SEO Terms, Defined
Four hundred and fifteen core SEO and search terms, from keyword to serp, listed A to Z. Each one gets its own page with a plain-English explanation and real examples.
0-9
A status code meaning a page loaded successfully.
A status code meaning a request created a new resource.
A success that sends nothing back.
A permanent redirect that passes ranking power.
A temporary redirect that keeps the original.
A temporary redirect that preserves the request method.
A status code meaning the server refuses access.
A status code meaning a URL does not exist.
A URL that was intentionally removed.
A client that hit a rate limit.
A status code meaning the server failed internally.
A status code meaning an upstream server failed.
A server that is temporarily unavailable.
An upstream server that took too long.
A
The server record of every request.
A term you bid on in paid search.
The score that sets your ad position.
Enterprise analytics for marketing teams.
Earning commissions on promoted products.
Your name appearing inside AI answers.
Source links in AI-generated answers.
Conversational search with follow-ups.
Google's AI summary at the top of results.
Search that generates answers instead of links.
The sources an AI assistant names in its answers.
How AI systems order the sources in their answers.
How often AI search surfaces your brand.
Optimizing for AI-powered search experiences.
How often a brand appears in AI-generated answers.
The rules search engines use to rank.
Descriptive text for images.
The old framework for instant mobile loads.
The clickable words in a link.
The mix of anchors in your links.
Optimizing to be cited in AI answers.
Optimizing an app to rank and convert in app stores.
A number that gauges a domain's strength.
How hard a keyword is to rank for.
Your typical spot in the results.
B
Business-to-business sales and SEO.
Selling directly to consumers.
Google's language model that understands the context of words to interpret search queries
Links from other sites to your pages.
A feature tested before full launch.
Deceptive tactics that risk penalties.
Automated software that visits pages.
Visits that leave after one page.
Any time your brand is named online.
Link text that uses your brand name.
A search that includes your brand name.
The trail showing where a page sits.
A major core update that re-evaluates quality across many sites and can shift rankings sitewide
Earning links by replacing dead ones.
How much revenue a keyword could earn your business.
C
The prompt that turns visitors into actions.
HTML that names the master URL.
The preferred version of a page.
A horizontal row of results on the SERP.
Optimizing hub pages that group content.
Earning local NAP mentions that build trust.
Keeping business listings consistent across directories.
The clicks a ranking could realistically earn.
The recorded trail of every visit.
How often a result gets clicked.
Rendering pages in the browser with JavaScript.
The original, most trusted domain extension.
Queries where buyers compare options before buying.
The high-traffic terms everyone targets.
Studying rival sites to find opportunities.
The advertisers bidding in your auction.
The pages ranking for your terms.
The substance search engines evaluate.
A hub page with linked subtopic posts.
Topics rivals rank for that you don't.
The platform that publishes your site.
Content that earns attention.
Writing pages that rank.
Links placed inside the body content.
The action you want visitors to take.
The share of visitors who take action.
A broad change to Google's core ranking systems that re-evaluates overall content quality
The three metrics Google uses for page experience.
Page experience metrics inside Semrush.
Improving LCP, INP, and CLS scores.
The share of spend one item consumes.
A domain ending tied to a country.
The price of a single ad click.
The price of a thousand ad views.
Pages a search engine crawls in a given time.
How much Google wants to crawl your site.
How many clicks a page is from the homepage.
URLs Googlebot could not crawl successfully.
How fast Googlebot requests your site.
Data on how Googlebot crawls your site.
How easily engines can read your pages.
Software that scans web pages.
The system that manages customer relationships.
The code that styles your pages.
The share of searchers who click.
How much a page jumps while loading.
D
Where a link or ad takes the user.
Earning coverage and links through stories.
Visits with no referring source.
Telling Google to ignore bad links.
The list you submit to Google.
Visual banners across the web.
A score that predicts ranking strength.
Moving your site to a new domain.
The same content on multiple URLs.
Different addresses that serve the same content.
How long a visitor stays on your page before returning to the results.
Serving crawlers a rendered page and users the app.
E
Buying and selling online.
Optimizing online stores for search.
Links earned voluntarily on merit.
Google's quality framework: experience, expertise, authority, trust.
Interactions measured by analytics.
Interactions tracked over time.
User behaviors that indicate how engaged visitors are with a page.
Running SEO across large sites, teams, and systems.
A distinct, nameable thing.
Optimizing around things and relationships.
Making the facts about a thing clear to search engines.
Optimizing for real-world things, not just words.
How close tool estimates come to reality.
The visits tools predict for a site.
Link text that is the exact keyword.
Links from your page to another site.
F
Likes, comments, and shares on the platform.
