Glossary

Marketing, lead and AI-answer terms, in plain words

Short definitions of the words a service business owner meets when they deal with marketing, leads, websites and AI answers. Each one links to the answer on this site that explains it in full.

This page is for owners, not marketers: each term is defined by what it means for your business, in plain words, and links to the answer on this site that covers it in full. Where a definition quotes a platform's page or names a government rule, that page is listed under Sources. The other entries summarize the answer they link to, which lists its own sources. This is a plain summary, not legal advice. Ascent Vision keeps the list to terms that one of its answers explains.

A

Accessibility (website): A website is accessible when people with disabilities can use it, including people who are blind, deaf or cannot use a mouse. The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative describes accessible sites as "designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them".
What is website accessibility, and why does it matter for a small business?
Agency (marketing agency): An outside company paid to bring a business more customers through its website, its visibility on Google and in AI answers, ads, social media or the handling of new inquiries. What matters to an owner is what it hands over: a plan in plain words, a dated record of the work, accounts in the business's name and a monthly count of inquiries by source.
What does a marketing agency actually do for a small business?
AI answer: A written reply from an assistant such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode to a question like who is a good electrician nearby, which often names a few businesses. It is one of the eight lead channels, and an assistant can only describe a business accurately if it can find clear information about what it does, where and for whom.
How do customers find businesses through AI assistants?
AI assistant: Software you ask questions in plain words and that replies in writing, such as ChatGPT. For a service business, a growing share of customers may ask one before they search or call anyone.
How many people use AI assistants like ChatGPT?
AI Mode: A conversational way to search on Google, separate from the usual list of links. Google's guide for site owners says it suits questions that need more exploration, reasoning or comparison, and that its replies include links to supporting websites.
What are Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode?
AI Overview: A short AI-written summary that Google shows at the top of some search results. Google calls it "an AI-generated snapshot with key information and links to dig deeper" and notes that AI responses may include mistakes.
What are Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode?
AI receptionist: Software that answers a business's phone at once, at any hour, takes the caller's details and can book a visit. It can say wrong things in a business's name, so pick one you can check, and make sure every call lands in your lead list with its source.
Should a small business use an answering service or an AI receptionist?
Answer engine optimization (AEO): One of several names, alongside GEO and AI SEO, for the same aim: a business being visible and accurately described in answers written by AI. The names have no agreed definitions, so what a seller will check and report tells you more than the label.
Are AEO, GEO and AI SEO the same thing?
Answering service: A company whose staff answer a business's calls when the owner cannot, take a message or the caller's details and pass them on. A human service usually handles unusual or upset callers better than software does.
Should a small business use an answering service or an AI receptionist?
Attribution (lead attribution): Writing down where each inquiry came from, such as a search, an AI answer, social media, a referral, an ad or an email, and following it to won, lost or still open. It lets you see which marketing brings customers instead of guessing.
What is lead attribution, and why does a small business need it?

B

Boosted post: A paid ad made from something you already posted on Facebook or Instagram. It is still an ad: it often suits getting a strong post seen nearby, and it is judged by the inquiries and jobs it brings, not by likes.
Should you boost a Facebook post or run an ad?
Bounce rate: In website analytics, the share of visits that ended without the visitor engaging, such as leaving after one page. A service business should not worry about a high number by itself, because a one-page visit that ends in a phone call can be a success; judge pages by the inquiries they bring.
What is a bounce rate, and should a service business worry about it?
Brand awareness: How many people in your area know and remember your name. It feeds word of mouth, helps in a new area and can make other channels work a little better, and it shows up as more people coming to you by name.
Should your marketing build brand awareness or bring in leads?

