SEO Glossary
SEO Terms,
in Plain English
A jargon-free reference to the SEO words you’ll hear from agencies, tools and reports — grouped by topic.
SEO Glossary
General
SEO — Search Engine Optimisation: improving a website so it appears higher in unpaid (organic) search results.
SERP — Search Engine Results Page: the page of results Google shows for a query.
Organic traffic — Visitors who arrive from unpaid search results, not ads.
Keyword — A word or phrase people type into search that you want to be found for.
Search intent — The reason behind a search: to learn, compare, or buy. Good pages match it.
AI Overview — An AI-generated answer Google shows above results, drawn from trusted web content.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO — Optimising the content and HTML of a page: titles, headings, copy and structure.
Title tag — The clickable headline shown in search results for a page.
Meta description — The short summary under the title in search results.
Internal linking — Links between your own pages that help users and search engines navigate.
Anchor text — The visible, clickable words in a link.
Money page — A key commercial page (e.g. a service page) you most want to rank and convert.
Technical SEO
Crawling — How search engines discover pages by following links.
Indexing — Storing and organising a page so it can appear in results.
Core Web Vitals — Google’s metrics for loading speed, interactivity and visual stability.
Schema markup — Code that helps search engines understand your content (and can enable rich results).
Sitemap — A file listing your pages to help search engines find them.
301 redirect — A permanent redirect that sends an old URL to a new one.
Canonical — A tag telling Google the preferred version of similar or duplicate pages.
Local SEO
Local SEO — Optimising to appear in local and “near me” searches and Google Maps.
Google Business Profile — Your free Google listing that appears in Maps and local results.
Map pack (3-pack) — The three local business results shown with a map.
NAP — Name, Address, Phone: business details that should be consistent everywhere.
Citation — A mention of your business details on directories and other sites.
Local pack ranking — Driven largely by proximity, relevance and prominence.
Off-Page & Authority
Backlink — A link from another website to yours; a key trust signal.
Domain authority — A third-party score estimating a site’s overall ranking strength.
Link building — Earning credible links from other sites to build authority.
E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust: quality signals, key for health/finance topics.
Toxic links — Spammy links that can harm rankings and may need disavowing.
Content & Measurement
Long-tail keyword — A longer, more specific phrase with lower competition and clearer intent.
Cannibalisation — When two of your pages compete for the same keyword and weaken each other.
Impressions — How often your pages appear in search results.
CTR — Click-Through Rate: the share of people who click after seeing your listing.
Google Search Console — Google’s free tool showing how your site performs in search.
Conversion — A desired action, like a call or form enquiry.
No Jargon, Just Results
We Explain SEO in Plain English
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