Search engine optimization (SEO) is its own niche of digital marketing and therefore has its own set of terms for specific actions, processes, metrics, and outcomes. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of SEO terminology with quick, digestible definitions that you can find at a glance. These SEO terms are commonly used in the field, and it’s important that SEO professionals understand what they mean and how to use them properly.
The terms are listed alphabetically below, so you can use this as a handy reference when coming across terms you may be unfamiliar with or need a refresher on.
A
AI Overview (AIO): An AI-generated summary of Google Search results that is displayed near the top of the search engine results page (SERP). AI Overviews often provide direct answers to queries and key takeaways with linked citations for further research.
AI Overview Citation: Links within AI Overviews that identify the source that the artificial intelligence used to come up with the summarized information.
AI Visibility: A measure of how often your brand is shown in AI-powered search results, such as AI Overviews, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. AI visibility can be measured in “mentions” or “citations,” depending on what the desired outcome is.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): The practice of creating, structuring, and optimizing content so that it can be easily understood by AI-powered tools and featured as a direct answer to a specific AI query. Targeting AEO means targeting very specific, niche questions and searches that users are asking.
Average Position: An SEO metric specific to Google Search Console that reflects your website’s average ranking within Google Search results over a given time period. Rankings 1 through 10 typically indicate visibility on page one.
Ahrefs: A third-party SEO platform that houses tools for keyword research, competitive research, site audits, backlink analysis, and content analysis with the goal of helping improve a website’s organic performance. Ahrefs takes its name from “a href,” an HTML anchor tag that includes a loadable URL that connects one webpage to another.
Alt Attribute: An HTML tag that is added to images to provide a description. It helps to improve accessibility, allowing screen readers to understand the content by displaying text. It can also provide context to users, as it can appear when an image won’t load on a page.
Anchor Text: The clickable text in a hyperlink (think blue, underlined text). Anchor text is important because the words used as anchor text can help users and search engines understand the context of the page that is being linked to.
B
Backlinks: Hyperlinks from other sites that link to your website. They are sometimes referred to as inbound links, and they help search engines discover content. Search engines gauge the quality and quantity of these links to determine if they are relevant and demonstrate authority.
Bing Webmaster Tools: Microsoft’s free platform that allows website owners to monitor and optimize their site’s visibility in Bing’s organic search results. This tool provides insights into organic search traffic, keyword rankings, indexing, backlinks, technical SEO issues, and overall site health. It is the equivalent to Microsoft of what Google Search Console is to Google.
Black Hat SEO: Unethical and spammy practices, like keyword stuffing, buying links, hidden text, and cloaking, to try to manipulate the search engine algorithms to improve rankings and organic performance artificially. These tactics often result in short-term spikes, and they violate search engine guidelines and come with risks like penalties, manual actions, or de-indexing of your site.
Blogging for SEO: The practice of writing and optimizing informational content that provides helpful answers to things that people are searching for, to improve your website’s visibility in the search results. A consistent blogging strategy helps target those long-tail search queries, earn backlinks, build topical authority, and attract additional website traffic, resulting in the passing of relevant link authority back to the core domain.
Bounce Rate: A metric that measures the percentage of users who view only one page and then leave your website without clicking to another page or interacting with your site in some way. A high bounce rate percentage can indicate that your content doesn’t meet the needs of searchers.
Brand Authority: Search engines like Google associate certain levels of trust and authority with brand names. “Brand Authority” is a trademarked term by Moz, a third-party SEO platform, that attempts to quantify this level of credibility, expertise, and trust.
Branded Keywords: Search queries that include a company name, along with modifiers like a product name, model number, or location. These keywords target searchers who are already familiar with a brand, and they typically have a higher conversion rate since these users already know what they want.
Brand Mention: Any reference to your brand, products, or services online in the form of plain text or backlinks to your site with brand term anchor text. These mentions can appear on other websites, in blogs, social posts, podcasts, forums, news articles, and AI-generated answers. If your brand is consistently mentioned in high-quality, topically relevant content, this can improve your rankings and visibility in AI-generated responses. These mentions help increase brand awareness, authority, credibility, and trust.
Breadcrumbs: Often formatted as a horizontal row of clickable links at the top left of landing pages, breadcrumbs act almost as a secondary navigation for your website. They help visitors navigate your site and understand where they are at a glance within a site’s hierarchy. By linking back to higher-level subcategory and category pages, breadcrumbs strengthen interlinking between related pages and help bots and crawlers better understand a site’s taxonomy and structure.
Broken Links: Broken links are hyperlinks that no longer work and result in a “404 Page Not Found” error when clicked. Common reasons for these are that the URL is incorrect, or a page has been removed or moved, resulting in a poor user experience.
C
Cache: A temporarily stored version of an image, script, or webpage that allows your browser to load content more quickly for following visits.
Canonicalization: The process of telling the search engine which version of similar or duplicate pages should be the primary version featured in the search results by using a canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) in the code. User-selected canonicalization helps a website avoid duplicate content and ensures that the correct URL appears in the SERPs.
Canonical Tag: A canonical tag is a piece of HTML code that lets the search engine know which version of a page is the preferred source when a site has similar or duplicate content. It helps to ensure that multiple pages do not compete with each other for ranking signals by consolidating them.
Category Page Optimization: The practice of improving a category page’s metadata, structure, copy, internal links, and user experience to improve its performance in organic search.
Child Page: A child page is a webpage that is nestled beneath another page (often called a “parent page”) in a site’s structural hierarchy.
Chunking: This is the process of organizing and grouping content into logical “chunks,” often using headings with short paragraphs, bulleted lists, or other formatting strategies that make content easily digestible. When done right, chunking creates a more visually appealing and easier-to-read experience for users while simultaneously creating a more scannable page for AI systems to crawl and contextualize.
Citations: Any mentions of a company’s name or webpage online that help to establish credibility, trust, and extra visibility in organic search results. For AI systems, they are links or mentions in an AI-generated response. In local SEO, they act as online listings, including the business name, address, or phone number (referred to as NAP).
Click Depth: The number of clicks that it takes to navigate from the homepage to a specific page on the site. Pages in the navigation or linked to from the homepage have a depth of one, while links further in the site have a larger click depth. The larger the click depth a page has, the less link authority flowing to that page.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): This metric isn’t specific to SEO. It measures the percentage of users that click through to a page after seeing it in an ad, organic search result, etc. The percentage is measured by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions and then multiplying that number by 100. With certain types of queries, such as navigational, transactional, or commercial, a higher CTR can indicate that your visible metadata like your title tag and meta description are compelling and relevant to the search intent.
Cloaking: Cloaking is a common spam tactic where a website intentionally tries to manipulate search rankings by showing different content to bots and crawlers than it does to users. This practice violates search engine guidelines and can result in penalties or site deindexation.
Commercial Intent: This type of search intent is when the user is in the research stage of a potential transaction or upcoming purchase. Searchers with commercial intent are comparing products or services across different brands and reading customer reviews to find the brand that meets their needs. These queries often include modifiers like “best,” “top-rated,” “compare,” or “reviews.”
Competitive Content Analysis: An evaluation of the competition’s websites that helps to identify content gaps, the keywords that they are targeting, and their strengths and weaknesses. Insights from this type of analysis can help to uncover opportunities to improve your content and site structure to increase visibility in organic search.