On-the-fly filtering that can generate many near-duplicate URLs.
Taming filter URLs for the index.
The answer box at the top of results.
The practice of structuring content to win the boxed answer at the top of Google
When the first content visibly appears.
Links that pass ranking credit.
G
Improving your Google Business Profile.
The EU privacy rules that shape tracking.
Optimizing for generative AI engines.
AI-composed answers to queries.
Neutral link text like here or learn more.
A global domain ending like .com.
Showing different content based on a user's location.
Earning money from your traffic.
The system behind every ranking.
Measuring traffic, behavior, and conversions.
Your free listing in Maps and search.
Optimizing your Google Business Profile for local visibility.
Free dashboards from your data.
Optimizing your presence in Google Maps and the map pack.
The direct path to customer reviews.
Google's tool for monitoring search performance.
A periodic Google rollout that improves automated detection and demotion of spam
Google's crawler for the search index.
SEO tactics in the gray area between safe and risky.
H
Tags that structure a page's headings.
Where users click, move, and scroll.
Content made for people first, rankings second.
Google's system for rewarding people-first content and demoting content written mainly for search engines
Your past performance, kept for comparison.
Mistakes that break language annotations.
Pointing users to the right language version.
Signals for language and regional pages.
Enforcing secure HTTPS connections.
The language that structures pages.
A human-readable list of site pages.
The protocol that moves the web.
The migration to a secure, encrypted site.
The secure standard for every site.
Attaching interactivity to server-rendered HTML.
I
The descriptive text behind an image.
Smaller image files, faster pages.
The name of your image file.
Optimizing images for search and speed.
A sitemap that lists your images.
The percentage of eligible ad impressions your ads actually receive.
Which of your pages Google indexes.
Whether a page can enter the index.
Pages a search engine stores and serves.
Queries where people want answers, not products.
How fast a page reacts to clicks.
Links between pages on your site.
Ranking across countries and languages.
The address that routes the internet.
J
K
Google's research prototype database that predicts and stores facts about entities
The word or phrase a searcher types in.
Two pages fighting for one keyword.
Grouping related keywords into topics.
How often a keyword appears on a page.
How hard a keyword is to rank for.
Assigning each keyword to one page.
A keyword's full picture at a glance.
How early and visibly a keyword appears.
How close the words of a keyword sit together.
Finding the words worth ranking for.
Overusing a keyword to game rankings.
Related forms and synonyms of a keyword.
Google's web of entities and facts.
The fact box beside search results.
L
Built for one conversion goal.
AI trained on massive text.
How fast the main content loads.
The connection that built the web.
Content built to attract links.
Earning links from other sites.
The power that flows through links.
Every backlink pointing at your site.
Keeping local listings accurate.
Controlling listings from one place.
The sources an LLM credits when it answers.
How AI models first learn your brand exists.
When an AI model suggests your brand in an answer.
How an AI model pulls the information it needs to answer.
Optimizing to be cited by language models.
Your presence inside AI model answers.
Paid visibility for nearby searchers.
Consistent mentions that build trust.
The full view beyond the local pack.
Searches with a nearby place, product, or service in mind.
Terms your nearby customers use.
A page built to rank for one location's searches.
Where your business shows up.
Winning customers in your area.
What moves the local results.
Google results tuned to a searcher's location.
Local rankings, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Ranking for searches near a business.
Studying server logs to see how search engines crawl a site.
A specific, lower-volume search phrase.
M
How easy your site is to use on a phone.
Optimizing a site in many languages.
Targeting users by country or region.
The Google AI model that understands language, images, and video together to answer complex queries
Penalties placed by human reviewers.
Following your local positions.
When a niche converges on the few.
How well a keyword fits a page.
The snippet under a result's title.
HTML tags that describe a page.
The clickable headline in results.
Structured data in your HTML.
Shrinking code to speed pages.
The copy that duplicates your site.
Google ranking the mobile version of pages.
Optimizing for search on phones.
N
The AI technology that lets search engines understand the meaning and intent of human language
Links earned organically without manipulation.
Queries searching for a specific site or page.
Terms that block your ads from showing.
The AI system Google uses to connect search queries to the underlying concepts and entities
A sitemap for news articles for Google News.
A link attribute that passes no authority.
Keeping a page out of search results.
A search that has no brand name.
The total count reported for a query.
O
Signals that build authority outside the page.
Sites that list business information.
Monitoring and responding to reviews.
How findable your brand is online.
Optimizing the content on a page.
Tags controlling social share previews.
Clicks on organic results per impression.
A page's position in unpaid results.
Unpaid listings ranked by relevance.
How much of the search results your site appears in.
Pages with no internal links pointing in.
