What these words actually mean

The words we use, and what they mean

NAP

Name, Address, Phone. The three facts that must be identical everywhere your shop appears online. When they disagree between Google, Yelp, and your website, search engines get less confident about which one is real, and confidence is what local ranking is built on.

GBP

Google Business Profile. The listing that appears in Maps and in the panel beside your name in search results. For most tattoo shops it produces more calls and direction requests than the website does, which is why we treat it as a managed asset.

Schema

Structured data: a machine-readable description of your page embedded in the HTML. It is how you tell Google, explicitly, that a page lists prices, answers questions, or belongs to a business in San Diego, instead of hoping it infers the same thing.

FAQPage schema

A specific schema type for a page of questions and answers. It gives a page a chance to be surfaced as an expandable answer, and it is the cheapest structured data win available to a service business.

Organic vs. paid

Organic traffic arrives from an unpaid search result. Paid traffic arrives because you bought the placement. Organic compounds and is slower; paid is immediate and stops the day you stop paying.

Impressions vs. clicks

An impression is your page appearing in a result. A click is someone choosing it. Impressions rising with flat clicks means you are becoming eligible for searches that do not match what the page says yet.

Local pack

The block of map results above the ordinary search results for queries with local intent. It usually takes most of the clicks for “tattoo shop near me,” which is why the profile matters as much as the site.

Motif page

A page built around the thing a client wants tattooed - a dragon, an oni mask, a cherub - rather than the style an artist works in. Much closer to booking intent, and almost universally unclaimed by shops.

Consumer guide

A page answering a pre-purchase question: what a tattoo costs, whether it hurts, how to plan a first one. National-volume terms that do not depend on your portfolio, which makes them available from day one.

Content taxonomy

The deliberate set of page types a site is built from - styles, motifs, artists, guides - each with a job and each linking into the others. The opposite of a blog.

Redirect map

A list of every old URL on a previous site and where each one should now point. Skipping this throws away any authority and rankings the old pages had earned.

Canonical URL

The one address search engines should treat as the real version of a page when more than one address can reach it. Getting this wrong splits your own authority between two copies.

Deposit path

The route from a booked intent to money in the account: a deposit taken online, from a phone, without a phone call. For tattoo shops it is the single highest-leverage fix on a website.

Conversion tracking

Recording which channel produced a form fill, a call, or a booking, so the monthly report can be about decisions rather than impressions.

LTV

Lifetime value: what a client is worth across every session they will ever book. It is the number that tells you whether a high cost per acquisition is cheap or expensive.

CPA

Cost per acquisition: what you paid, in media or fees, to produce one booked client. Only meaningful next to LTV.

Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager. A container that holds your measurement tags so they can be changed without editing the site. It is plumbing, and it is what makes the reporting trustworthy.

Search Console

Google’s own reporting on how your site appears in search: queries, impressions, clicks, and indexing problems. Free, and the primary evidence base for SEO decisions.

GA4

Google Analytics 4. The current version of Google’s analytics platform. Useful for behaviour, not for deciding which keyword earned a booking on its own.

Indexable

Able to be stored and shown by a search engine. Content that lives only in an Instagram grid is not indexable, which is why a portfolio that exists only there contributes almost nothing to search.

Local pack radius

The rough area around your address where you can appear in map results for a query. It is why two shops one mile apart rank completely differently for the same search.

Ai citations

Cases where an AI assistant names your shop or cites your page in an answer. Real visibility that does not show up as a click, which is one reason a rising-impressions-flat-clicks pattern is not automatically bad news.

Notice period

How much warning either side gives before the engagement ends. We use one instead of a lock-in, because a retainer that has to be enforced is already failing.