SEO terms, defined for the person paying for it.
Thirty-nine terms, chosen because they appear in proposals and monthly reports rather than because they filled out a list. Where a term describes nothing, the entry says so.
You will be able to read a proposal or a monthly report and tell which lines describe work being done and which lines are vocabulary.
Why this one is short
Search for a glossary in this field and every result advertises its size in the title. Ninety-two terms. Two hundred. Three hundred. Those are reference works for people learning the trade, and they are organised on the assumption that more definitions is more helpful.
For somebody who is buying search work rather than doing it, that assumption is backwards. You will never need to look up most of those words. You will need about thirty, and the useful information is not what each one means but whether it describes anything.
So every entry below is a term you are likely to meet in a proposal, a sales call or a monthly report. Where a term describes real mechanics, the entry explains the mechanics. Where it describes a number that moves without meaning anything, the entry says that instead.
Local search has its own vocabulary, and it is covered separately in the local terms glossary rather than repeated here.
A to Z
- AI Overview
- The generated summary that appears above the results on some searches. It answers the question in place of the pages it drew from, which means a search that once sent you a visitor may now resolve without one. Real, and worth watching in your own results rather than reading about.
- Algorithm update
- A change to how Google ranks pages. Large ones are named and announced, most are neither. The word is also the most common explanation given for a drop that had a simpler cause, so it is worth asking which update, on what date, and what specifically changed on your site around it.Also called: core update
- Alt text
- A written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines that cannot see pictures. Describe what the image shows. Alt text stuffed with keywords is both useless to a blind visitor and obvious to Google.
- Anchor text
- The words a link is attached to. Clicking here tells nobody anything; clicking hot water system replacement tells both the reader and the search engine what is on the other side. One of the few genuinely easy improvements on most sites.
- Black hat
- Techniques that break search engine guidelines: bought links, hidden text, pages built for the crawler rather than the reader. The label matters less than the exposure, which is that the results can vanish overnight and you may not be told what was done in your name.
- Bounce rate
- In current Google Analytics this is simply the inverse of engagement rate. A session counts as engaged if it lasts more than ten seconds, includes a key event, or covers two or more pages. Note what that means: somebody who read one page for a minute and left satisfied is not a bounce. The old definition counted them as one, so a bounce rate compared against a figure from the previous version of Analytics is comparing two different things.
- Canonical tag
- A line in a page's code naming which version is the real one, used when the same content is reachable at several addresses. It prevents your own pages from competing with each other. Genuinely technical, genuinely useful, and invisible to you.
- Click-through rate
- Of the people who saw your listing in the results, the share who clicked it. Useful because it isolates one thing: whether your title and description gave them a reason to choose you over the other nine. A high position with a low rate is a wording problem, not a ranking problem.Also called: CTR
- Conversion rate
- The share of visitors who did the thing you wanted. Only meaningful if the thing is defined honestly. A rate counting anybody who reached the contact page is measuring interest; a rate counting calls and form submissions is measuring enquiries. Ask which is being counted before you accept the number.
- Crawl
- The process of a search engine's software following links and fetching pages. If a page is never crawled it cannot be found. Most pages that are not appearing are not crawling problems, but it is the first thing to eliminate.
- Crawl budget
- Roughly, how much attention a search engine will spend on your site. It matters for sites with hundreds of thousands of pages. For a local business with forty pages it does not matter at all, and a proposal that raises it is describing a problem you do not have.
- Disavow
- Telling Google to ignore specific links pointing at your site. Google's own guidance is that most sites never need this. It is sold routinely as protection against negative attacks that mostly do not happen, and used carelessly it removes links that were helping you.
