and decision. People drop out at every stage, and measuring how many move from one to the next shows where customers are lost.
Scale-up
A scale-up is a company that has found a model that works and is growing fast. The OECD speaks of high-growth enterprises when they grow by more than 20% a year on average for three years in a row, in employees or in revenue.
Search intent
Search intent is what the person searching actually wants: to learn something, to reach a specific site, to compare options or to buy. Google ranks results by the intent it infers, so a page that does not meet it will not rank even if it has the keyword.
Seed funding
Also: seed round
Seed funding is a startup’s first serious financing, the money that takes it from an idea to a product with its first customers. A seed round usually comes from business angels, accelerators and early-stage funds, and prepares the company for a Series A.
SEM
Also: Search Engine Marketing
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is marketing on search engines. Broadly it includes SEO, but most people use it for the paid part: ads in Google Ads or Microsoft Ads that show for keywords and are paid per click.
SEO
Also: Search Engine Optimization
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the work of getting a website into the organic results, the ones nobody pays for, of search engines like Google: content that answers what people search for, a site that is easy to crawl and links from other sites. It takes months, but it does not vanish when you stop paying.
SEO audit
An SEO audit is a review of a website to find what keeps it from ranking: technical crawling and indexing problems, content that does not answer what people search for, links and competitors. A good audit ends in a prioritised list of what to fix first, not a hundred-page report.
SERP
Also: search engine results page
The SERP is the results page a search engine returns. Today it is much more than ten links: AI Overviews, ads, related questions, videos, maps. That is why ranking first organically no longer guarantees being at the top.
Sitemap
Also: XML sitemap
A sitemap is an XML file listing the URLs of a site that you want Google to crawl, with the date each was last changed. It does not guarantee indexing, but it helps Google find new or poorly linked pages. It is submitted in Google Search Console.
SMART goals
SMART goals are those that meet five conditions: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. “More leads” is not a SMART goal; “150 MQLs a month by June” is.
SQL
Also: Sales Qualified Lead
An SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a lead that sales has reviewed and accepts as a real opportunity: it has the need, the budget and someone who decides. It is the step after an MQL. The share of MQLs that become SQLs is one of the best signs of whether marketing attracts the right people.
Stakeholders
Stakeholders are the people or groups affected by a decision or a project, or able to influence it: management, other teams, customers, investors, suppliers. In a marketing project, forgetting a key stakeholder is the quickest way for good work to get stuck.
Startup
A startup is a young company looking for a repeatable, scalable business model, usually built on technology and designed to grow very fast. What sets it apart from a small business is not size but its growth ambition, and the fact that it is still finding out what works.
Stock options
Stock options are the right to buy company shares in the future at a price set today. If the company is worth more when they are exercised, the difference is the gain. Startups use them to attract talent they cannot pay with salary, and they almost always come with vesting.
Structured data
Also: schema markup
Structured data is code, usually JSON-LD with the schema.org vocabulary, that spells out what is on a page: an article, a product, a person. It helps search engines understand the page and can earn rich results, although it does not guarantee them.
Sweat equity
Sweat equity is a stake in a company that someone gets in exchange for work instead of money: a co-founder who joins without a salary, an adviser who puts in hours. It is common in the early stages, when there is no cash to pay.
Terms with the letter T
TAM, SAM, SOM
TAM, SAM and SOM are three ways of sizing a market. TAM: the whole possible market for your kind of product. SAM: the part you can serve with your offer and your channels. SOM: the part you can realistically win in a few years. A well-reasoned SOM convinces more than a huge TAM.
Term sheet
A term sheet is the document, usually non-binding, in which investor and startup set the main terms of an investment: how much money, at what valuation, what rights the investor gets and what happens in a sale. It then becomes the shareholders’ agreement and the final contracts.
Traction
Traction is proof that a product works in the market: paying customers, growing recurring revenue, repeated use. It is the first thing investors look for in a startup, because it lowers the risk more than any business plan.
Terms with the letter U
Unicorn
A unicorn is a private startup valued at more than $1 billion. Investor Aileen Lee coined the term in 2013, when they were as rare as the animal. Today there are hundreds worldwide, though they are still the exception.
Unit economics
Unit economics are a business’s revenue and costs measured per unit: per customer, per order or per user. They answer a simple question: do you make money on each customer? If not, growing only multiplies the losses. The LTV to CAC ratio is their most common summary.
Upselling
Upselling is getting a customer to buy a higher or more expensive version of what they were already buying: the professional plan instead of the basic one, more seats, more capacity. Selling more to someone who already trusts you costs less than winning someone new, which is why it is a main growth route in SaaS.
Terms with the letter V
Value proposition
The value proposition is the promise that explains why a customer should choose you: what problem you solve, for whom and what sets you apart from the alternatives. It has to be understood in seconds. If it could go unchanged on a competitor’s website, it is not a value proposition.
Venture capital
Also: VC
Venture capital is funds that invest in startups with the potential to grow very fast in exchange for part of the company. They expect most of their investments to fail and a few to make up for all the losses, which is why they look for companies able to multiply their value many times over.
Vesting
Also: cliff
Vesting is the schedule by which a founder or employee earns their shares or options over time. The usual set-up is four years with a one-year cliff: leave before twelve months and you get nothing; after that, a part vests every month. It protects the company from partners who leave early.
Terms with the letter Z
Zero-click
Also: zero-click searches
A zero-click search is one that ends without the user clicking any result, because the answer already appears on Google’s own page: an AI Overview, a featured snippet, a number. There are more and more of them, and they force you to measure visibility as well as visits.