Your A–Z SEO glossary.

A 301 redirect is a permanent, server-side instruction that sends visitors and search engines from one URL to another. It is the standard way to move a page without losing its traffic or its rankings, and it transfers the original URL's ranking signals to the destination.

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect that sends visitors to a different URL while telling search engines the original URL is still the correct one. Because it signals a temporary move, search engines generally keep the original URL indexed rather than transferring signals to the destination.

A 404 error is the HTTP status code returned when a requested page does not exist. It is a normal and correct response for genuinely removed content. A soft 404 is different — a page that returns a success code but has no real content, which Google treats as a problem.

AI crawlers are automated agents operated by AI companies to fetch web content. They do three distinct jobs — collecting training data, indexing for AI search, and fetching a page when a user asks about it — and each job usually has its own user agent.

An AI hallucination is a confident but incorrect statement generated by an AI system. For local businesses this typically means an assistant stating wrong opening hours, services the business does not offer, or details belonging to a different company.

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google's search results, synthesising information from multiple sources into a direct answer with links to the pages cited. They appear most often on informational queries and push organic results further down the page.

AI referral traffic is visitors arriving by clicking a link inside an AI assistant's answer — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Much of it is misclassified in analytics as direct or generic referral traffic unless it is deliberately configured for.

AI-generated content is text produced wholly or partly by a language model. Google does not penalise content for being AI-generated; its policies target content produced at scale primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help people, regardless of how it was made.

Above the fold is the portion of a web page visible without scrolling. The term comes from newspaper printing, and in web terms there is no single fold — it varies by device, and the mobile viewport is what matters for most local businesses.

Alt text, short for alternative text, is a written description placed in an image's alt attribute. Screen readers read it aloud to people who cannot see the image, search engines use it to understand what the image shows, and browsers display it if the image fails to load.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink. It tells a reader where the link goes, and it tells search engines what the destination page is about. Google treats it as a relevance signal for the page being linked to.

Apple Business Connect is Apple's free portal for managing how a business appears across Apple Maps, Siri, Wallet and other Apple services. It controls the business Place Card — name, address, hours, photos, categories and action links — on the mapping app that ships as default on every iPhone.

Ask Maps is Google's AI-powered feature that answers customer questions about a business by generating a response from its Business Profile, reviews and website, rather than showing user-submitted questions and answers. It replaced the Google Business Profile Q&A feature.

Attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that contributed to it. Different attribution models distribute that credit differently, and no model captures the full picture, particularly for local businesses.

An author page is a dedicated page describing the person who wrote a piece of content, covering their credentials, experience and other work. It supports the expertise and trust elements of E-E-A-T by making authorship verifiable rather than asserted.

Average position is the mean ranking position of a site across all impressions for a query or page, as reported in Google Search Console. Because it averages across locations, devices and dates, it frequently describes a position the site never actually held.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat links as signals of credibility, so backlinks from relevant, trusted sites contribute to how authoritative a site is judged to be. Quality and relevance matter considerably more than quantity.

A benchmark report is a record of a client's performance at a fixed point, usually the start of an engagement, against which later progress is measured. It also refers to comparative reports positioning a business against competitors or industry averages.

Bing Places for Business is Microsoft's free portal for managing a business listing on Bing Search and Bing Maps. It covers the same basic information as a Google Business Profile — name, address, phone, hours, categories and photos — for a considerably smaller audience.

Black hat SEO refers to tactics that violate search engine guidelines in order to manipulate rankings. White hat describes work within the guidelines, and grey hat is used for tactics that are ambiguous — though the ambiguous category is smaller than it is usually presented as.

Booking links are the appointment and reservation options on a Google Business Profile. They come in two forms: a Reserve with Google integration through a supported scheduling provider, and a custom URL added manually that sends customers to your own booking page.

A brand mention is any reference to a business by name on another website, with or without a link. Linked mentions are backlinks; unlinked mentions still contribute to how search engines and AI systems understand and evaluate a business.

A brand SERP is the search results page returned when someone searches a business name. It typically combines the business website, a knowledge panel or local listing, reviews, social profiles, directory listings and any third-party coverage — much of which the business does not control.