Competitive Research: Thorough analysis of other brands or sites appearing in the SERPs for your target keywords. It involves seeing what competitors are doing right for SEO and finding new keyword or on-page opportunities to improve your content to serve searchers better.
Content Audit: The process of evaluating your site’s content to assess its quality and SEO performance against business goals, with the ultimate goal of determining what should be kept, consolidated, optimized, or removed.
Content Consolidation: The process of combining multiple pages of overlapping content into a single comprehensive page. Content consolidation reduces competing content, improves overall user experience, strengthens SEO signals, and creates one powerful, more authoritative resource for users and search engines.
Content Decay: A gradual loss in traffic, conversions, and organic search rankings over a period of time due to not refreshing content as user intent shifts, statistics change, competitors improve their content, or as search engine algorithm updates are introduced.
Content Freshness: Content freshness can refer to how current, recent, or up-to-date a piece of content is. By regularly keeping a page or blog “fresh” with new or improved information and/or relevant visual elements, sites can stave off content decay or losing rankings to competitors. For large-language models (LLMs) and AI crawlers, refreshed content can help appeal to these tools’ recency bias, wherein more recent, comprehensive pieces of content are cited or mentioned.
Content Gap: The difference between what information your top-ranking competitors provide and what you provide based on what users are searching for. Identifying these missing pieces of information, visual elements, keyword gaps, and topics that are not covered on your site helps uncover opportunities to create content that targets missing search intent.
Content Optimization: The process of improving your website’s content to improve visibility in search results and AI-powered search. It involves refining your keywords, headings, aligning with relevant search intent, and providing optimized copy that adds value to searchers. The copy should feature keywords that read naturally with internal links that provide a path to other pages on your site.
Content Pruning: This decluttering strategy involves removing, refreshing, or consolidating outdated, duplicate, or underperforming content on your site. It helps search engines crawl quality content more efficiently and improves user experience and SEO performance.
Content Refresh: This strategy involves updating your content with new information, updated keywords, better formatting, and sometimes replacing broken links to improve the accuracy and relevance of your webpage. Refreshing content helps a page remain competitive in organic search.
Conversion Rate: A conversion rate is applicable to every marketing channel (not just SEO) and refers to the percentage of visitors who complete a desired goal, whether it’s making a purchase, filling out a form, downloading a resource, or signing up for a newsletter. This metric measures how often your traffic converts. The conversion rate percentage is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors and multiplying by 100.
Conversions: In SEO, this is the successful completion of a desired action on a website by organic visitors that aligns with your business goals. A conversion can include actions like making a purchase, downloading a resource, signing up for a newsletter, or submitting a contact form.
Core Updates: Google makes smaller algorithmic updates all the time, but core updates are the significant changes that Google makes to its search ranking algorithms with the goal of improving the relevance and quality of organic search results. Because they’re so significant, these larger updates are announced by Google. Core updates can be tumultuous, affecting rankings of websites across industries. They can be helpful to sites that are providing content that already follows Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines, as each update is made with the intention of making Search more reliable and useful to users.
Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals are Google’s metrics for page experience that measure a website’s loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. These metrics include: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). If all three elements are in good health and meet Google’s performance benchmarks, your site has the opportunity to win a rankings boost.
Country Targeting: In SEO, country targeting refers to the practice of optimizing your site so that search engines serve the correct localized version to a specific country. This strategy can incorporate country-specific domains or pages, language targeting, localized content, regional currency, and hreflang tags.
Crawlability: The ability of a website to be discovered and accessed by search engine bots so that its pages can be found and indexed. A clear site structure, crawlable navigation, internal links, and proper robots.txt files and XML sitemaps help ensure a site can be crawled.
Crawl Budget: The number of URLs that search engines are able to crawl on a site within a set period of time. It is determined by site size, page quality, and frequency of updates.
Crawled – Currently Not Indexed: In Google Search Console, this indexing status means that your page has been crawled but Googlebot has chosen not to include it in the index at this time. This can happen for a number of reasons, including if Google deems the page has duplicate or too similar content to another page. Crawled – currently not indexed could also be an indicator of low-value or low-quality content.
Crawl Errors: These are issues that prevent the search engine bots from accessing or indexing pages on your site, preventing your content from appearing in organic search. Common issues include server errors, blocked pages, broken links, redirect issues, and error codes.
Crawl Frequency: How often the search engine bots visit and scan your site to discover new, refreshed, or deleted content. The frequency of how often your site is crawled determines how fast search engines index your updated content.
Crawling: The automated process where search engines use bots, also known as crawlers or spiders, to scour the internet and scan, discover, and analyze webpages by following links and reading the content on the pages. This is the first step in determining whether or not a page can be indexed so that it can show in the search results.
Crawl Queue: A list of prioritized webpages that a search engine has scheduled to crawl. The page’s importance determines the priority, as more important pages are crawled more frequently.
Crawl Waste: This is when a search engine uses crawl budget to crawl duplicate content, low-value pages, or non-indexable URLs over more important pages. Too much crawl waste may result in slow indexing for high-value content and poor visibility in the search results.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): One of the three Core Web Vitals metrics from Google that measures the visual stability of webpages across your site by tracking how often elements on the page shift around while loading. This shifting can make users click on the wrong links or buttons or lose their place reading the content. The lower the CLS score, the better the user experience.
Customer Reviews: This feedback in the form of text or ratings about a service, product, or the business overall, is helpful to brands and signals trust to search engines and consumers. When reviews use keyword-rich language, they can improve SEO performance and can generate rich snippets when marked with structured data.
D
Disallow: A crawl directive used in a website’s robots.txt file that restricts search engines from crawling specific pages, sections, or folders on your site. A disallow tells the bot to ignore specific pages from being crawled, but it doesn’t always prevent a page from being indexed if other signals point to it.
Disavow Files: A file that instructs search engines to ignore spammy, low-quality backlinks that could negatively affect your SEO performance. For sites that have unknowingly purchased domains with a history of link spam, a disavow file can help put the domain on a path toward recovery.
Discovered – Currently Not Indexed: A status in Google Search Console that means that Google has found your page from links on your site or an XML sitemap but hasn’t crawled or indexed it yet. It may occur because of crawl budget limits or low-value pages in the crawl queue.
Dofollow Link: A standard hyperlink that allows crawlers to follow and pass link authority to the linked page. This is the default for links unless marked with attributes like rel=”nofollow”, rel=”ugc”, or rel=”sponsored.”
Domain: A unique, primary web address like “jumpfly.com” that serves as a website’s online presence. For websites with multiple pages, the domain is the root of the URL where all link authority flows back to and from.
Domain Authority: This term is a metric coined by Moz that predicts the likelihood of a website ranking in the search results compared to its competitors. It’s scored on a scale from 1 to 100 and is based on a variety of weighted factors. The higher the score, the more authoritative the site is predicted to be. It is not an official Google ranking factor, merely a third-party metric.
Domain Rating: Like domain authority, domain rating is a third-party metric from Ahrefs that measures the strength and ability of a site to rank in search. The higher the rating (anywhere from 0 to 100), the stronger the profile. This is not a Google ranking factor.
Duplicate Content: Duplicate content is the name given to exact match content that appears in multiple places on your site or across different sites. Having competing pages targeting the same keyword theme and with the exact same content is harmful for SEO strategies because it makes it difficult for the search engine to choose which page to rank. Oftentimes, neither page wins or is as strong as it could be, limiting the potential visibility in organic search for all pages involved.