C

Call to action: The button or line that tells a visitor what to do next, such as "Call for a quote" or "Book a visit". It works best when it asks for one step, starts with a plain verb, says what happens next and uses the same wording wherever it appears.
What is a call to action, and what makes a good one?
Call tracking: Recording every call that is a new inquiry in the same place as your other leads, with who called, what they wanted, where they heard about you and what happened next. Asking how they heard about you on every call, and writing the answer down at the time, is the habit that makes it work; calls are recorded only with the caller's consent.
How do you track leads that come in by phone?
Campaign link (tagged link): A normal web address with short labels added at the end that show where the link was placed, such as in an email or an ad. Clicks on it let your website's analytics show which campaign sent each visit, but analytics shows visits, not customers, so also note the campaign on each lead.
What is a tagged campaign link, and how do you use one?
Channel (lead channel): The kind of source a lead is credited to. The eight channels are search, AI answer, social, referral, paid, email, campaign and direct, and every lead carries one so you can see which ones bring jobs.
How can I generate more leads for my service business?
Chatbot: Software on a website that answers simple questions and takes a visitor's details, out of hours too. A bad one gets in the way, gives wrong answers in your name and loses leads, so for many small businesses a short form and a fast human reply are enough.
Should a small business use a chatbot on its website?
Consent (calls and texts): A person's permission to be called or texted. Text or call a lead or a past customer only with their consent, stop as soon as they ask, and ask separately before sending any offer, because answering what someone asked about is different from marketing to them. This is a plain summary, not legal advice.
Can you text a new lead or a past customer, and what consent do you need?
Contact form: The form on a website where a visitor sends an inquiry. It should ask only what you need to reply well, a name, one way to reach them and what they need help with, because every extra field costs completed forms.
What should a contact form ask?
Conversion rate: The share of a site's visitors who do what you hoped, which for a service business is usually to get in touch. If a thousand people visit and twenty send an inquiry, the conversion rate is two percent; a clearer, faster and easier-to-use site tends to raise it.
What is a conversion rate, and how do you improve it on a service website?
Cost per click: The charge each time someone clicks your ad. A click is a tap on the ad, which is not the same as a visit or a customer, so whether ads pay shows up in the cost per inquiry and per job won instead.
What do cost per click, impressions and reach mean in an ad report?
Cost per lead (cost per inquiry): What the ads cost in a month divided by the inquiries they brought. It only means something set beside the cost per job won and what a customer is worth to you, which together tell you whether that cost is affordable.
What do cost per click, impressions and reach mean in an ad report?
CRM: A customer relationship management system: one shared place that records every customer and inquiry, who they are, how they found you, what was said and what happens next. A well-kept spreadsheet often works at first; software earns its place when inquiries start slipping through or more than one person handles leads.
What is a CRM, and does a small business need one?
Customer value (lifetime value): What an average customer brings in over a year, or over the whole time they stay with you, minus what it costs to serve them. That figure tells you how much you can sensibly spend to win one.
How do you work out what a customer is worth to your business?

D

Direct mail (flyers and door hangers): Flyers, door hangers and postcards sent or left at homes, reaching people whether or not they are searching. It tends to build familiarity more than it catches urgent needs, so give each drop its own phone number, short web address or code and judge it by jobs won, not pieces sent.
Do door hangers, flyers and direct mail still work for a service business?
Direct (traffic and leads): In website analytics, direct traffic is the channel for visits that arrive by a saved link or a typed address, and it can include people who heard your name from a person or an AI answer and then typed it. In lead records, direct is the channel for a customer who typed your address or came back on their own, and a returning customer counts as direct.
What does 'direct' traffic mean in your website analytics?
Domain authority: A score from a third-party SEO tool, not from Google, that estimates how likely a website is to rank. A higher score is not a business result: judge search work by the inquiries and customers that arrive from it.
What is domain authority, and should you pay an agency to raise it?
Domain (domain name): Your web address. It is separate from hosting, the rented space where the site's files live, and from the website itself, and the business should control all three accounts.
What is the difference between a domain, hosting and a website, and how do you find out who hosts yours?
Domain privacy: A registrar option that keeps your contact details off the public registration record for a domain. Check that the business stays the registered owner, because some versions can put the provider's name on the record instead.
Should you turn on domain privacy for your business domain?