Branded keywords contain a business's name or a close variation; non-branded keywords describe a product, service or need without naming anyone. The distinction matters because branded searches come from people who already know the business, and non-branded searches are new demand.

Breadcrumb navigation is a secondary navigation element showing where a page sits within a site's hierarchy, usually as a row of links from the homepage down to the current page. With BreadcrumbList structured data, Google often displays the path in search results instead of the URL.

Broken link building is the practice of finding dead links on other websites and suggesting your own content as a replacement. It offers the site owner something useful — a fix — which historically produced higher response rates than cold link requests.

Business hours are the opening times listed on a Google Business Profile, covering regular weekly hours, special hours for holidays and exceptions, and in some categories more specific hours such as delivery or senior hours. They determine whether a business appears in “open now” results.

The Business Redressal Complaint Form is Google's formal route for reporting fraudulent or misleading business listings — fake businesses, keyword-stuffed names, invalid addresses and impersonation. It handles serious or large-scale cases that the standard Suggest an Edit flow does not.

Business relocation is moving a business to a new physical address. For local search it changes the point from which proximity is calculated and requires updating the business data everywhere it appears — a process that is straightforward in principle and routinely done badly.

Business status is the field on a Google Business Profile indicating whether a business is open, temporarily closed or permanently closed. Both closed states substantially reduce visibility, and permanently closed is extremely difficult to reverse.

Call tracking is the use of dedicated phone numbers to identify which marketing source generated a call. Numbers are assigned to specific channels, and calls are forwarded to the real business line so the caller experiences no difference.

A canonical tag is an HTML element that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version of a page when several URLs show the same or very similar content. It consolidates ranking signals onto the chosen URL without redirecting visitors.

A case study is content documenting a specific piece of work from the customer's problem through to the outcome. For a local business it is the most direct way to demonstrate first-hand experience, because it describes work only that business did.

Centroid bias is the tendency for businesses located near the geographic or commercial centre of a town or city to rank more widely in local results. It was a pronounced effect in earlier local search and has largely been replaced by proximity to the individual searcher.

Churn rate is the percentage of customers or clients lost over a given period. For an agency it measures how many clients cancel, and it is calculated by dividing clients lost during a period by the number held at the start of it.

A citation audit is a systematic check of every online listing a business has, comparing each one against a single reference record for name, address and phone. It identifies mismatches, duplicates, missing listings and outdated details so they can be corrected in priority order.

Citation building is the process of creating new listings for a business across directories, review platforms and data aggregators, using consistent name, address and phone details. It follows a citation audit, because fixing existing listings comes before adding new ones

Click-through rate, or CTR, is the percentage of impressions that result in a click. In organic search it is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions, and it indicates how compelling a result is to people who have already seen it.

Client offboarding is the process of ending an engagement cleanly — transferring account access and ownership, handing over data and documentation, and closing out work in progress. It is the least commercially rewarding part of an agency relationship and the most reputationally consequential.

Competitor analysis is the process of identifying which businesses compete with you in search results and examining what they do differently. In local SEO the relevant competitors are those appearing in the same local pack, which are often not the businesses an owner considers rivals.

Consent mode is a mechanism that adjusts how Google tags behave according to a visitor's cookie consent choices. Where consent is declined, tags send limited signals without cookies, and Google may model the missing data rather than reporting it directly.

A content audit is a systematic review of every page on a website, assessing performance and quality to decide what to keep, improve, consolidate or remove. It turns an accumulated archive into a deliberate set of pages.

A content brief is a document specifying what a piece of content must cover before writing begins — the target query, the intent behind it, the questions to answer, the structure, and where it links. It exists so the writer and the commissioner agree in advance.

Content decay is the gradual decline in traffic or rankings of a page that previously performed well, caused by outdated information, stronger competing content, shifting search intent or changes to the results page. It is a diagnosis; a content refresh is the remedy.

A content delivery network, or CDN, is a distributed set of servers that store copies of a website's files and serve them from a location near each visitor. It reduces the physical distance data travels, which lowers latency and improves loading performance.

A content gap is a subject or question relevant to your customers that your website does not adequately cover. It is broader than a keyword gap, which compares your rankings against competitors — a content gap can exist on a subject no competitor covers either.