- Featured snippet
- An answer lifted out of a page and shown at the top of the results, with a link back. Winning one puts you above results that outrank you. The way to win one is to answer the question directly in a couple of sentences, near the top of the page, rather than after four paragraphs of preamble.Also called: position zero
- GEO and AEO
- Generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation, both meaning work aimed at getting cited by AI assistants rather than ranked in a list. As of early 2026 there is no agreed distinction between the two terms and they are used interchangeably. The underlying work is real. Two acronyms for it, priced as a separate service, is a sales device.
- Google Search Console
- Google's free tool showing what people searched before reaching you, which pages appeared, and what is broken. It is the only source in this entire field that reports what actually happened rather than what a tool estimates. If you own one login, own this one.
- Heading tags
- The structural levels of a page: one main heading, then sub-headings beneath it. They tell both a reader skimming and a search engine reading what the page is organised around. Using them for visual size rather than structure is the usual mistake.Also called: H1, H2
- Index
- The store of pages a search engine has kept and can show. Crawled and indexed are different: a page can be visited and not stored. Search Console will tell you which of yours are which, and the answer is often surprising.
- Internal link
- A link from one page of your site to another. The cheapest and most neglected improvement available. It shows readers where to go next, and it is how a search engine works out which of your pages you consider important.
- Keyword
- What somebody types. The word survives from an era when matching the exact string mattered a great deal, and it now misleads people into writing for a phrase rather than for a question. The useful version of the idea is search intent, below.
- Keyword cannibalisation
- Several of your own pages competing for the same search, so none of them wins clearly. Real, common on sites that published a page per suburb or a post per variation of the same question, and usually fixed by combining rather than by adding.
- Keyword difficulty
- A tool's guess, on a scale it invented, at how hard a search would be to rank for. Different tools give the same phrase very different scores, which tells you what the score is worth. Useful for sorting a list roughly. Not a fact.
- Keyword stuffing
- Repeating a phrase unnaturally in the hope of ranking for it. It stopped working many years ago and now reads as spam to both the reader and the search engine. If a draft mentions your city eleven times, that is this.
- Link building
- Getting other websites to link to yours. The legitimate version is slow and looks like sponsorship, supplier pages, local press and genuinely useful content. The packaged version, a fixed number of links per month for a fixed fee, is almost always bought placements and is the single most common way a small business gets penalised.
- Long-tail keyword
- A longer, more specific search. Fewer people type it and the ones who do are closer to buying. For a small business these are not a secondary tactic, they are the entire opportunity, because the short phrases are held by companies with budgets you are not going to match.
- Meta description
- The summary line beneath your title in the results. It is not a ranking factor, and Google frequently replaces it with a sentence from the page if it judges that a better match. It is still worth writing, because when it is used it decides whether somebody clicks you or the result underneath.
- Nofollow
- An instruction attached to a link telling search engines not to treat it as an endorsement. Applied to paid placements and to anything user-submitted. Relevant to you mainly as a check: if somebody sold you links, and those links carry it, you paid for nothing.
- Off-page SEO
- Everything influencing your position that does not live on your website. Links, mentions, reviews, reputation. The name is unhelpful because it groups genuine reputation work with link buying, and the two could not be more different in risk.
- On-page SEO
- Everything on the page itself: what it says, how it is titled, how it is structured, how it loads. The least glamorous part of the field and the part with the most reliable return for a small business, because most competitors have not done it.
- Organic traffic
- Visitors arriving from unpaid search results. Worth separating from every other source in your reporting, because it is the only number that tells you whether the search work is working. A report showing total traffic can hide organic traffic falling.
- Redirect
- An instruction sending one address to another. A 301 is permanent and is what you use when a page moves or a site is rebuilt. A 302 is temporary and is what gets used by mistake. Getting this wrong during a website rebuild is the most common cause of a business losing its rankings overnight.Also called: 301, 302
- Robots.txt
- A file telling search engines which parts of your site not to crawl. It controls crawling, not indexing, which is a distinction that catches people out. Also the single most destructive file on a website: two careless lines can remove you from search entirely, and it happens most often the week a new site goes live.
