SEO glossary

Google's generated answer block.

A summary at the top of some results that cites sources. Being one of those sources is now a distinct visibility goal.

The clickable words of a link.

It describes the destination. Descriptive anchors help both readers and search engines; 'click here' helps nobody.

Which channel gets the credit.

How you assign a sale across the touchpoints before it. Decide the model up front so reports stay comparable.

Your typical ranking for a query.

An average across impressions, so it moves when you gain visibility on new queries. Read it alongside clicks, never alone.

A link from another site to yours.

Still one of the strongest ranking signals. Relevance and genuine editorial intent matter far more than raw volume.

The preferred version of a page.

A tag that says 'this is the master copy'. It stops near-duplicate URLs from competing with each other.

A mention of your business on another site.

A directory or listing entry with your details. Volume matters less than accuracy and the quality of the directory.

How often AI answers link you.

The share of answers that name your site as a source. Driven by clear, quotable, well-structured pages.

Clicks divided by impressions.

How tempting your result is at its current position. Improve it with better titles, descriptions and rich results.

The plan before writing.

Target query, intent, angle, sections, internal links and the questions to answer. Briefs are what make writing repeatable.

Old pages losing traffic.

Rankings slide as facts age and competitors publish fresher work. Refreshing decaying pages usually beats writing new ones.

The action you actually want.

A form, call, booking or sale. Ranking without conversions is a vanity metric — tie every report back to this.

Google's page experience metrics.

Three measurements of loading, responsiveness and layout stability. They matter most on mobile and on slow connections.

How much of your site gets fetched.

Large sites need bots to spend their limited crawling on money pages, not filters, parameters and duplicates.

How search engines discover pages.

A bot follows links and sitemaps to fetch pages. If a page cannot be crawled it cannot be ranked, which is why crawl errors are always fixed first.

A third-party strength score.

An estimate of how strong a site's link profile is. Useful for comparing prospects, never a metric Google itself uses.

Experience, expertise, authority, trust.

The qualities Google's raters look for. In practice: real authors, first-hand proof, citations, and a site people can verify.

Generative engine optimisation.

Earning mentions and citations inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews rather than just blue links.

Your listing on Google Maps and local results.

Name, address, phone, hours, categories, photos and reviews. The single biggest factor in local visibility.

An article published on another site.

A legitimate way to earn links and reach when the piece is genuinely useful and the site has a real audience.

Language and country targeting.

Tags that tell search engines which language or country version of a page to show, so a UK visitor is not sent to the US page.

How often you were shown.

The number of times your pages appeared in results. Rising impressions with flat clicks usually means a snippet problem.

Being stored in the search engine.

After crawling, a search engine decides whether a page is worth keeping in its index. Thin, duplicated or blocked pages are often left out.

Links between your own pages.

How you tell search engines which of your pages matter and how they relate. The cheapest ranking lever most sites ignore.

Two pages fighting for one phrase.

When several pages target the same query, they split links and signals. The fix is to merge them or clearly separate their intents.

How hard a phrase is to rank for.

A score based on how strong the pages already ranking are. High difficulty means you need better content and stronger links.

Finding what people actually search.

Collecting the real phrases your buyers type, then judging each one by volume, difficulty and how close it is to a purchase.

Links competitors have and you do not.

Sites linking to several of your rivals but not you. The highest-hit-rate outreach list you can build.

One page per location or service area.

A real page with unique details, staff, directions and reviews — not the same text with the city name swapped.

What bots really did on your server.

Server records showing which URLs bots fetched and how often. It exposes crawl waste no crawler can guess.

A longer, more specific phrase.

Lower volume, far less competition and usually a clearer intent. Most early wins for a new site come from the long tail.

The three local results with a map.

The block of local businesses at the top of a local search. Proximity, prominence and relevance decide who appears.

The snippet under the title.

It does not rank a page but it heavily affects clicks. Write it like ad copy that answers the query.

Same name, address, phone everywhere.

Conflicting details across directories confuse search engines and customers. Fix the canonical record, then push it out.

A link that passes no endorsement.

An attribute telling search engines not to treat the link as a vote. Common on ads, comments and sponsored placements.

A page with no internal links.

Reachable only by sitemap or direct URL. Search engines treat it as unimportant, and users never find it.

The questions you track in AI tools.

A fixed list of buyer questions checked on a schedule, so AI visibility can be measured over time like rankings.

Sending one URL to another.

A 301 is permanent and passes signals; a 302 is temporary. Chains and loops waste crawling and lose value.

A unique linking website.

One hundred links from one site count for far less than links from one hundred different sites. Count domains, not links.

A recurring monthly agreement.

The core agency model: an agreed scope of SEO work each month with clear deliverables and reporting.

Crawl instructions file.

A small file at the root of a site that tells bots which paths they may fetch. A mistake here can hide an entire site from search.

Google's free performance data.

Real impressions, clicks, positions and indexing status straight from Google. The most trustworthy dataset you have.

What the searcher wants.

Whether the person wants to learn, compare, buy or find a specific site. Match the intent or the page will not rank however good it is.

How often a phrase is searched.

An average monthly estimate. Useful for sizing an opportunity, but never a promise of traffic on its own.

Search engine optimisation.

The work of making a website easier for search engines to find, understand and recommend, so it earns clicks without paying for each one.

A structured health check.

A crawl plus manual review that turns findings into a prioritised, owned fix list — not a 200-page PDF nobody reads.

Search engine results page.

The page of results you see after a search. It mixes normal blue links with ads, map packs, images, videos, People Also Ask boxes and AI answers.

How often you appear versus rivals.

Across a set of prompts or keywords, the percentage where your brand is mentioned. The core AI-visibility metric.

A list of your important URLs.

An XML file that lists the pages you want indexed, with their last change date. It speeds up discovery on big or new sites.

Machine-readable facts about a page.

Schema markup that spells out what a page is: a product, a recipe, an FAQ, a local business. It powers rich results.

The clickable headline in results.

The strongest single on-page signal and your main ad copy. Keep the main phrase near the front and stay under about 60 characters.

A hub page plus supporting pages.

One broad pillar page linked to many specific pages. It shows depth on a subject and spreads link value across the group.

A link that can do harm.

Links from spam networks, hacked pages or paid schemes. Audit regularly and disavow only clear, deliberate patterns.