Content marketing is the practice of attracting and retaining customers by creating and publishing material that is genuinely useful to them, rather than directly promotional. In search, it means producing content that answers the questions potential customers are already asking.

Content pruning is the removal or consolidation of pages that provide no value, in order to improve how a site is assessed as a whole. It is the action that follows a content audit, and it usually makes a site smaller and better at the same time.

A content refresh is the practice of updating an existing page — correcting outdated information, adding depth, improving structure — rather than publishing new content. It is usually a better use of effort than writing more, because the page already has history and links.

A content strategy is the plan governing what content a business will produce, for whom, and to what end — the decisions made before anything is written. It is distinct from content marketing, which is the practice of publishing, and from a content calendar, which is the schedule.

Content syndication is republishing content on another website with permission, either in full or in part. It extends reach to another audience and creates a duplicate that can outrank the original if it is not handled correctly

Content velocity is the rate at which a site publishes new content, usually measured as pages or posts per period. It is not a ranking factor in itself, and sustained consistency matters considerably more than volume.

Content gap analysis is the process of comparing your website with a competitor’s to identify important pages and topics they cover that are missing from your own site.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action — submitting a form, calling, booking or buying. It is calculated by dividing conversions by visitors over the same period, and it depends entirely on how a conversion is defined.

Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is the practice of increasing the proportion of visitors who complete a desired action. It is the discipline; conversion rate is the metric. For most local businesses it means fixing obvious friction rather than running experiments.

Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to measure real-world page experience: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability. They are measured from real Chrome users, not lab tests.

Cost per lead is the average amount spent to generate one enquiry, calculated by dividing total marketing spend over a period by the number of leads produced. Customer acquisition cost is the related figure measured against customers rather than enquiries

Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will crawl on a site within a given period. It is determined by how much a server can handle without strain and how much demand a search engine has for the site's content.

Crawling is the process by which search engines discover and read web pages. Automated programs called crawlers follow links and read sitemaps to find URLs, fetch their content, and pass it on for possible indexing.

Customer lifetime value, or LTV, is the total revenue or profit a business expects from a customer over the whole of their relationship, rather than from a single transaction. It determines how much a business can sensibly spend to acquire one.

A data aggregator is a service that collects business listing information and distributes it to directories, apps, navigation systems and search engines. Because many downstream sites pull from aggregators, incorrect data at the aggregator level propagates widely.

Digital PR is the practice of earning online coverage, links and brand mentions by producing material journalists and publishers genuinely want to cover — original data, expert commentary, or newsworthy stories. It is link building through editorial merit rather than outreach volume.

Direct traffic is the channel analytics assigns to visits with no identifiable referral source. It nominally means someone typed the URL or used a bookmark, but in practice it is where analytics places anything it cannot attribute.

Disavowing is the act of submitting a file to Google Search Console listing backlinks you want Google to ignore when evaluating your site. Google's guidance is that the tool is an advanced feature for unusual cases, and that most sites will never need it.

Domain Authority is a score from 1 to 100, created by Moz, that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results. It is a third-party estimate based largely on backlink data. Google does not use it and has no equivalent public metric.

Duplicate content is substantially identical content appearing at more than one URL, either on the same site or across different sites. It is not a penalty — Google consolidates duplicates and picks one version to index — but it splits signals and wastes crawl resources.

A duplicate listing is a second or subsequent profile for the same business on the same platform. Duplicates split reviews and ranking signals between profiles, confuse customers, and on Google they violate the guidelines and can lead to suspension.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. It is the framework Google's human quality raters use to assess content quality. It is not a ranking factor and no page receives an E-E-A-T score, but it describes what Google's ranking systems are tuned to reward.

Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that qualify as engaged — in Google Analytics 4, sessions lasting longer than ten seconds, containing a key event, or including two or more page views. It replaced bounce rate as the headline behavioural metric.

An entity is a distinct, uniquely identifiable thing — a person, place, business, product or concept — that search engines recognise and store information about, along with its relationships to other entities. Search has shifted from matching keyword strings to identifying entities.

Evergreen content is material that remains relevant and useful long after publication, rather than being tied to a date, event or trend. It continues to attract search traffic over years, though it still requires periodic updating to stay accurate.

