Digital Strategy Glossary

Breadcrumbs are a row of links on a webpage showing your current location that are located beneath your site’s main navigation row.

A call-to-action (CTA) is a request on a web page that asks the user to take a specific action. It is usually a button or link that prompts the user to take an action.

A child, or secondary page, is a page nested beneath a parent page within your site’s content structure. In the main navigation, child pages are typically revealed when a visitor clicks or taps the parent page’s link.

A website content audit is a systematic process of cataloging, evaluating, and analyzing the pages and assets across a site to assess their performance, quality, and relevance. It helps website owners make informed decisions about which content to keep, update, consolidate, or remove.

Website content optimization is the process of improving web text, images, and media to rank higher in search engines, engage users, and meet business goals. It combines search engine visibility, user readability, and conversion tracking.

Content organization refers to how information is structured on a page. The most important information—especially what users are looking for—should appear near the top, followed by supporting content and additional details in a logical order.

Content presentation refers to how the elements on a page are organized and displayed, and how easily users can scan and understand the content to complete a task or achieve their goal.

Website content strategy is the ongoing plan for the creation, delivery, and governance of digital information. It guides how a site builds useful text, media, and structure to meet user needs while reaching business goals.

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is a readability metric that estimates the years of formal education required to understand text. Originally developed for the U.S. Navy to assess technical manuals, it helps writers ensure their content is appropriately tailored to their audience.

Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, measure value set by content owners and marketing professionals to track progress, evaluate success, and reach important goals.

Lemmings, or those who mindlessly follows whatever an LLM spits out, often never visit your website directly because they rely on AI-powered search tools to provide them with information.

Lookers are typically in the earliest stages of gathering information. They arrive with a specific goal and want to find what they need as quickly as possible.

Navigation depth measures the average number of clicks (pages visited) to get to a certain page.

Nesting is when you place your web pages or elements on a page (text, images, videos, etc.) inside one another to build a hierarchical relationship.

For example, a child page is nested under a parent page when looking at the hierarchical structure of your website.

Page content is text, images, and media displayed on a digital web page for users to view and interact with. It provides the core information, value, and purpose of a site.

A parent page is a page that is nested directly underneath your homepage in your site’s navigational hierarchy and is considered a top-level page. Links to these pages are typically visible in your site’s navigation bar.

Readability measures how easily visitors can read and understand the text on a web page. It depends on two main things: how the words look on the screen (visual design) and how the sentences are written (language complexity).

Readers are visitors who want to engage more deeply with your content and learn more about what you have to offer.

Researchers are looking for comprehensive, in-depth information. They want to understand the full picture and are interested in the details—the who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Scanners are not reading all of your content. Instead, they’re skimming and scanning for key ideas.

A site footer is a feature included on all UMC WordPress websites and displayed at the bottom of every page. It typically includes the department or office name, contact information, and other relevant departmental details.

A sitemap lists all the important pages, videos, and files on a website. It acts as a roadmap, showing search engines how to crawl your site more efficiently and helping human visitors easily navigate your content.

Site navigation is the menu structure that allows visitors to move from one page of your website to another. Navigation links are typically organized into parent links—the primary links visible in the menu—and child page links, which are nested beneath a parent link and usually require a user to click or tap to reveal them.

A target audience is the specific group of people most likely to read, care about, and use your information or products. It relies on key data points like demographics, interests, and pain points.

User experience, or UX, encompasses every aspect of an end user’s interaction with an organization, its services, and its products. It extends beyond the digital experience to include every touchpoint a person encounters, both online and in person.

A user or visitor is someone who uses the internet to find information and access websites. In content strategy, a user is anyone searching online for information, while a visitor is a user who has arrived at your website.

Behavior Maps detail your visitors’ interactions with your pages and include:

• Heat map
• Scroll map
• Click map
• Segmentation map

The bounce rate tells you the number of people who come to your website and only see the one page they started on.

A conversion is the process of tracking and analyzing user behaviors on your website that lead to a desired goal, like completing a form or signing up for an event.

The devices metric in Siteimprove displays a breakdown of desktop, mobile, and tablet usage on your site.

Direct traffic consists of entry pages for the visits that have started through a direct entry to your website (for example from a bookmark) and not through an external referrer or search engine.

An entry page is the first page visitors see when they enter the website.

Event tracking can be set up to measure engagement with specific elements throughout your site, such as navigation links, buttons, and embedded YouTube videos.

An exit page is the last page visitors see when they leave the website.

External referring domains are sites outside of yoursite.wfu.edu that have referred visitors to your website.

External referring pages are pages on external domains that have referred visitors to your website. 

Funnels are used to track and map the sequence of steps a user takes toward a specific goal on your site.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a free tool by Google that tracks user activity on websites and apps. It uses an event-based model instead of old page views, offers cross-platform tracking, and applies machine learning for privacy-safe insights.

GA4 is used by Wake Forest University/UMC to track data performance on several WFU websites. WordPress site editors are encouraged to use Siteimprove Analytics when collecting data from their site due to its user-friendly interface and robust offerings.

Metrics are quantitative, numerical measurements that track and evaluate user activity, performance, and behavior on a site.

Navigation depth refers to the average number of clicks (pages visited) to get to a certain page.

Pageviews is the number of time a page has been viewed on your site within a specific timeframe.

Page load time is the average amount of time (in seconds) it takes a page to load across all devices.

Organic traffic tracks visitors who land on your website through unpaid search engine results, such as Google Search or Bing.

