Glossary
The words, without the industry around them.
Most of the confusion in website software is vocabulary rather than technology. If a term here is used loosely elsewhere, this says so.
- Adaptive website
- A website connected to a structured record of your business and to evidence of what visitors and customers do, so it can be kept in step as the business changes. Changes are proposed and approved rather than made silently. It is commonly confused with a responsive website, which only means the layout fits a phone screen — that is a question of shape, not of whether the content is still true.
- Business knowledge
- The structured record of what is true about your company: services, service areas, opening hours, prices, guarantees, credentials, response times and the questions customers keep asking. Each entry is held as a fact with a source and a date, so pages can be written from it and checked against it. It is not a brand folder or a pile of documents — a document cannot tell you which eleven pages now contradict your new pricing.
- Fact
- A single checkable statement about your business, such as a call-out charge, a covered postcode or a certification, stored with who provided it and when. Facts are the unit everything else is built from — pages, structured data, forms and adverts all point back to one. People sometimes use the word loosely for anything a model wrote; here it means specifically something you confirmed.
- Provenance
- The trail showing where a claim on your site came from: which fact, from which source, confirmed on which date. It is what lets you open any sentence on a page and see why it says what it says. In AI tools the word often means a link the model cited from the web — here it means your own record, which is a much stronger thing to stand behind.
- Digital presence
- Everything a potential customer meets when they look for a business like yours: your website, your listings and map profile, your reviews, your adverts, and increasingly the answer an assistant gives about you. It is wider than a website and it moves whether or not you touch it. Treating presence and website as synonyms is the reason so many businesses have a smart site and a stale everything-else.
- Conversion
- A visitor doing the thing that matters to your business — sending an enquiry, booking a survey, calling, or paying. The definition has to be yours, because a conversion for a commercial HVAC firm is a site visit request, not a newsletter sign-up. It is widely abused: platforms count scroll depth, page views and video plays as conversions, which flatters the report and tells you nothing about work won.
- Enquiry
- Someone contacting you through a form, a call or a message. It is a raw event, not yet a judgement — it includes wrong numbers, spam, suppliers and students doing coursework. Counting every enquiry as business is how a month looks busy and the bank account does not.
- Lead
- An enquiry that has been judged worth pursuing: a real person, in your area, wanting something you actually sell. The step between enquiry and lead is qualification, and it is a human judgement recorded against the contact. Advertising platforms routinely label every form submission a lead, which inflates the number and quietly hides how much of your spend bought noise.
- Attribution
- Connecting money earned back to what caused it — the page, the search, the campaign or the referral that started the chain. It is an explanation, not a measurement, and different models give different answers: last click credits the final step, first touch credits the introduction, and both are simplifications. Anyone presenting attribution as certainty is overselling it; the useful version tells you what it assumed.
- Bounce
- A visit where someone arrives on a page and leaves without any further recorded interaction. It is treated as failure almost everywhere, and often is not — a visitor who lands on your contact page, reads the phone number in eight seconds and rings you is a bounce and a win. Judge it per page, against what that page was for.
- Consent
- A recorded permission from a visitor to use cookies or tracking for a stated purpose, which they can withdraw. Consent is the record and the honouring of it, not the banner — a banner that sets cookies before anyone clicks is theatre. Consent is also specific: agreeing to analytics is not agreeing to advertising.
- First-party analytics
- Measurement collected by your own site, on your own domain, about your own visitors, rather than handed to a third-party advertising network. It survives browsers blocking third-party cookies, and the data stays yours. It is often marketed as cookieless or privacy-proof, which is misleading — where the law requires consent, first-party measurement still requires it.
- Traffic quality
- How much of your traffic is actually prospective customers, as opposed to bots, scrapers, click fraud, job seekers and people who wanted a different business with a similar name. It is the missing denominator in most reporting. A rise in visits with no rise in enquiries is usually a quality story, not a marketing one.
- Answer engine
- An assistant or search feature that answers a question directly instead of listing links — the place a growing share of people now meet your business without visiting it. Clear, consistent, machine-readable facts make you easier to represent correctly. Nobody can guarantee you a citation in one, and any product promising that is guessing on your behalf.
- Structured data
- Labels added to your pages in a standard format so machines can read your services, locations, hours, prices and reviews without interpreting prose. It makes your facts legible to search engines and assistants. The common claim that adding schema improves rankings is wrong as stated — it improves how well you can be understood, which is not the same as a promise.
- Canonical URL
- The address you declare as the official one for a page that can be reached at several addresses — with and without a trailing slash, with tracking parameters, or in two languages. Setting it stops your own pages competing with each other for the same content. It is frequently confused with the page slug or title, which are separate things entirely.
- Redirect
- An instruction that forwards an old address to a new one. A 301 says the move is permanent and carries the page's standing with it; a 302 says it is temporary and does not. The classic mistake during a rebuild is redirecting every old page to the home page, which throws away what those pages had earned and drops visitors somewhere they did not ask to be.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's measures of how quickly your page shows something useful, how fast it responds to a tap, and whether it jumps about while loading. The numbers that matter are the ones from real visits on real devices, not a single test run on a fast connection. Passing them is a floor, not a strategy — a fast page that does not answer the question still loses the job.
- Release
- A set of changes published together as one recorded event, with what changed, why, which facts it rested on and who approved it. Working in releases is what makes a site reviewable and reversible. Most website tools treat publishing as an instant, untracked act, which is why nobody can ever say when a page last changed or who changed it.
- Rollback
- Returning your site to a previous release when something published was wrong. It restores pages, content and settings as they were at that point. It does not undo the world — enquiries received, payments taken and adverts already served in the meantime stay exactly as they are.
- Session
- One visit: a continuous run of activity by one browser, ending after a period of inactivity. It is the basic unit behind most visit numbers. Sessions are routinely reported as people, which overstates your audience — the same customer checking you on a phone at lunch and a laptop that evening is two sessions and one prospect.
- Workspace
- The container holding a set of sites along with their facts, people, permissions and reporting. For most businesses there is one, covering every location and brand they run. For an agency there is one per client, isolated from the others, which is what stops work or data crossing between accounts.
- Proposal
- A specific suggested change, presented with the reasoning behind it, a preview of the result, and the evidence or fact that prompted it — waiting for your approval. Nothing high-impact reaches your live site without passing through one. It is not the same as a generic AI suggestion, which typically arrives with no preview, no reasoning you can inspect, and no record afterwards.
- Content graph
- The map of how your pages, facts, services and locations depend on each other, which is why changing one price can surface the nine pages that quoted it. It is what turns an edit into a complete update rather than a half-finished one. It is often confused with a sitemap, which is only a list of your pages and says nothing about what depends on what.
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