An FAQ page is a page collecting answers to common customer questions. For search purposes, questions generally perform better distributed across the relevant service pages than gathered on one page, because each answer then sits with the content it relates to.

Faceted navigation is a filtering system that lets users narrow a list of results by multiple attributes at once — price, colour, size, location. Each combination typically generates its own URL, which can produce vast numbers of near-identical pages.

A fake review is a review that misrepresents the reviewer's actual experience — written by someone who was never a customer, by an insider without disclosure, bought from a third party, or generated to damage a competitor. Platforms prohibit them and, in the US, federal rules carry civil penalties.

A favicon is the small icon representing a website in browser tabs, bookmarks and, on mobile, beside the result in Google Search. It is not a ranking factor, but it is visible at the moment a searcher decides which result to tap.

A featured snippet is a block at the top of Google's results that answers a query directly, using an extract from a page along with a link to it. Pages are selected algorithmically from results that already rank, and the position cannot be bought or explicitly requested.

Franchise SEO is local SEO across a franchise network, where locations are separately owned but share a brand. It differs from multi-location SEO because control is divided — the franchisor owns the brand, the franchisee owns the business, and both have a stake in the same listings.

Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of making content more likely to be used and cited by AI answer engines such as AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. It is also called Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO); the two terms are used interchangeably.

Geo-grid rank tracking measures a business's local search position from many separate points across a geographic area and displays the results as a colour-coded map. It replaces a single reported rank with a picture of where a business is visible and where it is not.

A geo-modifier is a location term added to a search query — a town, city, postcode, neighbourhood or a phrase like “near me”. Google also infers location from the device even when no modifier is present, which makes unmodified searches behave locally too.

A Google algorithm update is a change to how Google ranks search results. Google makes thousands of changes a year, but confirms only the significant ones — principally broad core updates, which recalibrate quality assessment, and spam updates, which target policy violations.

Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is Google's website and app analytics platform. It records user interactions as events rather than pageviews and sessions, and it reports how people arrive at a site, what they do there, and which actions they complete.

Google Autocomplete is the feature that predicts and suggests search queries as a user types, based on real searches other people have made. Because the suggestions reflect actual search behaviour rather than modelled estimates, it is a reliable free source for keyword research.

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that represents a business on Google Search and Google Maps. It holds the name, address, phone number, hours, categories, services, photos and reviews, and it is the asset local pack and Maps results are drawn from.

Attributes are descriptive tags on a Google Business Profile covering facilities, accessibility, service options, amenities and identity — things like wheelchair access, free parking, appointment required or women-owned. Available attributes depend on the primary category.

Google Business Profile categories describe what a business is, chosen from a fixed list Google maintains. Every profile has one primary category and can add secondary categories, and the primary is generally the single most influential ranking field on the profile.

The business description is a free-text field on a Google Business Profile, up to 750 characters, describing what the business does. It appears in the profile's About section and is subject to content guidelines that prohibit promotional offers, URLs and misleading claims.

Google Business Profile messaging was a chat feature letting customers message a business directly from its listing. Google discontinued the chat and call history features in July 2024, and profiles no longer offer it.

Google Business Profile performance data reports how customers interact with a business listing — calls, direction requests, website clicks, bookings and the searches that surfaced the profile. It captures local conversions that never reach the website.

Google Business Profile photos are the images shown on a business listing in Search and Maps, uploaded by the business owner or by customers. They influence whether a searcher chooses the business, and Google interprets their content itself since there is no alt text field.

The services section of a Google Business Profile lists what a business offers, using a mix of Google-suggested services based on the primary category and custom services the owner adds, each with an optional description and price.

A Google Business Profile suspension is an enforcement action taken when Google believes a profile breaches its guidelines or cannot be confirmed as legitimate. It either removes the listing from Search and Maps or locks the owner out of managing it, and it is resolved by appeal.

Google Business Profile verification is the process of proving that a business is real and that you are authorised to manage it. Until a profile is verified it cannot appear in local results, and Google chooses which verification method you are offered rather than letting you pick.

