The Business Owner’s Simple Glossary of SEO Terms

As a business owner, you may feel a little confused over the terms used by your SEO professionals. What does SEO stand for, and what’s an LSI?

Having a better understanding of SEO terms can help you make better marketing decisions by allowing you to understand what’s going on completely.

Read through the glossary below if you’d like to understand these terms better. The most important SEO terms are included and broken down for easy understanding.

Glossary of SEO Terms

Algorithm

An algorithm is a process or formula used by search engines that help them retrieve information and order it in a meaningful way.

Example: “The Google algorithm is constantly changing, so it can be hard for anyone who isn’t a marketing professional to stay up-to-date.”

Backlinks/ Inbound Links

These are links on other websites that point to your website.

Example: “Writing guest posts for high-quality websites can help build effective backlinks.”

Black Hat

SEO practices that violate Google’s quality guidelines and have the potential to get a website de-listed.

Example: “Reputable marketing companies avoid black hat practices because they understand the implications they could have on their clients.”

Caching

Caching means saving a version of your website. This can help if the website has to be reset or redesigned.

Example: “If you’re not caching your website, you risk losing all your most crucial information.”

Crawling

Crawling is the process used by search engines to discover your company’s web pages.

Example: “If search engines aren’t crawling your website, you won’t receive much organic traffic.”

De-indexed

This is when a page or group of pages have been removed from Google’s index. This can be done intentionally (when you’re revamping your company’s website) or unintentionally (when Google removes them for violating their terms).

Example: “Google de-indexed those pages because they violated their quality guidelines.”

Engagement

This represents how searchers interact with your website, advertisements, social media accounts, and other online outlets. Generally, engagement is defined through data and analytics.

Example: “Increasing online engagement is crucial in improving your lead-to-customer ratio.”

Google My Business Listing/GMB Post

This is a free listing provided by Google available to local businesses hoping for some additional exposure.

Example: “I receive a small boost in traffic after I began using using the Google My Business Listing.”

Indexing

Indexing is how search engines store and organize the content found during crawling.

Example: “Indexing is crucial to organizing online content found on websites.”

Intent

You may sometimes hear this referred to as “user intent.” This refers to what people are trying to find or do based on what they’ve typed into the search engine’s query bar.

Example: “Understanding user intent is crucial to make effective marketing decisions.”

Internal Links

These are links on your website that point to other areas of your site.

Example: “Incorporating internal links into all of your blog posts can help increase the amount of time spent on your website by each potential customer.”

Keyword Difficulty

This estimated metric determines how difficult it might be to outrank competitors on specific keywords.

Example: “The lower the keyword difficulty is, the easier it is to rank well for it in SERPs.”

KPI/ Key Performance Indicator

This is a measurable value or metric that lets you know how well a specific activity achieves a goal.

Example: “Our company’s last pay-per-click marketing campaign failed to meet all of our KPIs, so we need to revise our approach.”

Long-Tail Keywords

These are longer queries you can use in the same way as short-tail keywords, which are most commonly used for ranking purposes. However, long-tail keywords are more specific than shorter options.

Example: “Incorporating long-tail keywords into your SEO plan can help you rank better for ultra-specific queries.”

LSI/ Latent Semantic Indexing

These are keywords that are conceptually related to other keywords. Using LSI helps improve a search engine’s understanding of your content, which, in turn, helps it be indexed appropriately.

Example: “The use of LSI keywords can help take your SEO to the next level.”

Organic Traffic

Traffic you earn through SEO and other inbound marketing practices versus paid advertisements.

Example: “Increasing your website’s organic traffic can help create more qualified leads than some pay-per-click advertising options.”

Search Volume

This is the number of times people searched a specific keyword over the last week, month, etc.

Example: “When looking for the right keywords, a combination of high search volume and low keyword difficulty is preferred.”

SEO/Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of optimizing content or websites to rank well in major search engines.

Example: “Our website isn’t ranking well, but incorporating SEO into our on-page copy can help.”

SERP/Search Engine Results Page

This is the page that comes up after typing a query into the bar on any search engine.

Example: “Most people don’t browse past the first SERP before navigating to their chosen result.”

Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of URLs on your website that search engine crawlers use to discover your content and appropriately index it.

Example: “Many website owners forget the importance of a clean, uncluttered sitemap.”

Traffic

Traffic is visits to a website. Traffic is one of several things a good analytics software will track.

Example: “Our last marketing campaign helped significantly boost our website traffic.”

White Hat

These are SEO practices that adhere to Google’s quality guidelines.

Example: “You want to hire a marketing company that only uses white hat practices.”

Don’t Be Confused by SEO Terms Anymore

You don’t have to be confused by SEO terms anymore. The glossary above provides the most important search engine optimization terms a business owner would need to know.

Do you need assistance with your SEO campaign? Be Branded Agency is ready to help with SEO and other marketing efforts. Contact us today.