Dwell Time: The total amount of time a visitor spends on a webpage after clicking on the link from organic search before returning to the search results. It is not a Google ranking factor, but it’s a good indicator of whether or not a page satisfies search intent.
E
E-E-A-T: A set of quality guidelines from Google to evaluate the credibility and helpfulness of content online. The acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google’s human search quality raters rely on these guidelines to determine which search results are most accurate, relevant, and useful for a given query.
Engagement Metrics: Measurements that show how visitors interact with the content on your site or your site as a whole. These metrics include average engagement time, engagement rate, clicks, pages per session, scroll depth, and conversions. Higher engagement can signal that your site provides value.
Entity SEO: Instead of focusing on keywords alone, this type of optimization approach focuses on specific people, places, organizations, products, and concepts. It’s designed to target search engines’ understanding of the “entity,” improving visibility and rankings by encapsulating the minutiae of subtopics around this entity.
Evergreen Content: Material that remains relevant, accurate, and valuable to users over time. Evergreen content addresses topics that aren’t time-sensitive and may only require occasional updates. Typically, this type of content drives continuous traffic for long periods of time, and it can perform consistently outside the confines of organic search across multiple marketing channels.
External Links: Hyperlinks that direct your page to a webpage on a completely different site. Also referred to as outbound links, they allow you to cite sources, provide additional valuable content for searchers, and build credibility by linking externally to topically relevant and informative resources.
F
FAQ Schema: A type of structured data that tells search engines and AI models that your page contains questions and answers in a format that they can easily understand. Google no longer displays FAQ rich results directly in the search results, but schema is used for AI-powered search and can help the bots interpret the content on the page.
Featured Snippets: While AI Overviews are mostly replacing these, they can still appear in the search results, often at the top of the page. Like AI Overviews, they answer a query directly without having to click through to a webpage. They can appear as a paragraph, table, list, or video and typically feature a link to the source.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): A list of commonly asked questions and corresponding answers that are related to a specific topic, product, service, or business. They provide answers to questions that users are searching for directly on a webpage. Optimized FAQs address user intent and can target long-tail keywords, and when marked with schema, they can be featured in AI queries.
G
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): A strategy where content is structured so that LLMs, like ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and Perplexity, can easily understand, reference, and cite it. While traditional search engine optimization prioritizes clicks from organic search rankings, GEO’s purpose is to make your brand a trusted source and reference in AI-powered search. Whereas AEO targets specific queries, GEO has a broader goal, aiming for citation and reference across a cluster of AI queries.
Google Analytics (GA4): Google’s web analytics platform that helps businesses track their site’s performance, providing insights into user behavior, traffic sources (like paid, organic, and email), platforms, engagement, and conversions. Organic performance in GA4 includes cross-platform traffic attributed as organic from Google, Bing, and other search engines.
Googlebot: Google’s automated web crawler, which surfs the web, discovers content, scans it, and analyzes webpages to determine whether or not to include pages in its search index.
Google Business Profile (GBP): A free Google business listing, allowing companies to manage how they show up in Google Search and Maps. Formerly known as Google My Business, GBP includes information about your business, like your company name, address, phone number, (known as NAP), business hours, services, photos, and reviews. When optimized, these are helpful for appearing in localized search.
Google Quality Rater Guidelines: A public document that is used by thousands of human evaluators and quality raters to assess the usefulness and quality of pages ranking in Google Search results. These guidelines are not direct ranking factors, but they do emphasize the importance of E-E-A-T and help Google improve its search algorithms.
Google Ranking Systems: A collection of automated algorithms that is designed to evaluate and rank webpages in organic search results. The systems consider hundreds of signals, including content relevance, quality, page speed, page experience, backlinks, and usability, to deliver the best possible results for a user’s query.
Google Search Console (GSC): A free Google tool that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in the Google Search results. The tool provides insights into organic search performance, indexing, crawl issues, backlinks, and Core Web Vitals to help optimize and improve your website’s visibility on Search.
Google Search Essentials: Previously called Webmaster Guidelines, these are Google’s foundational guidelines for getting your content to appear, be indexed, and be visible in organic search. It involves technical requirements, spam policies, and best practices.
Google Trends: A free tool from Google that measures the popularity of search queries over a given period of time. It helps you identify topics that are popular, compare keyword interest, spot patterns in seasonality, and discover opportunities for new content.
Google’s Algorithm: A complex system of ranking algorithms and machine learning systems that Google uses to crawl, index, and retrieve data from its search index to provide the most useful and relevant search results.
H
Headings: HTML elements (h1 through h6) that are used to structure a webpage’s content, often creating a logical hierarchy of information. They help users scan content and search engines understand what your page is about.
H1 Heading: The main heading on a webpage that is marked with the <h1> HTML tag. It represents the main topic, helping users understand what the page is about, and sends a strong signal to the search engines. Having a keyword-aligned, clear h1 heading is a key component for optimizing a page.
Head Term: A broad, competitive search term that often consists of just one or two words, like “shirts” or “dress shirts.” Head terms have a higher search volume and high competition, making it harder to maximize visibility than more specific long-tail keywords, which typically have higher click-through rates and conversion rates.
Helpful Content: People-first content that is designed to provide value, demonstrate first-hand experience, and directly answer a searcher’s query rather than manipulate search engine rankings.
Helpful Content System: This is what Google refers to as their ranking systems. It rewards sites that provide original, trustworthy content based on the E-E-A-T guidelines that help answer searchers’ questions rather than trying to manipulate search rankings. This system is so important that Google once-upon-a-time released helpful content updates before integrating these into core updates in 2024.
HTML: The standard markup language for creating structured webpages. For SEO, it involves using specific tags that help crawlers understand, index, and rank your content. It’s all about optimizing the code and communicating the context of your page directly to bots to influence how your site appears in the search results. Important HTML elements for SEO include title tags, meta descriptions, H1 headings, href links with loadable URLs, and image alt attributes.
HTML Sitemap: A webpage that contains all important pages of your site with links in a structured list. It is designed for human visitors and helps users navigate a site clearly, while XML sitemaps are built for bots.
Hreflang: An HTML attribute that lets search engines know the preferred language and which geographical region of a site should be shown to users in different locations or countries. It’s used to help prevent duplicate content issues and serves the correct version of the page to users based on their geographic location.
HTTP Status Codes: These are three-digit numbers that are returned by a web server, indicating an error in response to a request for a search. These status codes help search engines understand whether the pages are indexed and accessible or whether they need to be removed or redirected. The most common server response codes are 200 (OK), 301 (Moved Permanently), 302 (Temporary Redirect), 404 (Not Found), and 500 (Internal Server Error). However, there are many more, each with its own distinction.
I
Image Alt Text: A brief description added to an image using HTML text. It helps improve accessibility for users with screen readers, allows search engines to understand image content, and displays text when images don’t load properly.
Image Pack: In the search results, this is a group of images that is displayed for a search term with strong visual intent. The pictures typically link to Google Images or the sources, giving websites another way to gain visibility.
Impressions: The number of times your webpage appears on a search results page. Every time users search for a query and your page is shown, it counts as one impression, regardless of whether the user clicks or not or if the page is shown on results page 1 or 100. It’s a valuable measurement of how often your site appears in the search results, indicating overall visibility.