Google Maps is Google's mapping service and a major local business discovery surface in its own right. Business listings in Maps are drawn from Google Business Profiles and ordered by the same local ranking factors that govern the local pack.

Google My Business, or GMB, was the former name for what is now the Google Business Profile. Google renamed it in 2021 and retired the standalone desktop dashboard, moving management directly into Search and Maps. The term remains in common use

Google Posts are short updates published directly to a Google Business Profile, appearing in the Updates section of the listing on Search and Maps. They support text, images, video and a call-to-action button, and different post types have different lifespans.

Google Search Console is a free tool that reports how a website performs in Google Search. It shows the queries a site appears for, its impressions, clicks and average position, and it reports indexing status, technical issues and manual actions.

Google Search Essentials is Google's official documentation setting out what a site needs to appear in Google Search. It replaced the Webmaster Guidelines in 2022 and has three parts: technical requirements, spam policies, and key best practices.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool for deploying and managing tracking scripts on a website without editing its code each time. A single container snippet is installed once, and individual tags are then added, changed or removed through a web interface.

Google Trends is a free tool showing the relative popularity of search terms over time and by geography. It reports interest on a normalised 0 to 100 scale rather than absolute search volume, which makes it useful for comparison and seasonality and not for sizing demand.

Guest posting is writing content published on another site, usually with a link back to your own. It is legitimate when the purpose is reaching that site's audience, and a link scheme when the purpose is the link — particularly where payment or keyword-rich anchor text is involved.

HTTP status codes are three-digit responses a server returns for every request, indicating whether it succeeded, was redirected, failed or errored. Search engines use them to decide whether to index a page, follow a redirect, or stop crawling.

HTTPS is the encrypted version of the HTTP protocol, securing data passed between a browser and a website using an SSL/TLS certificate. It is a confirmed Google ranking signal, browsers warn users about sites without it, and it is expected on every site regardless of what it handles.

Heading tags are HTML elements from H1 to H6 that define the hierarchy of headings on a page. They give a page structure that helps readers scan and helps search engines understand how sections relate, with H1 as the main heading and lower levels as subsections.

Helpful content is Google's term for content created primarily to help people rather than to rank in search. The Helpful Content System was a standalone ranking signal from 2022 until March 2024, when Google integrated it into its core ranking systems.

Hreflang is an attribute telling search engines which language and regional version of a page to serve to which users. It is used on sites with equivalent content in multiple languages or for multiple countries, and it is a targeting instruction rather than a ranking signal.

Image geotagging is the practice of embedding GPS coordinates in a photograph's EXIF metadata, on the theory that it signals location relevance to search engines. There is no good evidence that Google uses EXIF location data from uploaded images as a local ranking signal.

Image SEO is the practice of optimising images so search engines can understand them and so they do not slow the page down. It covers file names, alt text, file format and compression, dimensions, lazy loading and, where relevant, structured data.

An impression is recorded when a link to your site appears in search results for a query. It does not require the user to scroll to it or notice it, which makes impressions a measure of eligibility and visibility rather than of attention.

Index bloat is a situation where a search engine has indexed a large number of low-value pages from a site — duplicates, thin pages, parameter URLs, archives — diluting how the site is assessed and burying the pages that matter.

Indexing is the process by which a search engine analyses a crawled page and stores it in its index, making it eligible to appear in search results. Being crawled does not guarantee being indexed — search engines choose which pages are worth storing.

An industry directory is a listing site specific to a profession or sector — a legal directory, a medical register, a trade association listing. For local businesses these are typically the most valuable citations available, because relevance beats reach.

Internal linking is the practice of linking between pages on the same website. Internal links help visitors navigate, help search engines discover pages, and distribute relevance and authority between pages — all under the site owner's direct control.

Internal site search is the search function on a website, letting visitors look for content directly. The queries it records are first-party data showing what people expected to find, and its results pages should be kept out of search engine indexes.

JavaScript SEO is the practice of making content that depends on JavaScript accessible to search engines. Google renders JavaScript, but in a separate queued stage after the initial HTML fetch, which introduces delay and several ways for content to be missed.

A key performance indicator, or KPI, is a metric chosen to measure progress toward a specific goal. A good KPI connects directly to a business outcome, can be influenced by the work being done, and cannot be improved without the underlying result improving.

