illicit mammoth

The SEO industry loves to talk gibberish. Just the other day I ran a GSC pull to check the CTR, then cross-checked it against GA4 to see if the CVR held up, before flagging it as a CRO issue. It might have been because the title tag (also called a meta title, page title or SEO title) and the h1 weren’t consistent, or perhaps our recent GEO efforts have caused issues with the site’s geotargeting.

Well done if that makes sense to you, there are no prizes though - just more acronyms and terminology.

Word has it that one of these chaps loves orange soda.

Even if you do know your FCP from your LCP, it’s a curse because nobody outside your niche little bubble cares. Back to your graphs and spreadsheets, you big nerd.

Learning when and how to explain things at different complexity levels has been a skill that has taken some work, and often simple analogies and visual examples work best.

One concept I had to explain on multiple occasions was character count vs pixel width, usually in the context of title tags and meta descriptions. To help explain this, I came up with “illicit mammoth”. Both 7 characters long, but clearly different widths in terms of pixels:

illicit7 characters

mammoth7 characters

This example is consistent across multiple common fonts. In some cases you can fit a double “illicit” into the space of a single “mammoth”, if that’s what you’re in to.

It’s now my go-to when I need to explain the concept, and it’s a fun oxymoron: illicit implies secrecy, mammoth implies enormous. It is also a fun thing to picture, if that’s what you’re in to.

a crayon-style drawing of a woolly mammoth hiding under a single bed, tusks and fur sticking out either side, while a startled child in the bed points it out to another child in the doorway — "Man-moths?" - Karl Pilkington

or, for polite company

If “illicit mammoth” is a bit of a mouthful then perhaps “little wombat” is more palatable. Only slightly shorter at 6 characters and the length comparison isn’t quite as impressive, but it’ll get the job done without any raised eyebrows.

little6 characters

wombat6 characters

You’re welcome to take either, or both, if that’s what you’re in to. Take them, pass them on, use them the next time a client or coworker asks, thank me personally in your speech when you accept the Nobel Prize for being a good explainer.

If this has sufficiently tickled your pickle, then you might get a kick out of my SEO explainer tool, which offers 3 ways to explain SEO concepts from “clever colleague” to “crayon” complexity. It’s about 50% for funsies and 50% actually useful, like me after 4pm on Friday.