An outbound link (or external link) is a hyperlink on your webpage that points to a completely different domain, like another website or an externally hosted PDF.

A session is a group of interactions (such as pageviews, clicks, and events) a single user makes on your website or app within a specific timeframe. It acts as a single “visit.” By default, a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, or when the user leaves the platform.

User journeys display all of the routes that have been taken between a start page (A) and end page (B).

Visit depth refers to the number of page views for each visit. Visits with a high number of page views suggests that the site is encouraging visitors to stay.

Visit length refers to the time a visitor spends on your site during their visit. This data can be used to determine how much your website retains visitor – if the visit length is typically low, you could investigate ways to keep your visitors on your site for longer.

A return visitor is someone who has visited your site multiple times.

A unique visitor is a web analytics metric that counts an individual person who visits a website at least once during a specific time period. They are counted only once, no matter how many times they return or how many pages they look at during that time.

Visits are how many times someone visits your website. These are not the same as pageviews as visits refer to the actual user and not how many times that person looks at a page on your site.

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that AI tools, voice assistants, and search platforms can easily understand and use it to generate answers. Unlike traditional search engine optimization (SEO), which focuses on ranking web pages in search results, AEO focuses on positioning content to be selected as a direct, spoken, or AI-generated answer.

Average click-through rate is the percentage of users who see your pages in Google search results who then click on them.

The number of clicks on Google search results that led to your pages.

Generative AI, or GenAI, refers to AI-powered tools that allow users to search for information and receive summarized, conversational answers to their questions or prompts—often without needing to visit another webpage.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) helps your content appear and get cited in AI answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Google Custom Search serves as Wake Forest University’s primary, or global, search feature, allowing visitors to search for content across the university’s websites.

Google Search Console helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google Search results. Key features include performance tracking, indexing reports, and error alerts.

An impression is a metric that counts every instance an ad or piece of content is displayed on a user’s screen. It measures total visibility and brand exposure, tracking how many times content is served regardless of whether the user actually clicks or interacts with it.

Keywords, or keyphrases, are words entered into a search engine by users to look for specific information online.

Large Language Models (LLM) are a type of artificial intelligence designed to read, write, and understand human language.

A meta description is a brief summary you provide in Yoast that describes the purpose and content of a webpage. Search engines may use this information to help understand and represent your page in search results.

A page title is how the name of your web page appears in a web browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website’s visibility, content, and structure so that it appears higher in unpaid (organic) search engine results on platforms like Google.

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. It is the web page you see on Google, Bing, or another search engine after you type in words and press search.

Traditional SEO usually refers to search engines like Google Search and Bing that don’t use AI to generate search results.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin used by Wake Forest University to help website editors provide meta information, such as page title and a page description, to search engines.

A zero-click search is a search query that a user resolves directly on the search engine results page (SERP) without clicking on any external website links.

The concept of designing physical and virtual spaces and points of contact so that they are usable to all people, with an intentional focus on ensuring usability for people with disabilities.

Techniques that people with disabilities use to navigate computers and digital content. Adaptive strategies may or may not involve the use of assistive technology.

A short, concise written description that conveys the meaning and function of images in their context.

The ADA stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act, a vital federal civil rights law passed in 1990 that stops unfair treatment of people with disabilities. It gives people with disabilities equal rights and access to jobs, schools, public places, and transportation.

A piece of software or hardware that supports access and use of digital and physical content and services for people with disabilities.

A time-synced text version of the spoken part of a television show, movie, or computer presentation. “Quality” or “meaningful” captions, which are most useful, should be edited for accuracy and include additional context such as time stamps and speakers’ names. “Open” captions are always on and cannot be turned off, while “closed” captions can be turned off by the user.

Multiple links that appear close together on a page and lead to the same destination. These often occur when both an image and the text next to it are individually linked to the same page, creating two separate focusable elements for assistive technology users.

A framework of headings that organizes the content of a web page or document like a table of contents. Headings are hierarchical with the Heading 1 (H1) representing the main idea in the document and sub-sections marked with H2, H3, etc.

Text that helps users know where a hyperlink is directing them. To be meaningful, the linked text should also be unique within a page and be purposeful when read out of context.

An annual event hosted by Wake Forest, PDF Makeover is an effort to convert this file type into a more accessible format, such as a web page, Google Doc, or Canvas page. Additionally, files can be remediated to include accessibility features while remaining PDFs. PDFs, which are widely used for digital documents, capture information in an electronic image but may do so in a way that loses accessibility features, like the ability to be navigated logically by a screen reader.

Skip links, or anchor tags, are hidden navigation shortcuts that let users jump directly to the main content of a page, bypassing repeated menus or headers. They become visible when focused, usually by pressing the Tab key.

Reading order refers to the sequence in which content is presented and will be interpreted. The same logical reading order should be presented both structurally and visually, to ensure consistent messages for everyone, including those who use assistive technology such as screen readers. Structural reading order determines how text, images, headings, and other elements are navigated and understood by users who rely on assistive technology. Reading order is most often a concern in PDFs and presentation slides.

Text to speech technology that, by interpreting computer code, converts visual content on a screen into spoken words.

The concept of ensuring websites, digital materials, and technology-delivered services are created and maintained so that they can be used equitably by everyone.

A written version of content which was originally spoken. Transcripts should include speaker names and usually include time stamps.

An international standard for web accessibility. Each guideline is followed by ways to achieve success. Version 2.2 is the most recent version of these guidelines, and most vendors and web site developers aim for level AA conformance.