A key event is an event in Google Analytics 4 that has been marked as significant to the business — a form submission, a phone tap, a booking. Key events replaced the term “conversions” in GA4 reporting, though the underlying concept is the same.

Keyword cannibalisation happens when two or more pages on the same site compete for the same search term, splitting relevance signals between them so that neither ranks as well as a single consolidated page would.

Keyword difficulty is a score, usually from 0 to 100, estimating how hard it would be to rank on the first page for a given term. Each tool calculates it differently, mostly from the link authority of the pages currently ranking, and the scores are not comparable between tools.

Keyword gap analysis is the process of identifying search terms that competitors rank for and you do not, in order to find content and service opportunities. For local businesses it extends beyond keywords to gaps in profile categories, services and coverage.

Keyword mapping is the process of assigning each group of related search terms to a single page on a site, so that every page has a defined purpose and no two pages target the same intent. Clustering — grouping terms that share an intent — is the step before mapping.

Keyword research is the process of finding and evaluating the search terms people use to look for a product, service or answer. A keyword is any word or phrase typed into a search engine, and research establishes which ones are worth targeting based on volume, intent, difficulty and commercial value.

Keyword stuffing is overloading a page with search terms in an attempt to manipulate rankings — repeating phrases unnaturally, listing variations, or hiding terms from readers. It is named in Google's spam policies and has been ineffective for well over a decade.

A knowledge panel is the information box that appears in Google's search results showing key facts about an entity — a business, person, place or organisation. For local businesses it is generated largely from the Google Business Profile and appears on branded searches.

LLM visibility is how often and how favourably a brand appears in answers generated by large language model assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. It is measured by sampling prompts and recording whether a brand is mentioned or cited.

A landing page is the page a visitor arrives on. In analytics it means any entry page; in campaign marketing it means a page built for one specific audience and action, usually with reduced navigation and a single conversion goal.

Lazy loading is a technique that defers loading images, videos or iframes until they are about to enter the viewport, rather than loading everything when the page opens. It reduces initial page weight and improves loading performance when implemented correctly.

Link building is the practice of acquiring links from other websites to your own. Legitimate link building earns links by creating something worth referencing or by genuine relationship-building; manipulative link building buys or manufactures them and violates search engine guidelines.

Link equity, sometimes called link juice, is the ranking value passed from one page to another through a link. It is an informal term for a real effect: links transfer some portion of a page's authority and relevance to the pages they point at.

A link profile is the complete set of backlinks pointing at a website, together with their characteristics — the sites they come from, the anchor text used, whether they are followed, and how they accumulated over time. It is assessed as a whole rather than link by link.

A listing accuracy score is a vendor-generated figure summarising how consistent a business's listings are across directories. It is calculated by each tool's own method against its own directory set, and it is not a metric Google publishes or uses.

Listing suppression is when a business profile stops appearing in search results without being formally suspended. The listing still exists and remains manageable, but Google has stopped surfacing it — usually following a quality or eligibility concern.

A local citation is any online mention of a business's name, address and phone number, whether or not it includes a link. Citations appear in directories, review sites, social profiles, apps and editorial content, and they help search engines confirm that a business exists where it claims to.

The local finder is the expanded list of local business results shown after clicking “More places” from a local pack. It displays many more businesses than the pack's two or three listings, with filters, and it sits between the pack and Google Maps.

Local justifications are the short snippets Google displays beneath a business listing in local results, explaining why that business matched the search — quoting a review, naming a service, referencing the website, or highlighting a post.

Local link building is the practice of earning links from websites connected to a business's geographic area — local press, community organisations, associations, suppliers and events. Local relevance often matters more than the linking site's overall authority.

Local organic results are the standard web listings appearing beneath the local pack on a query with local intent. They are ranked by conventional organic factors rather than by proximity and profile strength, which makes them a separate contest from the pack.

The local pack is the block of business listings shown with a map near the top of Google's results for searches with local intent. It has traditionally held three listings, which is why it is also called the map pack or three-pack, and it sits above the organic results.

Local ranking factors are the signals Google uses to order business listings in local results. Google names three: relevance, or how well a business matches the search; distance, or how close it is to the searcher; and prominence, or how well known and well regarded it is.