E

Email list: The people who agreed to hear from you by email, usually past customers and people who asked about your services. A bought list is a different thing: the people on it never asked to hear from you, which is why buying one usually backfires.
Should a small business buy an email list?
Email marketing (newsletter): Sending short, useful emails to people who already know you, to stay in mind for the next job and for referrals. It works poorly for reaching strangers; keep each message honest, about one thing and easy to unsubscribe from.
Is email marketing worth it for a small service business?
Estimate (free estimate): A visit or call to price a job before the customer commits. Free estimates can bring in more inquiries, especially where customers expect them, but each visit to a poor fit costs unpaid time; a short screen of questions first, or a paid assessment credited to the job, are common middle grounds.
Should a service business offer free estimates?

F

Fake review: A review that is not based on a real experience, or that misrepresents who wrote it. Google's policy bars soliciting or encouraging reviews that do not represent a genuine experience, and the FTC's rule (16 CFR 465.2) treats a business writing, creating or selling a review that materially misrepresents the reviewer or their experience as an unfair or deceptive practice. This is a plain summary, not legal advice.
Can you get a fake or unfair Google review taken down?
Follow-up: The short, useful messages sent to a lead who has gone quiet, spaced out over a couple of weeks, then stopped with the outcome recorded. Each one should make it easy to say yes, no or not now.
How should you follow up with a lead that goes quiet?
Fractional marketing lead: An experienced marketer hired part time to set the plan and oversee the work, rather than a full-time employee or an agency. It often suits a business that needs direction more than extra hands.
Should you hire a marketing employee, a fractional marketing lead or an agency?
Freelancer: One skilled person you deal with directly, usually with lower overheads than an agency but less cover when they are away. The questions that matter are the same either way: who owns the accounts, and what gets reported.
Should you hire a freelancer or an agency for SEO and marketing?
Funnel (marketing funnel): A way to picture the steps people go through before contacting a business: they notice it, compare it with others, and some get in touch. A local service business often has a short one, sometimes a single search and a call, so the useful move is to find where people drop out and fix that step first.
What is a marketing funnel, and does a small service business need one?

G

GEO (generative engine optimization): The work of getting a business named, described correctly and recommended inside the answers AI systems write, such as those from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. SEO aims for a ranked link on a results page; GEO aims for a mention inside the answer itself.
What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?
Google Business Profile: The listing Google shows for a business on Search and Maps, with its name, hours, contact details, photos, reviews and a short description. Google describes it as a free Business Profile the business takes control of; for most local service businesses it is worth claiming.
What is a Google Business Profile, and does a service business need one?
Google Local Guide: A member of Google's program for people who add reviews, photos, edits and facts to Google Maps. Treat a guide's review like any other, and never offer a guide anything for one: Google's review policy bars offering incentives in exchange for posting a review.
What is a Google Local Guide, and do their reviews count for more?
Google Local Services Ads: Ads in Google Search for certain local service categories where, in Google's words, a business will "only pay when a customer gets in touch from your ad". Google screens the businesses that take part, and the ads are best judged by booked jobs, not by lead count.
What are Google Local Services Ads, and are they worth it?
Google Partner: A badge Google gives to companies that meet its Google Ads requirements for performance, ad spend and certifications. It speaks to paid-ads activity; by itself it does not show skill with free search results, map listings or AI answers.
What does it mean when an agency says it is a Google Partner?

H

Hallucination: An AI assistant stating something wrong, outdated or made up about a business, such as an old phone number, a service you stopped offering or a location you closed. You cannot edit an assistant's answer, so check what assistants say about you and keep your own website plain and current.
Do AI assistants get facts about businesses wrong?
Hosting: The rented computer space where a website's files are kept. Look for an account in the business's name, backups you can actually restore, support you can reach when the site is down, secure connections, fast pages and renewal terms in plain words.
What should a small business look for in website hosting?
HTTPS: The secure version of a web address, which keeps what a visitor's browser and your site send each other private and harder to tamper with. It matters most on pages where people type in their details, such as a contact form.
Does a small business website need HTTPS?

I

Impressions and reach: An impression is one showing of an ad; reach is how many different people or accounts saw it at least once. Both describe attention, not inquiries or customers.
What do cost per click, impressions and reach mean in an ad report?
Inquiry: A person getting in touch about work: a call, a form, a message or a booking. Answer it quickly, with a reply that thanks the person, answers what they asked and offers one clear next step.
How do you write a good first reply to a new inquiry?

