SEO Glossary: Key Terms Explained
This SEO glossary defines the technical and content terms in audits and SEO reports, from crawl budget and canonical tags to search intent, E-E-A-T and page speed metrics. Each entry says why the term matters for rankings.
About this seo glossary
The glossary covers four areas. Technical terms include crawling, indexing, robots.txt, sitemaps, canonical tags, redirects, hreflang and page experience metrics such as LCP, INP and CLS. On-page terms include title tags, meta descriptions, headings, internal links and structured data. Content and authority terms include search intent, topical authority, E-E-A-T, backlinks and anchor text. Reporting terms include impressions, average position and click-through rate as Search Console defines them.
Read it alongside an SEO audit. Many audit findings sound alarming until you understand them, and some that sound minor, like duplicate canonicals or redirect chains, matter more than they appear. Several entries link to the SEO guide for fuller explanations. Definitions stay short on purpose, so you can look a term up mid-meeting and get back to the decision.
AEO (answer engine optimisation) #
Structuring content so answer engines and AI Overviews can extract and cite it directly.
Related: AI SEO Services
Backlink #
A link from another website to yours; a key signal of authority for search engines.
Related: Link Building Services
Canonical tag #
An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the primary one, preventing duplicate-content issues.
Related: Technical SEO Services
Core Web Vitals #
Google metrics for loading (LCP), interactivity (INP) and visual stability (CLS) of a page.
Related: Website Speed Optimization Services
Crawl budget #
The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given time.
Related: Technical SEO Services
E-E-A-T #
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: qualities Google looks for in content and its authors.
GEO (generative engine optimisation) #
Optimising content so generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity mention and cite your brand.
Related: AI SEO Services
Indexation #
Whether a page has been stored in a search engine’s index and is eligible to appear in results.
Keyword difficulty #
An estimate of how hard it is to rank on page one for a given keyword.
Schema markup #
Structured data added to pages so search engines understand entities such as products, FAQs and organisations.
Related: Technical SEO Services
Search intent #
The goal behind a search: informational, navigational, commercial or transactional.
SERP #
Search engine results page: everything shown in response to a query.
Case studies & resources
Real-world results and practical reading to help you plan your next step.
Client stories
How similar work has played out for other businesses.
Helpful resources
Guides, tools and articles our team recommends on this topic.
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