What does SEO stand for?

Search engine optimisation: the work of making a website easier for search engines to find and rank, and more useful to the people who arrive from them.

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEO is about the organic results, which cannot be bought. SEM, search engine marketing, usually means paid adverts on the results page, though some people use it to cover both.

The search engine results page: everything you see after you search, including adverts, the map, answer boxes and the ordinary results.

A link from another website to yours. Links from relevant, trusted sites are treated as a sign that your site is credible.

Is domain authority a Google ranking factor?

No. It is a score invented by SEO tools to compare sites. Google has its own, unpublished, ways of assessing a site’s links.

Which of these terms should a business owner actually understand?

Search intent, Google Business Profile, impressions and clicks, conversion, redirects and noindex. With those, you can read any report and ask the right questions.

SEO Glossary: Plain-English Definitions for Business Owners

In short

Search terms: what the results page is made of and how Google builds it.
Local search terms: the map, the profile, citations and reviews.
Technical terms: crawling, indexing, speed and the things that stop a page appearing.
Measurement and AI search: the numbers in your reports and the newer words in the news.

Search basics

SEO (search engine optimisation): The work of making a website easier for search engines to find, understand and rank, and more useful to the people who arrive from them.
SERP: Search engine results page: what you see after you search. It includes adverts, map results, answer boxes and the ordinary blue links.
Organic results: The results a search engine chooses on merit, as opposed to the paid adverts. SEO is about these.
Paid search (PPC): Adverts bought on the results page, usually charged per click. Separate from SEO, and often run alongside it.
Keyword / search query: The words someone types or speaks into a search engine. “Query” is what the person typed; “keyword” is the phrase a business chooses to target.
Search intent: What the searcher actually wants: to buy, to find a local business, to learn, to reach a particular site. Pages succeed when they match the intent, not just the words.
Ranking: Where a page appears in the results for a particular search, for a particular person, in a particular place. It is not a single fixed number.
Featured snippet / answer box: A box at the top of some results that quotes an answer from a page. The source page gets the credit and often the click.
People also ask: The expandable questions Google shows on many results pages. A useful list of what people want to know about a topic.
Search volume: An estimate of how many times a phrase is searched each month. Tools estimate it; the figures are rough, and local phrases are usually under-reported.

Local search

Local SEO: The work of being found by people near you, especially in the map results. See what is local SEO?
Google Business Profile: The free listing that puts a business on Google Maps and in the local results. Formerly called Google My Business.
Local pack / map pack: The block of map results, usually three businesses, shown for searches with local intent.
NAP: Name, address, phone number. Keeping them identical everywhere online is a basic local signal.
Citation: A mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website, such as a directory. See citation building.
Service-area business: A business that travels to customers rather than serving them at its premises. See SEO for service-area businesses.
Primary category: The single category on a Google Business Profile that best describes the business. The most influential field you control.
Review velocity: How steadily new reviews arrive. A business with recent reviews is favoured over one whose reviews stopped.
Proximity: How close a business is to the person searching. One of the three factors Google names for local ranking; the one you cannot change.

Technical

Crawling: A search engine’s software visiting your pages and reading them. A page that cannot be crawled cannot appear.
Indexing: Storing a crawled page so it can be shown in results. “Not indexed” means Google knows the page exists but is not showing it.
robots.txt: A small file that tells crawlers which parts of a site not to visit. A mistake here can hide a whole site.
noindex: An instruction on a page telling search engines not to include it in results. Right for thank-you pages; disastrous on a service page.
Canonical URL: The address you tell search engines is the official version of a page, when the same content can be reached at more than one address.
Redirect (301): An instruction that a page has moved permanently to a new address. Essential when a site is rebuilt; see the redesign checklist.
Sitemap (XML): A file listing the pages you want search engines to know about. A hint, not a guarantee of indexing.
Core Web Vitals: Google’s measures of how a page loads and responds for real visitors: speed, stability and responsiveness.
Structured data / schema: Code added to a page that labels its facts, business, opening hours, reviews, questions, so search engines can understand and sometimes display them.
Title tag: The page title shown in the browser tab and, usually, as the headline of a search result. The single most important line on the page for search.
Meta description: A short summary of a page that search engines may show under the title. It does not affect ranking directly; it affects whether people click.
Technical SEO: Work on the site itself, speed, structure, crawling, indexing, rather than on content or links. See technical SEO.

Content and authority

Backlink: A link from another website to yours. Search engines treat links from relevant, trusted sites as a sign of credibility.
Domain authority: A score invented by SEO tools to estimate how strong a site’s links are. Not a Google measure, and not a ranking factor; useful only as a rough comparison.
Anchor text: The clickable words of a link. They tell search engines, and people, what the linked page is about.
Internal linking: Links between pages on your own site. They help search engines find pages and understand which matter most.
E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google’s quality guidelines ask its reviewers to look for. Not a score; a description of what good pages have.
Thin content: Pages with little or nothing useful on them, a town name swapped into a template, a paragraph of praise. They rank poorly and can drag a site down.
Duplicate content: The same text at more than one address. It confuses search engines about which to show; rarely a penalty, usually a waste.
Cannibalisation: Two of your own pages competing for the same search, so neither ranks well. Fixed by giving each search one page.
Digital PR: Earning coverage and links from news sites and publications through stories, data or expertise. See link building and digital PR.

Measurement

Google Search Console: Google’s free service showing how your site performs in its results: the searches you appear for, impressions, clicks and problems.
Impressions: The number of times a page was shown in results for a search, whether or not anyone clicked.
Click-through rate (CTR): Clicks divided by impressions. A low rate with many impressions usually means the title or description is not earning the click.
Average position: Where your page appeared, averaged across all the times it was shown. See how to check your ranking.
Conversion: A visitor doing the thing the page is for: calling, sending a form, booking, buying.
Conversion rate: Conversions divided by visitors. The number that connects traffic to business.
Call tracking: Using a different telephone number on the website, or on particular pages, so that calls can be counted and attributed.
GA4: Google Analytics 4, the current version of Google’s free analytics service, which records what visitors do on the site.

AI search

AI Overviews: The AI-written summary Google shows at the top of some results, with links to the pages it drew from.
AI Mode: Google’s conversational search experience, where a question is answered in prose with sources, and follow-up questions can be asked.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO): A newer term for making a business and its pages easy for AI assistants to understand, cite and recommend. Mostly the same work as good SEO, with more emphasis on clear facts and sources. See AI search and local business.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): Writing pages so that they answer questions directly and can be quoted: clear headings, short answers, questions people actually ask.
llms.txt: A proposed plain-text file that describes a site for AI assistants. Harmless to add; no engine has committed to using it.
Zero-click search: A search where the person gets what they need from the results page, an answer box, the map, an AI summary, without clicking through to a site.

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SEO glossary: the jargon, in plain English