L

Landing page: A web page made for one campaign, such as an ad or a flyer, that picks up the offer the visitor responded to and asks them to take a single step. A business needs one only when it is sending people to a specific offer; otherwise a clear homepage and service pages usually do.
What is a landing page, and when does a small business need one?
Large language model (LLM): Software trained on a large body of text to guess which words are likely to come next, so it can write, summarize and answer questions in plain language. It powers chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and because it predicts wording rather than looking facts up, it can sound sure and still be wrong.
What is a large language model (LLM), in plain terms?
Lead: A person who has shown interest in your work and can be contacted, which for a service business usually means an inquiry. Each lead is tagged with its source and followed to an outcome of won, lost or still open.
How can I generate more leads for my service business?
Lead ads: Ads on Facebook or Instagram that open a form inside the app, so a person can send their details without visiting your website. They can bring many forms from people who were only mildly interested, so record each lead as paid and judge the ads by jobs won.
Are Facebook and Instagram lead ads worth it for a service business?
Lead generation company: A business that finds people who want a service and sends their details or calls to the businesses that provide it, usually charging per lead. Before you sign, ask who else receives each lead, what counts as billable and whether the customer ends up dealing with you or with the seller.
What does a lead generation company do, and should you pay per lead?
Lead site: A marketplace such as Angi or Thumbtack that sends inquiries to service businesses for a fee, often to several businesses at once. Judge each site by the jobs you win from it, and keep every customer's details in your own lead list, not only inside the site's app.
Should you buy leads from sites like Angi or Thumbtack?
Lead system: How an inquiry travels from first contact to a yes or a no: where it lands, who is told, how quickly it gets a reply, where it is written down and which source gets the credit. Any business that takes inquiries has one already; what matters is whether customers slip away along the way.
What is a lead system, and does a small business need one?
Lead tracker: A single shared sheet or board with one row per inquiry, holding the date, name, contact details, what they need, source channel, first reply time, outcome and notes. It only works if every inquiry from every channel is added the day it arrives.
How do you set up a simple lead tracker?
Local SEO: Being found by people who search for a service in a particular place, such as a plumber in a named town or a tax preparer near me. It matters most to businesses whose customers are nearby, whether customers visit them or they travel to customers.
What is local SEO?

M

Marketing audit: A look at every way a business wins and serves customers, from its website, Google profile and reviews to social pages, ads, email and how inquiries get answered. A good one gives the owner a plain list of what exists, what works, what is missing and what to do first.
What is a marketing audit, and is it worth paying for?
Marketing report: A one-page monthly summary that answers four questions: how many inquiries and customers came in and from which sources, what each source cost, what was done and what changed because of it, and what happens next. Traffic and rankings appear only as supporting detail.
What should a marketing report show a small business owner?
Mobile-friendly: A website that is fast, readable and easy to act on from a phone, which is often the first place people look for help. A site that is slow or awkward on a phone loses many visitors before they call.
Does a small business website really need to work well on phones?

N

Near-me search: A search for a service plus the words near me or a town name. Customers usually search the service and the place, not your business name, so a page that names both in plain words matters.
Why isn't my business showing up on Google?
No-show: A customer who booked an estimate or an appointment and did not turn up. Written confirmation, a reminder the day before (by text only with the person's consent) and one-step rescheduling cut them, and recording each no-show with the lead's source shows whether some channels bring more.
How do you cut no-shows for estimates and appointments?

O

Online booking: Letting customers pick a time on your website without waiting for a reply. It suits visits with a fixed length that need no quote first, and each booking should be confirmed and recorded with its source, in booking data the business owns.
Should a service business let customers book online?
Organic search: Visits that come from unpaid links, such as ordinary search results, rather than from ads. In analytics it is a label for visits, not for customers, so line it up with your own lead records with care.
What do 'organic', 'paid' and 'referral' traffic mean in your website analytics?