Inbound Links: Hyperlinks on other websites that point to your site. They are also referred to as backlinks, and they help search engines find your content and can improve your authority and trust signals if they come from relevant, high-quality sites.
Indexability: The ability for a webpage to be added to the search engine’s index so that it can show in the search results. For a page to appear in organic search, it must be crawlable, not blocked by noindex directives, and meet the search engine’s guidelines for being indexed.
Indexation: The process of a search engine storing and organizing information that it discovers after crawling pages on a site. When users search for a relevant term, your site can show for that query if it answers the user’s query and is optimized well. If bots cannot crawl and index your page, then those pages do not end up with any visibility in the search results. To see if your page is indexed, add the specific URL to Google Search Console. There is a feature to request indexing that may help speed up the process of getting Google to crawl the URL.
Index Bloat: The term for when search engines crawl and index too many low-value URLs or URLs you don’t want crawlable and indexable. This can include unnecessary pages or duplicate content. It wastes crawl budget and can make it harder for your more important webpages to rank in organic search.
Informational Intent: A specific type of search intent where users want to find out more about a topic or get their questions answered, rather than seeking to purchase a product or service. These searches often include verbiage like “how to,” “why,” “what is,” or “does,” indicating they are looking for information. Optimize and write educational and blog-type content to meet the needs of users, often with the goal of appearing in SERP features and AI Overviews over direct clicks to your website.
Information Gain: In SEO, this is the concept of providing distinct, original, and potentially proprietary content that has added value over other sites in search results. This type of content has fresh insights, demonstrates first-hand experience, and provides new data, making it helpful and more useful to searchers and information-hungry LLMs and crawlers.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): One of the Core Web Vitals metrics that measures the responsiveness of your website by seeing how quickly the page responds to clicks or taps. A low INP score indicates that the site responds in a timely manner without lag and provides searchers with a positive user experience.
Internal Links: Hyperlinks that connect pages on your domain, helping users navigate your website, providing a content hierarchy, and allowing search engines to discover content more easily. Each internal link gives pages linked to a bit more link juice, telling the search engine which pages are important and strengthening ties between pages in a related topical cluster.
J
JavaScript SEO: Any JavaScript-heavy site should be optimized so that bots can easily crawl and index content. Code generated by JavaScript (JS) may cause indexation gaps or render issues, drain crawl budgets, or have broken links. JavaScript SEO, therefore, is the name given to making these JS-heavy sites more bot-friendly.
K
Keywords: Words and phrases that users type into search engines to find products, services, or information on a specific topic. They are the foundation of SEO, guiding content optimization, and they give insight into content to create so that sites can match user intent, appearing in relevant organic search results.
Keyword Cannibalization: When multiple pages on the same site target identical or very similar keywords and the pages compete with each other in the search results. This can lower click-through rate and reduce the visibility of the more important page, with neither of the competing pages ranking well, despite how helpful either of them may be.
Keyword Density: The percentage of times that a specific keyword is on a webpage in comparison to the total number of words. It is not a primary ranking factor. Today, search engines prioritize high-quality content with keywords that are incorporated naturally instead of trying to reach a certain percentage.
Keyword Difficulty: This is an SEO metric that predicts how difficult it is to rank on the first page of organic search for a specific keyword. It’s often based on things like the strength of competitors’ pages and their backlink profiles, but the exact calculation varies by tool citing the difficulty. High scores mean lots of competition for certain queries, and low scores for specific keywords may mean there is opportunity for ranking with less competition.
Keyword Gap: This refers to topically relevant keywords that your competition ranks for in organic search that your site may be missing out on.
Keyword Gap Analysis: The process of comparing your site’s keyword rankings to the competition. This type of analysis helps to identify valuable opportunities to create new content to rank for specific queries you may not currently be competing for.
Keyword Intent: Also referred to as search intent, this is the reason someone is typing in a query. It describes what the searcher hopes to achieve, such as going to a specific website (navigational), performing research about a type of product (commercial), learning information about a topic (informational), or making a purchase (transactional). The type of search intent associated with specific keywords dictates the type of content that should be created to address users’ needs.
Keyword Mapping: The process of assigning specific keywords that are the most relevant in a certain theme to the appropriate pages on your site. It ensures that every page on your site targets a unique query and avoids keyword overlap or cannibalization.
Keyword Research: The process of identifying words and phrases that users type into search engines to discover content, get answers, and find products or services. It is the foundational step of an SEO strategy. The queries are matched with average search volume to show overall search demand, often estimated per month.
Keyword Stuffing: This black hat SEO tactic is when a site overuses keywords on a page in the metadata, headings, and copy to try to manipulate organic rankings. It’s an outdated SEO strategy that creates crummy, unreadable content that negatively impacts user experience and search performance.
Knowledge Graph: In the search engine results, this is a structured database of interconnected organizations, people, places, or concepts. Search engines use them to understand the semantic context and their relationships better. It helps to deliver accurate search results and powers AI-search experiences and Knowledge Panels.
Knowledge Panel: In Google Search, this appears as an information box on the right side of the search results page, or at the top of mobile search, when a user types in a specific person, place, organization, or concept. It is generated using the Knowledge Graph and other credible sources, providing searchers with a summary of important information, such as a brief description, images, dates, and links to the official website and social media profiles.
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Landing Page Report: This performance report in Google Search Console allows users to see which pages on their site received traffic and shows SERP clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position for a given time period. Data can be compared month-over-month or year-over-year, but it should be noted that GSC data is only stored for 16 months.
Language Targeting: An SEO strategy where you optimize content for a specific language. This targeting incorporates hreflang tags and pages translated in the target language, taking into account any regional dialects as needed.
Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO): Also referred to as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), this is the process of optimizing content so that it can be understood, cited, and used by AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. LLMO relies on clear, authoritative, structured content and semantic authority that AI tools can use in their responses.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A Core Web Vitals metric that measures how long it takes for the main content (a large block of text, an image, or video) on the webpage to load. A score of 2.5s or less is considered positive for search engines and user experience.
Lazy Loading: This is a performance optimization technique that delays nonessential content like images, videos, and scripts until they are absolutely needed. It conserves bandwidth, helps the page load much faster, and reduces server load, all of which can improve user experience and SEO performance.
Link Building: The process of acquiring backlinks from other sites that point back to your own to improve your website’s authority and credibility, with the goal of improving search rankings. This SEO strategy is effective when sites focus on gaining relevant, high-quality links through valuable content, partnerships, outreach, guest posts, and additional ethical practices from other sites with topical authority in the same niche.
Link Equity: Also called “link juice,” this is the SEO authority and value that is passed from one page to another on a website through hyperlinks. These high-quality and relevant links send a signal to search engines and help determine which pages are important, helping to improve rankings and visibility.
Link Juice: Also referred to as link equity, it’s the term for the value, trust, and authority that is passed from one page to another on a website through internal links or sitewide navigation. Search engines use these links as votes of confidence, passing some of the linking pages’ ranking power to the page it’s linked to. It can help increase rankings and organic search presence when the links come from relevant and high-quality sources.
Link Spam: The practice of creating or gaining low-quality or irrelevant links by buying links or acquiring spammy links to inflate search engine rankings artificially. This manipulative tactic violates search engine guidelines and can result in penalties.
Local Citations: Mentions of your business online, often in the form of your company name, address, or phone number (NAP), whether on websites, directories, maps, or social media platforms. Consistency and accuracy help search engines verify your business information and can result in an increase in organic visibility in local search results.
