// Know What You Own
The marketing terms most agencies hope you don't ask about.
Plain-English definitions, plus the questions that protect you when you hire anyone in this industry. Including me.
// Why This Page Exists
Most agency relationships go sideways for the same reason. The business owner doesn't know what they own, what they're paying for, or what walks out the door if the relationship ends. That isn't your fault. The industry runs on jargon and the jargon makes the asymmetry possible.
This page exists to flatten that. Read the terms. Ask the questions. Then hire whoever earns it.
// Before You Sign
10 questions to ask any agency.
For each one, here's the answer to listen for. If what you hear doesn't match, that's information.
// The Glossary
The terms, in plain English.
Grouped by what they actually do for your business, not alphabetical, so skimming works.
The Foundation
The pieces every business needs to own outright before anything else gets built on top.
- Domain
- The address people type. You should own it. It lives at a registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare) and renews yearly.
- Hosting
- The server your site lives on. Separate from the domain. Switchable without losing your domain or your content.
- CMS
- Content Management System. The software you log into to edit pages. WordPress, Webflow, Astro, Shopify. Each has tradeoffs around speed, flexibility, and lock-in.
- SSL Certificate
- The padlock in the browser bar. It encrypts traffic between visitors and your site. Free through Let's Encrypt or Cloudflare. There is no reason a modern site should be missing one.
- DNS
- Domain Name System. The set of records that tells the internet where your domain points. Where your site loads from, where your email gets delivered, who can send mail on your behalf. Owning your DNS means owning your ability to move anything.
- Registrar
- The company you buy and renew your domain through. Your name should be on the account. If your agency is the registrant on your own domain, you do not own your domain.
Local Search
How Google decides who to show when someone searches for a service near them.
- SEO
- Search Engine Optimization. The work that makes your pages eligible to rank in Google for the searches your customers are actually doing. Covers the content on the page, the structure of the site, and the signals coming in from elsewhere on the web.
- Local SEO
- SEO focused on geographic queries. Different ranking signals than general SEO. Distance, the strength of your Google Business Profile, and citations across the web matter more than backlinks here. This is the lane that matters for service businesses with a defined area.
- GBP (Google Business Profile)
- Your listing on Google Maps. The single highest-leverage asset most local businesses own and the one most often controlled by someone else. Your reviews, your photos, your hours, your service list, all live here. Free to claim. Should be in your account.
- Citations
- Mentions of your business name, address, and phone number on other sites (Yelp, BBB, industry directories). They reinforce that you exist where you say you do. Consistency across sources matters more than volume.
- Local Pack
- The three map results that show up at the top of a local search, above the regular blue links. Most clicks for service-business searches land here. Ranking in the local pack is a different game than ranking organically.
- Schema
- Hidden code on your pages that tells Google what kind of business you are, what services you offer, where you operate, what your hours are. Invisible to users, important to search engines. Powers things like rich results and FAQ snippets.
Measurement
The instruments that tell you whether any of this is actually working.
- GA4 (Google Analytics 4)
- Tracks what people do on your site. Sessions, conversions, traffic sources, time on page. Free. Should be in your Google account, not the agency's. If the agency owns it, when they leave, your historical data leaves with them.
- GSC (Google Search Console)
- Tells you what queries you rank for, which pages Google has indexed, and what's broken from a search-engine perspective. Free. Often ignored. One of the most valuable free tools in marketing.
- Conversion
- A measurable action that matters to your business. Phone call, form fill, quote request, booking. Not a page view. The thing every other metric should ladder up to.
- Bounce Rate (and why it does not mean what it used to)
- The old metric for "people who left without doing anything." GA4 retired it in favor of engagement rate. If an agency is still selling you on improving bounce rate, they are working from a 2018 playbook.
- Attribution
- How you decide which channel gets credit for a conversion. Did the lead come from Google, the Facebook ad, the referral, or all three? There is no perfect answer, but pretending there is one is the start of most bad marketing reports.
- UTM Parameters
- Tags appended to the end of a URL (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that tell analytics where a click came from. The difference between knowing "Facebook sent 40 leads" and knowing "the September boat-show post sent 40 leads."
Paid Media
What the numbers mean when you're spending money to acquire customers.
- CPC
- Cost Per Click. What you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Useful as a leading indicator, not as a measure of success on its own.
- CPL
- Cost Per Lead. What you pay for each form fill or phone call from your ads. The number that starts to actually matter.
- CPA
- Cost Per Acquisition. What you pay for each closed customer, not just each lead. The number that determines whether the channel is profitable.
- ROAS
- Return On Ad Spend. Revenue divided by ad spend. A 4x ROAS means $4 of revenue for every $1 spent. The number that determines whether to scale or pull back.
- Quality Score
- Google's 1-to-10 rating of how relevant your ad is to the search query and how good the landing page is. Higher quality score means you pay less per click for the same position. The fastest lever for cutting ad waste.
- MCC (Manager Account)
- The agency-side account that holds permissions to manage your ad account. The agency uses an MCC, you still own the actual ad account underneath. If they merged your account into theirs, that's a problem.
Content and Authority
How Google decides whether your site is worth showing in the first place.
- Backlink
- A link from another site to yours. Some help your rankings, some hurt them, most do nothing. Quality and relevance beat quantity every time. A link from one trade publication beats a hundred from directories nobody reads.
- On-Page SEO
- The SEO work that happens on the page itself. Title tag, meta description, headings, body content, internal links, image alt text. The part you have full control over.
- Off-Page SEO
- The SEO work that happens elsewhere on the web. Backlinks, brand mentions, citations, reviews. The part that takes time because it depends on other people.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. The framework Google uses to decide whether to trust your content. Real-world experience now counts more than it used to, which is good news for operators who actually do the work.
- Anchor Text
- The clickable words in a link. "Click here" tells Google nothing. "Sarasota pressure washing" tells Google what the linked page is about. Used carelessly, it can backfire. Used well, it reinforces what each page should rank for.
- Pillar Page
- A long, comprehensive page on a core topic that other pages on your site link into. Concentrates internal-link signal toward the page you most want to rank. The page you're reading is a pillar page.
Made it this far?
If you've read this page, you take this seriously. That's the kind of business I want to work with.