Contacting others to earn links and mentions.
P
How fast a page loads and responds.
The heading that names the page.
A count of each time a page loads.
The signals that reward fast, stable pages.
Splitting content across linked pages.
How Google decides which URL parameters matter.
Ranking content on a trusted third-party site to borrow its authority.
Link text that includes the keyword.
Google's ability to rank a page for a query based on a single relevant passage
Written for readers first, search engines second.
A hub guide that anchors a topic cluster.
When a searcher clicks a result, bounces back, and clicks another result.
Paying only when an action completes.
Paying for every ad click.
Rendering JavaScript pages to static HTML in advance.
The main term a page targets.
Optimizing product pages for search.
Pages built from data to rank many keyword variations at scale.
Building reputation through earned media.
When a visitor completes a purchase.
Q
Google's rating of ad relevance.
The words a searcher types.
Google's approach to showing a variety of perspectives and sources for queries that deserve diversity
Google's system for boosting recent content when a query suddenly surges in interest
The process of broadening a search query with synonyms, related terms, and variants to find relevant results
A query phrased as a question.
R
Google's machine-learning system for interpreting queries and refining how ranking signals work
A signal search engines use to order pages.
A clue search engines weigh in rankings.
How easy text is to read.
Sending visitors to a new URL.
A series of hops between URLs.
URLs that keep redirecting in a circle.
Visits from links on other sites.
The page that sent the visitor.
The sites that link to your pages.
How well content matches the search.
A limit on the JavaScript work a page demands.
Shaping what people see when they search your brand.
The listings returned for a query.
How AI search retrieves and cites sources.
The rate at which searchers return to the results page after clicking a result.
Monitoring and responding to reviews.
Using customer reviews to win trust, clicks, and rankings.
Customer ratings and feedback.
A result with extra detail.
Page-level crawler instructions in HTML.
A file that guides crawlers.
Profit compared to what you spend.
The base address of a website.
S
Software delivered as a subscription.
Code that labels page content for search engines.
The vocabulary for structured data.
Extracting data from websites.
Software that finds web pages for a query.
The goal behind a search query.
Visitors who arrive from search engines.
How often a site shows up in results.
How often a keyword gets searched.
A supporting term a page also covers.
The broad term you start research with.
A canonical tag pointing to the page itself.
The cluster of related keywords a site targets.
Search that understands meaning and intent.
Optimizing for meaning, not exact keyword matches.
Paid promotion to gain search visibility.
A move planned to protect rankings.
Getting pages ranked in organic search results.
A full-site health check for rankings.
The page of results a search returns.
The practice of studying a results page to understand competition and intent.
Special elements on the results page.
How similar the results are for two different queries.
Where your page appears in the search results.
A measure of how much two queries share results.
How much rankings shift over time.
Reading raw server logs to see how bots really crawl.
Rendering page HTML on the server before the browser.
Pages targeting each area a business serves.
The percentage of brand-related searches your brand captures.
Your share of the search visibility.
Broad, high-volume head terms.
Changing platform, structure, or hosting.
Extra links under a result.
A file that maps a site's URLs.
A sitemap that lists other sitemaps.
The readable part of a URL that identifies a page.
Using social platforms to reach audiences.
Visits that arrive from social platforms.
A not-found page that returns a 200 status.
Google's AI system for detecting and neutralizing web spam at scale
How fast visible content fills the screen.
Marking a link as paid placement.
A link marked as paid placement.
Comparing versions to find a winner.
The certificate that secures a site.
Code that describes a page to engines.
A separate part of your domain.
A path that lives under the root domain.
T
Making a site crawlable and indexable.
Measuring word importance in content.
How long a visitor stays on a page.
How long the browser waits for the server.
When a page becomes responsive to input.
The headline of a search result.
The last part of a domain name.
A pillar plus supporting articles.
Trust earned by covering a subject deeply.
Value captured from each topic.
Depth of subject coverage.
The full size of the market.
Time a page blocks user input.
The combined set of interactions.
Links that can hurt your rankings.
The script that logs visits.
What acquiring visits costs.
Your share of the traffic mix.
The clicks a keyword could realistically earn.
The forward slash at the end of a URL path.
Queries where users are ready to buy.
Where search interest is heading.
Rich link previews shared on X.
Likes, reposts, and replies on X.
U
A link marked as user-generated content.
Content your audience creates.
Brand mentions that have no link.
Ad destination and display URLs.
Addresses built to convert clicks.
The standard web address.
How Google views a single URL.
The process of reducing multiple URLs for the same content to one form.
The query string values added to a URL after a question mark.
How your website addresses are organized.
Behavioral measures that reflect how satisfied searchers are.