Local Pack: On Google, this is a prominent block at the top of organic search that showcases location-specific results when a user makes a search with local intent. It’s also referred to as the “3-pack” or “Map Pack” and includes the company names, hours, contact information, reviews, and corresponding links to Google Business Profiles.
Local SEO: The practice of optimizing a company’s online presence to improve visibility and attract additional business from local searchers. A well-optimized Google Business Profile, location-specific content, reviews, local citations, and other local ranking factors all play a role in this type of SEO. It targets location-based search intent (“Mexican restaurants near me” or “Mexican restaurants in Chicago”) to help your business show up in local search results.
Long-tail Keywords: Highly specific phrases that users search, often with three or more words. They have lower search volume than broader keywords and “head” keyword terms, but they have less competition and often indicate clear search intent, making them more likely to convert into a sale or a lead.
Looker Studio: Google’s free reporting platform and data visualization tool that transforms data into easy-to-understand, customizable, and interactive reports and dashboards with charts and tables. It connects data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, and Sheets to display a full picture of your site’s SEO performance.
Low Hanging Fruit: In SEO, this describes opportunities for improvement that can deliver positive results, with little effort. Since SEO performance can take time to improve, starting with things like optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and content that is ranking lower on page one or even on page two, or fixing technical SEO problems, may move the needle a bit faster.
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Manual Action: A penalty when a human reviewer determines that a site violates Google’s Search Essentials. It can lead to pages being less visible in organic search or entirely removed from the search results.
Metadata: The information in a website’s HTML that describes the content to search engines so that they can understand, index, and show a webpage in organic search. It includes the title tag, meta description, robots meta tag, and other tags.
Meta Description: An HTML tag in the code of a page that provides a summary of its content. It is displayed within the search results underneath the title tag, and has an optimal length of 155 to 160 characters. Though it’s not a direct ranking factor for SEO, when optimized with a call to action or a promotion, it can increase the click-through rate. It should be noted that while it’s best practice to provide a tailored meta description, Google increasingly replaces meta descriptions with its own summarized versions based on Google’s understanding and interpretation of the page.
Meta Keywords: These are HTML tags in the code of a webpage that list relevant terms. Once a sought-after SEO strategy, today they are widely ignored by search engines due to spammy practices like keyword stuffing. Adding meta keywords will have no bearing or effect on the organic performance of a website.
Meta Tags: These little snippets of HTML code tell search engines what the page is about and how it should be displayed, and they are hidden in a webpage’s header. They don’t appear on the page itself.
Meta Robots Tag: An HTML snippet in the <head> section of a webpage that provides instructions to bots on how to crawl, index, and display a page and whether they should follow the links on that page using “noindex” or “nofollow”.
Mobile First Indexing: Google and other search engines use the mobile version of a website to crawl, index, and rank content in organic search results. In other words, how a website appears on mobile is the preferred, primary version that Google and other search engines will see, and thus, crawl, render, and ultimately index.
Modifier Keyword: This is a seed keyword that includes an additional word or phrase that makes the query more specific. Examples of modifiers include “best,” “cheap,” “chicago,” or “custom.”
Month-Over-Month (MoM): A metric often expressed as a percentage that compares SEO performance for the same timeframe from one month to the preceding month, measuring improvement or decline. This type of analysis helps to uncover organic trends, evaluate content that’s been optimized, and discover the impact of an algorithm update. This data can be affected by seasonality.
Moz: A well-known SEO software company that provides third-party tools for SEO, keyword research, link analysis, rank tracking, site audits, and proprietary metrics like Domain Authority.
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NAP: This stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number and is essential for any business to include for its local SEO strategy. Search engines use this information to verify that your business is legitimate and to ensure that the correct physical location is listed (if applicable to your business). It’s critical to make sure that anywhere your business is listed online (websites, social media profiles, directories, etc.), these details are consistent to improve visibility in local searches.
Navboost: One of Google’s core ranking systems that uses user interaction data, like clicks and other navigation behavior, to determine how pages should rank. It’s one of the many signals that Google uses along with authority, content quality, and relevance to improve organic search results.
Navigation: This is the logical structure of links that helps users and search engines find content on a website, often in the form of a menu featuring the site’s most important pages. An effective structure provides a positive user experience, distributes link equity, and allows bots to crawl and index the entire site.
Navigational Intent: This type of search intent is when a user is specifically searching for a brand, website, or page. An example of this is if a searcher types in “Nordstrom official site,” “Gmail login,” or “Facebook,” the search results will display the website or specific page that they are looking for so that they can navigate directly to what they need.
Navigation Optimization: The process of structuring a website’s menus logically and clearly that is beneficial to user experience and search engines, ensuring that both can easily find the most important pages on the website. Navigation optimization also supports bots, making crawling and indexing more efficient.
Nofollow Link: A hyperlink that contains a rel=”nofollow” HTML attribute telling search engines not to pass link equity through the link to the destination URL. The link still remains usable, but it doesn’t provide any link juice to the page being linked to. It is often used for affiliate links or user-generated content.
Noindex Tag: A <meta> tag or an HTTP header that tells the search engines not to include a specific page in the search results. It’s used when pages need to stay accessible to users but should not appear in the search engine results. It should be noted that while a page may include a noindex tag, this does not stop search engine bots from crawling the page. Each time a bot comes across the page, it will have to crawl it to see the noindex tag. The only way to prevent crawling is with a disallow in the robots.txt file.
Nonbranded Keywords: Search terms that do not include a specific brand, company name, or proprietary trademark. They are queries that help users find general services, products, or information and help visitors discover your brand if they aren’t already familiar with it.
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On-page SEO: The practice of optimizing the content and the HTML elements of individual webpages, with the goal of increasing the site’s visibility in organic search results. This is an essential part of an SEO strategy and involves optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and the copy on a page with natural integration of relevant keywords, helpful visual elements, and internal links.
Organic Clicks: Organic clicks, also known as “organic search clicks” or “search clicks,” are the number of visits to your website from organic search. This is a key measurement of traffic for SEO performance and can be seen in Google Search Console.
Organic Market Share: Also called “organic share of voice,” this is the percentage of organic traffic that a brand earns for industry-specific keywords in comparison to its competitors. It is determined by clicks, impressions, rankings, and estimated traffic for a set of keywords.
Organic Search: The unpaid listings in the search engine results page that show based on their relevance to a user’s query. These links are ranked by search engine algorithms based on their relevance and authority and how completely they meet a user’s needs, unlike paid search ads, which are influenced by budgets and ad campaigns.
Organic Search Analytics: The process of analyzing and understanding unpaid search traffic to improve SEO strategies and visibility in the search results. It helps you identify how users discover and interact with your content. It involves measuring organic performance with metrics like clicks, impressions, rankings, traffic, and click-through rate.
Organic Sessions: These are website visits that come from unpaid search results. As a metric, it measures the total number of sessions from organic traffic over a specific period of time in platforms like Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Organic Traffic: This is the total number of visitors who reach your site from unpaid search results. Each click from a non-sponsored link counts as a visit to your site. This metric shows how effective your SEO strategy is, and the overall visibility of your site in the search results helps increase visits to your site.
Orphan Page: A page on a site that has no internal links pointing to it, meaning users have no way of navigating to this specific webpage. Since it’s isolated from the website’s navigation structure, search engines have difficulty discovering, crawling, and indexing it, resulting in poor visibility in organic search. In cases where there are internal links pointing to the page, there could be other technical factors that prevent bots and crawlers from seeing those connections.