P

Paid search: Ads that appear with search results and are paid for by the click. They can bring calls within days and stop the moment you stop paying, while SEO usually takes months to build and tends to last after the work slows.
Is paying for Google ads better than SEO for a small business?
Pay per click (PPC): A way of paying for ads in which you pay for each click on the ad. What one click costs is the cost per click.
What do cost per click, impressions and reach mean in an ad report?
Pay per lead: Paying a set fee for each inquiry a company or a lead site sends you. It can work when the leads fit your work, are not sold to several competitors at once and turn into jobs.
What does a lead generation company do, and should you pay per lead?
Pay-for-performance SEO: An arrangement where an agency is paid only when a result is reached, usually a ranking. When payment depends on position, the easiest searches are the natural choice, and those often bring no customers; a better deal ties payment to inquiries you can trace or to jobs won.
Is pay-for-performance SEO a good deal?
Pipeline (sales pipeline): The plain stages an inquiry passes through once it has been answered: new, contacted, quote or visit booked, quote sent, and won, lost or still open. Seeing which stage each lead is stuck in shows where jobs stall, so you can fix that step.
What is a sales pipeline for a small service business?
Pop-up: A box that appears over a web page, often as soon as a visitor lands, asking for an email address or pushing an offer. People tend to dislike them, and for a service visitor they interrupt the call or inquiry you want; a visible phone number and an on-page form are gentler ways to ask.
Should a small business website use pop-ups?
Privacy policy: A page that says what information a website collects, why, who sees it and how a person can ask for it to be deleted. Some state laws can require one once a site collects names, email addresses or phone numbers, so a short, honest one is a sensible habit for any site with a contact form. This is a plain summary, not legal advice.
Does a small business website need a privacy policy?
Prompt: The question or instruction typed into an AI assistant. To check what assistants say about your business, use the prompts your customers would use, in a fresh conversation each time, and repeat them every month so changes mean something.
How do you check what ChatGPT says about your business?
Proposal: A written offer of work. A good one says in plain words what will be done, what will be measured and how you will see it, who does the work, what you will own, what you must provide and how either side can end the agreement.
What should a good SEO proposal include?

Q

Qualified lead: A lead who is a good fit: the need matches what you offer, they are in your service area, their timing works and what they expect is something you can deliver. A few short questions in the first reply or call usually settle it.
How do you tell whether a new lead is a good fit?
Quote: The written price and scope offered for a job. One that tends to win reads like an answer to the customer's problem: it restates what they need, says what is included and what is not, gives the timing and offers one clear way to accept.
How do you write a quote that wins the job?

R

Ranking (search ranking): Where a business or page appears in the list of results for a search. Rankings can point the right way, but on their own they do not show that marketing is working; what counts is the inquiries and customers it brings in.
How do you know if your marketing is working?
Referral: A lead that came because a person recommended you, which is one of the eight lead channels. A referral program makes that habit easier to notice, track and thank, with one thank-you that is the same for everyone and stated in advance.
Should a small business have a referral program?
Reply time: How long a business takes to answer a new inquiry, measured from the moment it arrives. Within the hour, and sooner if you can, is the standard worth aiming for, and it is worth tracking each month alongside where each lead came from.
How fast should a business reply to a new lead?
Retainer (marketing retainer): A deal to pay a fixed fee each month for an agreed amount of continuing marketing work, rather than per project or per hour. A fair one states the monthly work, how results are measured, the term, the notice either side must give, and that you own your accounts and the work.
What is a marketing retainer, and how should one work?
Retargeting: Ads shown to people who have already interacted with your business, such as by visiting your website, while they browse or search elsewhere; also called remarketing. It tends to suit jobs people compare for days, less so emergencies, and it is judged by the inquiries it brings.
What are retargeting ads, and are they worth it for a service business?
Review extortion: A threat to post bad reviews, or to leave them up, unless the business pays. Do not pay or negotiate: keep every message with its date and sender, link each suspect review, and report it to the review platform and to the FTC.
What should you do if someone threatens to post bad reviews unless you pay?
Review gating: Asking only happy customers for a review, or steering unhappy ones away from public sites. Google's policy says merchants may not "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers"; ask everyone, at the moment the work is done.
How do you get more reviews the right way?
Review (online review): A rating and comment a customer leaves about a business on a site such as Google, Facebook or Yelp. Many customers read them before choosing a local business, so recent, real reviews and thoughtful replies are part of how they decide.
Do online reviews matter for a small business?