- Search intent
- What the person actually wanted. Somebody typing the same three words might want to learn, to compare, or to buy right now, and a page aimed at the wrong one of those will not rank however well it is written. This is the idea that replaced keywords, and it is the one worth understanding.
- Search volume
- An estimate of how many people search a phrase each month. Estimates, from sampled data, rounded into bands, and frequently wrong for local searches specifically because the numbers are small. Use them to compare phrases against each other, never as a forecast of visitors.
- Sitemap
- A file listing your pages so search engines can find them all. Useful, generated automatically by most modern websites, and not a fix for anything. A page missing from search is rarely missing from the sitemap.
- Slug
- The readable part of a web address after the domain. Short and descriptive beats long and numeric. Worth getting right when a page is created and rarely worth changing afterwards, because changing it means a redirect and every link to the old one now takes a detour.
- Technical SEO
- Work on how the site is built rather than what it says: speed, structure, how pages are crawled, how they render on a phone. Real and necessary. Also the easiest area to bill for indefinitely, because the client cannot see any of it, so ask what changed and what it fixed.
- Thin content
- Pages with little of substance on them, most often produced by generating one near-identical page per suburb or per service. Google's guidelines name this specifically. It is the risk attached to any proposal offering a large number of pages quickly.
- Title tag
- The clickable headline of your result. Along with the position itself it is the largest influence on whether anybody chooses you. Google will rewrite it if it judges another string a better match for the search, which is worth knowing before you assume yours is being shown.
- White hat
- Work that follows search engine guidelines. The phrase is used as reassurance in sales conversations and is worth nothing on its own, since nobody describes their own work as the alternative. Ask what will actually be done instead.
When one of these turns up in a report, ask this
The report leads with keyword difficulty or search volume
Ask which of those searches produced an enquiry. Both numbers are third-party estimates. Search Console has the real ones and it is free.
Link building appears as a fixed monthly quantity
Ask where the links will come from, by name. A number of links per month is a purchasing arrangement, and it is the most common route to a penalty for a small business.
Technical SEO is a recurring line item
Ask what was technically wrong this month and what it fixed. Technical work is real but finite. Recurring for two years without a named problem is a retainer, not a service.
Crawl budget is raised for a site with under a thousand pages
Treat it as a signal about the proposal rather than the site. It is a genuine concern at very large scale and not at yours.
Bounce rate is quoted as improving
Check the period. If the comparison crosses the change in how Analytics defines it, the improvement is a definition change rather than a result.
GEO or AEO is quoted as a separate service with its own fee
Ask what is done under it that is not done under the existing work. The activity is real. Charging twice for it because it has a new acronym is not.
A ranking drop is attributed to an algorithm update
Ask which update, on what date, and what changed on the site that fortnight. Both answers should be specific and one of them frequently explains it.
About the vocabulary
Which of these terms actually matter for a small business?
Search intent, internal links, title tags, redirects and Search Console. Those five cover most of what decides whether a small site performs, and four of them are things you can check yourself this afternoon.
Why does this glossary have fewer terms than the others?
Because the others are written for people learning the trade and this one is written for people buying it. Three hundred definitions is a reference work. You need the thirty that appear in your proposal and a note on which of them describe anything.
What is the difference between this and the local SEO glossary?
This one covers general search vocabulary. The local glossary covers the terms specific to appearing in the map and in nearby searches, such as proximity, categories and citations. No term appears on both.
Is SEO jargon deliberately confusing?
Some of it is honest shorthand between practitioners. Some of it makes routine work sound technical so it can be charged for. The test is whether the person will explain the term plainly when asked, and whether the explanation still sounds like work afterwards.
What should I ask when I meet a term I do not know?
What decision does this help me make. If there is no answer, the term is decoration regardless of how technical it sounds.
Want a report without any of this in it?
The free audit is written in the same language as this page: what is wrong, what it costs you, and what would fix it. No scores from tools that invented them.