Outbound Links: Otherwise referred to as external links or sometimes outgoing links, these are hyperlinks that point users to pages on other websites. They are often used when you want to cite a reliable source or provide additional context. When used appropriately, they can improve user experience and build trust.
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Page Authority: A score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a specific page is to rank in the search results. It’s scored on a 100-point scale, with higher scores suggesting a great probability of that page ranking well.
Page Experience: Signals that measure the overall experience users have when they interact with pages on a website. Factors like mobile friendliness, page speed, secure connections, visual stability, and no intrusive pop-ups influence organic performance and site usability.
PageRank: Google’s original algorithm for measuring the authority of a page based on the quality and quantity of links pointing back to it. Today, this score is no longer publicly available, and though how PageRank works has evolved, the concept of link authority is still an integral part of Google’s ranking systems.
Page Speed: Measures how fast a webpage loads and becomes interactive. This metric is a ranking factor that influences user experience, can improve conversions, and can positively impact SEO performance.
PageSpeed Insights: Google’s free tool that allows users to analyze the performance of a page on a site on either mobile or desktop. It provides a score for your site on a scale of 0 to 100, with a lower score meaning that there are lots of items to troubleshoot and improve. The tool provides Core Web Vitals and actionable insights and recommendations for how to improve page loading times and overall user experience.
Page Title: Another name for the title tag, otherwise known as the title of your webpage. It’s an HTML element that appears as the clickable link in the search results and at the top of your browser tab. It lets users and search engines know exactly what your page is about.
Pagination: The process of dividing content, like blog archives or product listings, across many webpages, to improve user experience and navigation. It allows search engines to crawl pages more efficiently without having to process too much information at once.
Parent Page: A top-level webpage or category in a site’s navigational structure. Related sub-pages, otherwise known as child pages, are nestled underneath this type of page in the site’s hierarchy.
People Also Ask (PAA): A dynamic search feature on Google that shows a list of related questions associated with a user’s query. This feature is displayed in an accordion-style format where a brief answer and source are shown when the question is clicked on. Appearing in this SERP feature can increase your website’s organic visibility and drive more traffic to your site.
Pillar Page: A comprehensive page on a website that covers a broad topic and links off to separate related pages that have even more detailed content. This type of page acts as a central hub for a group of related pages, improving internal linking and strengthening the site’s topical authority.
Podcast SEO: An organic search strategy that optimizes your show’s title, descriptions, episode content, and transcripts, so that it’s able to be discovered by search engines, AI-powered search, and podcast platforms.
Primary Keyword: The main search term that a webpage is optimized for in order to rank in the SERPs. This phrase or term should accurately reflect the content on the page and be naturally integrated into the copy and key elements like the title tag, URL, and headings.
Programmatic SEO: A method using automation, templates, and structured data to create large amounts of optimized content that targets specific search terms. It’s an organic search strategy used by companies with large websites, lots of location pages, or expansive product catalogs.
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Quality Content: Information that is valuable, relevant, helpful, and accurate, designed to meet the needs of searchers by answering questions and being easy to digest. This original content meets E-E-A-T standards and is highly likely to rank in organic search.
Query: Similar to a keyword, this is a word or phrase that a searcher types into a search engine to find a solution, information, or a direct answer. It’s important to understand search intent to improve content and maximize your visibility in organic search.
Query Fan Out: In AI-powered search, this is the process that takes the user’s prompt and breaks it into several related search queries to gather a comprehensive answer from various sources and multiple angles.
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Rankings: This is a webpage’s organic position in the search engine results for a specific query. The closer the keyword for a page ranks to position 1, which is the first position on page 1 of search results, the more visibility it has, which can lead to more traffic from organic search.
Redirect Loops: A technical SEO issue that occurs when two or more URLs continuously redirect to the other pages, so that neither page loads. It eventually returns a “Too Many Redirects” error, causing poor user experience. Eventually, the pages affected may be deindexed by search engines.
Redirects: Automated instructions that send users and search engines from one URL to another specific URL. They are useful when a page is moved, deleted, or renamed, a URL changes, or when a site goes through a migration. They help maintain a positive user experience without returning 404 errors and preserve SEO value. The most common are 301 redirects (permanent) and 302 redirects (temporary), and each one has a specific use case.
Referring Domain: An external site that links to your site through one or multiple backlinks. In general, having links from various high-quality, topically relevant domains is more important than receiving many links from the same domain.
Rendering Problems: A technical SEO issue that prevents bots from fully seeing, indexing, or understanding the content as a user would. These issues typically happen when JavaScript, images, or CSS do not display correctly.
Reoptimize Content: An on-page SEO strategy that refers to improving content that has previously been optimized. It involves improving the quality of the content, refreshing keywords, adding new information, updating the metadata, adding more internal links to relevant pages, and providing the user with a better experience to gain better visibility in organic search and drive additional traffic and conversions. It’s also used to refresh a page and keep it competitive in a changing organic landscape.
Repurposing Content: Using existing content, like a blog post, whitepaper, or webinar, and adapting it into a new format to use on another platform. This could include repurposing a blog or informational page into a video, a social post, a newsletter, or an infographic. It extends the reach of your content and helps reach different audiences. It’s also a great way to generate omnichannel outcomes from SEO-driven initiatives.
Review Signals: Data that is extracted from customer reviews, including the quality, quantity, recency, and ratings. These factors are used to determine a brand’s visibility in local search results. Positive reviews also help to build a foundation of trust with customers.
Rich Results: Previously called rich snippets, these are visually enhanced search results that display extra information within organic search beyond the standard blue link, title tag, and meta description. These use structured data and include things like FAQs, product details, star ratings, images, recipes, prices, event information, and product availability. These results can improve visibility and click-through rates.
Robots Meta Tag: An HTML tag in a webpage’s <head> section that gives search engines instructions about how to crawl, index, and display a page. Common directives include follow, nofollow, index, and noindex.
Robots.txt: A file that is hosted on your web server that tells search engine bots which pages of a site they are able to crawl or not allowed to crawl. It’s used to manage the crawl budget but doesn’t prevent pages from being indexed if they are linked to from other sources.
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Schema Markup: Structured data added to a webpage’s code to help AI tools and search engines understand the content. It labels elements on the page like products, star ratings, reviews, FAQs, local business details, events, and recipes, making them eligible for rich results in the SERPs.
Screaming Frog: A desktop application that acts as a website crawler. It crawls a site and helps to uncover technical SEO problems, like broken links, missing metadata, crawl errors, duplicate content, and redirect chains, in the same way a search engine bot crawls a site. This tool is commonly used for website analysis and SEO technical audits.
Scroll Depth: An engagement metric that measures how far visitors scroll down a page, often expressed as a percentage of the length of the page. It helps determine if users are actually finding the content, while providing insights for improving user experience, page layout, and placement of important content. This metric can be tracked in GA4 or Google Tag Manager.
Search Engines: For users, a search engine is an online application that offers information, resources, and links in response to a user’s query. These same search engines use bots and algorithms to crawl, index, render, and rank webpages with relevant information based on the intent of users’ search queries. The most popular examples include Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The practice of optimizing a website’s content, navigation, authority, user experience, and technical elements to improve unpaid traffic and conversions by increasing organic search rankings in the SERPs.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs): The pages that are returned by search engines in response to a user’s search query. These results include organic listings, AI Overviews, paid ads, local results, images, videos, featured snippets, and other types of search features, like knowledge panels and “People Also Ask” boxes. These results are personalized, based on factors like search intent, the type of device used, the user’s search history, and their location, which play a role in what is shown for a specific query.
Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The practice of combining SEO with user experience (UX) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to improve rankings and the experience of visitors when they browse your site. This digital marketing strategy helps to ensure that users have an engaging, seamless experience from the time they click through to your site and while they are on it. The goal is for the user to find what they are looking for and turn clicks into conversions.
Search Generative Experience (SGE): Google’s experimental, AI search experience that was introduced in 2023, which provides answers and summaries directly in the SERPs. It is currently known as AI Overviews.
Search Intent: The purpose or primary goal of why a user types a query into a search engine. There are four types, including commercial, informational, navigational, and transactional, and understanding which one to optimize for helps to create content that provides users with what they want, whether it’s in the form of products or services, answers, information, or a specific site.
Search Operators: Specific characters, symbols, or commands used in search engines to narrow search results by applying a filter or constraint that excludes irrelevant listings. Common examples include quotation marks (” “), site:, intitle:, and filetype: to help users find specific information.
Search Quality Raters: People hired by search engines to evaluate the quality and relevance of search results using specific guidelines. They help determine whether content meets user intent, but their feedback doesn’t directly affect rankings. Instead, it helps search engines improve their algorithms and ranking systems.
Search Volume: An estimated average number of times that a specific search query or keyword is typed into a search engine within a given time period. It’s often measured as a monthly average over a 12-month timeframe and can be found in tools like Google Keyword Planner. This data helps determine on-page SEO strategies.
Secondary Keywords: Search terms that are related to a page’s primary keyword. They provide additional context, share the same search intent, and often have slightly lower search volume. Optimizing a page with these types of keywords helps improve topical relevance and can increase the webpage’s ability to rank for a wider range of relevant queries.
Seed Keyword: A broad search term, usually one or two words, that is often used as the foundation for keyword research. These terms by themselves often have a large search volume, but they are highly competitive and hard to rank for. They are paired with modifiers or other relevant terms to identify long-tail keywords that are relevant to a website.
Semantic Keywords: Words and phrases that are very closely related in context to a primary keyword. They help algorithms understand the meaning, intent, and depth of your content without having to repeat the same keywords throughout your copy.
Semantic Search: An information retrieval method that search engines use to understand contextual meaning and user intent, rather than just relying on exact keyword matches. It uses artificial intelligence to understand the relationship between content and the search query provided, giving users highly relevant results.
Semantic SEO: An organic search strategy that prioritizes optimizing content around concepts, topics, and user intent rather than targeting individual keywords. It helps AI models and search engines understand a page’s content and how the concepts relate to each other and improves the relevance of search results for users.
Semrush: A digital marketing platform that provides businesses and marketers with SEO tools like keyword research, site audits, backlink analysis, content optimization, competitor analysis, and rank tracking. It’s a popular third-party platform that is used to track and improve organic search visibility, as well as compare websites against competitors.
SEO Agency: A business that specializes in helping clients improve their organic search presence. Services provided include keyword research, on-page optimization, content creation, local SEO, technical SEO, and performance reports with the goal of driving high-quality traffic to a site, leading to more conversions.
SEO Audit: A comprehensive evaluation of a website’s organic search performance to identify technical issues, opportunities for optimization and content creation, and content gaps. The findings help to uncover a list of priorities to focus on to improve organic visibility and traffic to your site.
SEO Metrics: Measurable data points that are used to track the effectiveness of a site’s SEO performance. They provide insights into user behavior, technical site health, and organic visibility, giving marketers the ability to make data-driven decisions that improve organic search rankings and increase business growth. These include organic traffic, impressions, click-through rates, rankings, conversions, Core Web Vitals, and backlinks.
SEO Roadmap: A strategic plan or blueprint that outlines the highest priorities of your proposed SEO strategy. It provides a step-by-step plan for improving organic search rankings by outlining on-page SEO strategies, technical SEO tasks, link building, and performance reporting in a logical way, along with their respective timeframes.
SEO Strategy: A comprehensive long-term plan that is structured to improve visibility in organic search results. The goal is to grow non-branded organic traffic to your website with increased conversions by creating and optimizing high-quality content, improving user experience, outranking competitors, and making technical improvements to your site.
SERP Features: These are enhanced elements on a search results page that provide users with quick answers or visuals without having to click through to a site. They can appear at the top of the search results or intermixed with organic listings and paid ads. The most common examples include AI Overviews, People Also Ask, local packs, image packs, featured snippets, videos, rich results, and knowledge panels.
SERP Overlap: The percentage of the same URLs that appear in the search results for two or more keywords. A high percentage indicates that keywords have similar search intent and is helpful to determine if the pages should be combined to target that keyword with the same URL.
SERP Real Estate: The amount of space that your site occupies on the search engine results page. The goal is to maximize your brand’s visibility by being featured in organic search, paid ads, featured snippets, local packs, AI Overviews, and other features. Being present in many of these spaces increases your visibility and opportunities for clicks.
Sessions: Groups of user interactions with your site within a specified time period. It can include page views, events, and conversions, but it ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Share of Search: The percentage of searches a brand receives in comparison to the total searches for competitors in that same industry or category. This metric is used as a measure of brand awareness, interest, and opportunities to increase SERP real estate.
Share of Voice (SoV): The percentage of total search visibility that your brand receives in the SERPs in comparison to its competitors for a set of target keywords.
Site Hierarchy: The logical organization of a website’s pages, starting with the homepage and expanding into broad categories and subcategories, product pages, resource pages, and blogs, showing how they are all related. A clear site hierarchy helps improve navigation, user experience, and allows search engines to crawl your site more efficiently.
Sitelinks: Links that sometimes appear below a site’s main search results, often indented, that act as navigational shortcuts to important pages. Google generates them automatically based on relevance, your navigation, and site structure with the goal of helping searchers find the content they are looking for more quickly.
Soft 404: This error message occurs when a page returns a 200 (OK) status code but displays a “not found” message or empty content, instead of a 404 (Not Found). This can confuse search engines, waste crawl budgets, and negatively affect indexing.
Spam Updates: Google’s algorithm updates are designed to detect and remove sites that violate their spam policies by producing spammy content. These updates specifically target deceptive practices to artificially inflate rankings, like link spam, cloaking, and keyword stuffing.
Structured Data: Also known as schema markup, this is a standardized code that is added to a page on a site to help search engines understand the context of the content better. When implemented, it can make pages eligible for rich results in the SERPs, including FAQs, products, recipes, reviews, and events.
Subdomain: A prefix added to your root domain, like blog.sample.com. For SEO purposes, search engines treat this as an entirely separate website, meaning that it doesn’t naturally inherit the rankings, link equity, or authority of your primary domain.
Subfolder: Also known as a subdirectory, it’s a shared path, such as sample.com/blog/, within a site’s main domain that is used to organize related content and improve site structure. It keeps the content on the main domain, allowing the pages to contribute to and benefit from the site’s domain authority, rankings, and link equity.
Subdirectory: Also referred to as a subfolder, it’s a directory that is nested within a primary domain using a shared path, helping to organize content within a site while supporting SEO. The content on these pages benefits from and contributes to the link equity and domain authority of the site.