S

SEO (search engine optimization): The work of earning a business a ranked link on a search results page. It shares most of its foundations with GEO, which aims for a mention inside an AI answer instead, but the two are measured differently, and a business can do well in one while being absent from the other.
GEO vs SEO: what is the difference, and do you need both?
Service area: The places a business that travels to its customers says it serves, such as cities or postal codes. On a Google Business Profile, Google says a service area shows customers where you can provide your services, and a business that does not serve customers at its address should remove the address from the profile.
What is a Google Business Profile, and does a service business need one?
Spam (email): Email that the receiving service treats as unwanted, usually because it cannot confirm who sent it or because recipients mark it that way. Sending from your own domain, emailing only people who expect to hear from you and making unsubscribing easy help keep business email out of it.
Why are my business emails going to spam?
Spam inquiry (scam inquiry): A message through your website form, phone or email that is junk or a scam rather than a real customer. Such messages usually ignore what you offer, push you to act fast, offer to overpay or ask for payment by wire transfer, gift card or cryptocurrency, so check any claim through a contact you already trust and keep them out of your lead numbers.
How do you spot spam and scam inquiries from your website?
"Spam Likely" label: A warning some phones and carriers show on incoming calls they suspect are unwanted. A business cannot control it, but calling only with the person's consent, from a valid number that is really yours, and keeping call volume and repeat call-backs low can help.
Why do my business calls show up as 'Spam Likely' on customers' phones?

T

Target customer: The kind of customer a business most wants more of, worked out from the jobs it already wins and would happily take again: where they are, the type of job, how urgent it was and how they found you.
How do you work out who your target customer is?
Thank-you page: The page or message a person sees after sending an inquiry. It should confirm the inquiry arrived, say when and how you will reply, explain what happens next and say what to do if the matter is urgent.
What should a website say after someone sends an inquiry?

U

Unique selling proposition: The main reason a customer should pick you over the others they are weighing up, short enough to say aloud. The best ones rest on something you already do and can show, such as quick replies, a specialty or a neighborhood you know well, rather than a claim like quality that anyone can make.
What is a unique selling proposition, and does a service business need one?
Upgrade vs rebuild: Upgrading keeps a website's address, content and platform and fixes speed, clarity or a missing call to action; rebuilding starts over, on a new platform or with mostly new pages. Upgrade first, and rebuild only when the site cannot be saved.
Should you upgrade your website or rebuild it?

V

Voice search: Asking a phone or a smart speaker, such as Siri or Alexa, for a business out loud instead of typing. Nobody can promise an assistant will name a particular business, so ask every new inquiry how they found you and write down answers like Siri or Alexa.
Do Siri and Alexa recommend local businesses?

W

Website analytics: A tool that counts the people who visit a site and shows which pages they read and where they came from, so you can spot pages that are not working. It cannot show who became an inquiry or a customer; only your own lead records can.
Does a small business need website analytics?
Website builder: A service that lets an owner assemble a site from ready-made parts without a designer. It can be enough for a handful of services written plainly; either way, the site should be clear on a phone, get every inquiry to a person and sit on a domain the business owns.
Should you build your own website or pay someone to build it?
Website maintenance: Routine upkeep of a site: renewing the domain and hosting on time, applying software and plugin updates, testing that forms and phone links work, correcting details such as services and hours, and keeping a backup. Each check is quick, but if they are skipped, problems can go unseen for weeks.
What does looking after a small business website involve?
Word of mouth: Customers and other businesses recommending you to people they know. In lead records it is the referral channel, and one way to build it is to ask plainly a few businesses that serve the same customers as you without competing.
How do you get referrals from other businesses?

Z

Zero-click search: A search that ends without the person clicking any result, which can happen when an answer, such as an AI summary, appears on the results page itself. If fewer people click past the answer, the answer becomes the place to be seen, so track which channel your inquiries actually come from.
Are AI answers taking clicks away from Google search results?

Sources

A term that is not here?

Ask it on the form.

Work with us