Supporting Content: Standalone pieces of content, like FAQ pages, blog posts, and resource guides, that expand upon and internally link to primary category pages. These pages help improve user experience, internal linking, and topical authority. They are often used as part of a pillar strategy.
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Taxonomy: The way a website structures its content into a logical structure. It groups pages that are similar into categories, subcategories, and tags to help users and search engines understand how the content is related to each other.
Technical Audit: An analysis of your site’s health from a technical perspective. This in-depth analysis looks into crawability, indexation, mobile-friendliness, canonicalization, Core Web Vitals, and more, and provides recommendations for improvement in each area. A technical audit can help uncover hidden issues that prevent your pages, even when optimized, from performing in search.
Technical SEO: This is the process of optimizing a site’s back-end to ensure that search engines can crawl, understand, render, and index a website’s content. Main areas of focus include mobile-friendliness, site speed, crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals, and structured data. This type of SEO strategy is based on the functionality of the foundation of your site.
Thin Content: Pages with content that provide little or absolutely no value to searchers. These pages may have very little text, duplicate content, or AI-generated text. This type of content doesn’t satisfy user intent and is considered low value. Too many pages of thin or low-value content can send negative signals that drag site performance down overall.
Title Tag: One of the most important HTML elements that impacts on-page SEO. It is the main title of your webpage and appears in the search results as a clickable headline and in browser tabs. Best practices include keeping each title tag to 55 to 60 characters so as not to get truncated, placing your primary keyword towards the beginning, and including the brand at the end, often separated with a pipe or hyphen. Every page should have a unique heading that tells the user and search engine what the page is about.
Time to First Byte (TTFB): A metric that measures the amount of time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of data from a web server when a searcher requests a page. Lower TTFB indicates that your site is responsive with faster server response times and can contribute to a positive user experience and more efficient crawling and indexing.
Topical Authority: A measure of how credible your site is based on comprehensive coverage of related topics with high-quality content that demonstrates expertise. When your site covers a topic extensively with valuable and original content, it tells the search engine that you are the go-to source for that information.
Topical Map: This is a content plan for your SEO strategy that organizes topics and subtopics around a related subject. It maps out the content you need to create and optimize to cover a topic thoroughly. It helps ensure that pages are linked to appropriately, strengthening internal linking and visibility in the search results.
Topic Cluster: Refers to a group of related and interconnected topics that is centered around a main topic with a primary pillar page that links off to supporting pages that cover specific topics in more detail. The supporting pages target long-tail keywords that supplement and enhance the primary pillar page. This SEO strategy improves internal linking, topical authority, and search visibility by helping search engines better understand the relationship between content.
Transactional Intent: This type of search intent is when a user is ready to make a purchase or request a service. Queries often include terms like “order,” “buy,” “near me,” or “subscribe.” Users in this stage often know exactly what they want when they are searching. To optimize for this type of intent, optimize your page with relevant keywords and calls to action that are enticing and clear.
Trust Signals: Elements on a site that build credibility with users and search engines. This includes signals like security certificates, testimonials, user or third-party reviews, awards, certifications, contact information, and business policies, which indicate that your website is safe and legitimate. These are essential to E-E-A-T guidelines and affect search rankings.
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Unlinked Mention: Any textual reference to a brand, product, service, or website on another site, blog, or forum that doesn’t include a link. These mentions send semantic signals for AI-powered search, and in the age of AI, they are often as important and valuable as high-quality backlinks.
URL Parameters: These are additional values added to the end of the URL, often following a question mark, to filter, track, sort, or paginate content. It’s important to manage them properly to ensure that there is no duplicate content or crawling issues.
URL Structure: Refers to the organized format of a site’s web addresses. It consists of a protocol, a domain name, and a path or slug. A well-optimized structure for SEO is clear, descriptive, and follows a logical structure to be useful to searchers and search engines, so they can understand the content of the page and the relationship to the rest of the pages on the site.
User Experience (UX): This is how a user feels and behaves when they interact with a site. In SEO, positive UX involves making sure that your website is mobile-friendly and accessible with a clear navigation and that the site loads quickly, ensuring that users find what they need and engage with the site. It can also mean that on-page optimizations are structured in a way that is easy to read and visually engaging. While UX isn’t a ranking factor, a positive experience can build trust with users.
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Visibility Score: This metric is calculated by different third-party SEO tools, like Semrush and Moz, by estimating the percentage of organic clicks and traffic that a site receives based on its keyword rankings and estimated click-through rates. A higher score indicates the ability to attract even more traffic in organic search.
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Webmaster Guidelines: Previous term for what is now referred to as Google Search Essentials. These are the rules and best practices for helping websites get crawled, indexed, and ranked in organic search. Following these guidelines helps to ensure your site won’t encounter any manual actions or penalties.
Website Migration: The process of moving a site to a new domain, changing its URL structure, switching platforms, or completely redesigning the website while trying to preserve as much of your site’s visibility, traffic, and organic rankings.
White Hat SEO: Ethical SEO optimization practices that follow search engine guidelines. These tactics prioritize users over manipulating search algorithms. White hat SEO includes strategies like optimizing your site’s performance, creating high-quality, helpful content, and earning authentic backlinks or brand mentions.
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XML Sitemap: A file that lists a site’s most important URLs to help search engines discover, crawl, and index your content efficiently. It typically includes additional information, such as when pages were last updated. It’s recommended to upload XML Sitemaps to Google Search Console to help encourage page discovery.
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Year-Over-Year (YoY): A comparison metric that is used to evaluate organic search performance (rankings, traffic, clicks, sessions, conversions) during a period of time compared to the same timeframe for the year prior. It is used to identify long-term patterns and accounts for seasonality. It provides a clear picture of your website’s SEO performance.
“Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL): Google groups webpages that impact health, safety, overall well-being, and financial stability into this category. Search engines hold this type of content to a higher standard to ensure that everything follows E-E-A-T guidelines because information that is not accurate or factual can have serious consequences for users.
YouTube SEO: The practice of optimizing videos and channels to improve their visibility in the platform’s internal search results, recommendation feeds, and Google’s search results. It involves optimizing video content, including the titles, descriptions, thumbnails, and transcripts, to gain more visibility and align with recommended best practices.
Z
Zero-Click Search: Zero-click search is a phenomenon wherein a search query is answered directly on the search results page without the user clicking a link. AI Overviews, local packs, knowledge panels, and featured snippets help to answer users’ questions without an organic click.
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10 Blue Links: Prior to AI Overviews and search features taking up real estate in organic search, Google’s search engine results page typically showed ten organic listings with clickable, blue links.
301 Redirect: This is a permanent HTTP status code that sends search engines and users from one URL to another. Often used for pages that change URLs or are being removed, they help to preserve your rankings and traffic from the URL that is being redirected, helping to send the link equity to the new URL. They are also useful for sites that are undergoing a migration, URL restructuring, or a complete website redesign.
302 Redirect: This is a temporary move from one URL to another. The instruction tells the search engine to keep the original URL indexed, as the change is not permanent like a 301 redirect. This is sometimes used for product or collection pages when inventory is temporarily out of stock.
Continue Building Your SEO Knowledge
This all-encompassing SEO glossary is meant to be a starting point for common organic search terms. We recommend diving deeper into each area for even more information on these topics, but this blog gives a basic overview of important SEO terminology.