Local SEO is the practice of improving how a business appears in search results tied to a specific place. It covers Google Business Profile, the local pack, Maps, citations, reviews and location-focused website content, and it is measured by position on a map rather than a single national rank.

A local SEO audit is a structured review of everything affecting a business's visibility in local search — its Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, website and competitive position — producing a prioritised list of what to fix.

Local Services Ads, or LSAs, are Google's pay-per-lead advertising format for service businesses. They appear above standard ads and above the local pack, charge per qualified lead rather than per click, and require the business to pass category-specific screening.

A local visibility score is a composite figure produced by an SEO tool, combining signals such as rankings, profile completeness, reviews and citations into a single number. Each vendor defines it differently and Google publishes no equivalent.

LocalBusiness schema is the structured data type used to describe a business with a physical or service-area presence, covering its name, address, phone number, opening hours, geographic coordinates and the services it offers. It has dozens of more specific subtypes.

A location page is a page on a business website targeting a specific city, town or area the business serves. For a business with physical premises it describes that branch; for a service area business it covers a place customers are served in.

Log file analysis is the examination of server access logs to see exactly which URLs search engine crawlers requested, when, how often, and what response they received. It is the only data source showing what crawlers actually did rather than what they were told.

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search term with lower individual search volume than a broad head term. Long-tail queries usually carry clearer intent and convert at higher rates, and collectively they account for the majority of all searches.

Looker Studio is Google's free data visualisation and reporting tool, formerly Data Studio. It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads and other sources to build dashboards and reports that update automatically.

llms.txt is a proposed file format, placed at a site's root, offering a curated Markdown map of its most important content for large language models. It is an unofficial proposal with no standardisation, and no major AI provider has confirmed using it in production.

A manual action is a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google when a site is judged to violate its spam policies. It is reported in Search Console, affects ranking or indexing directly, and is lifted through a reconsideration request rather than by waiting.

A merged listing is the result of two Google Business Profiles being combined into a single profile, consolidating their reviews, photos and history. Merging is the correct way to resolve duplicates, and it occasionally happens in error between genuinely separate businesses.

A meta description is an HTML attribute that summarises a page's content. Google often displays it beneath the title in search results. It is not a ranking factor, but it influences whether people click, and Google frequently rewrites it based on the query.

The meta keywords tag is an HTML element listing keywords relevant to a page. Google announced in 2009 that it does not use it for ranking, and it has no effect on Google Search. It survives in CMS templates and in outdated SEO advice.

The meta robots tag is an HTML element that tells search engines how to treat a page — whether to index it, follow its links, show a cached copy, or limit how it appears in results. The X-Robots-Tag HTTP header does the same job for non-HTML files.

Mobile-first indexing means Google uses the mobile version of a website as the primary version for crawling, indexing and ranking. It applies to all sites, and rankings on desktop as well as mobile are determined by what the mobile version contains.

A commercial or service page that directly brings in customers (a service, treatment, or pricing page), as opposed to an informational blog post.

Monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, is the predictable revenue an agency receives each month from ongoing contracts. It excludes one-off project work, and it is the headline measure of whether an agency is growing or replacing losses.

Multi-location SEO is the practice of running local SEO for a business with more than one address. Each location needs its own Google Business Profile and its own website page, managed under a shared strategy so the locations reinforce each other rather than compete.

NAP stands for name, address and phone number, the three pieces of information that identify a business across the web. NAP consistency means presenting those details identically everywhere they appear, so search engines can match every mention to the same business.

Natural language processing, or NLP, is the field of computing concerned with how machines interpret and generate human language. It is the underlying technology; semantic search, AI Overviews and conversational search are applications of it.

A near me search is a query where the searcher wants a result close to their current location, whether or not the words “near me” appear. Google interprets the intent from the query and the device's location, then returns local results ordered largely by proximity.

Negative SEO is the practice of attempting to damage another site's search performance — through spam links, content scraping, fake reviews, hacking or fraudulent reports. Some forms are real threats; the best-known form, link-based attacks, is largely neutralised.

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric based on one question: how likely someone is to recommend a business, rated 0 to 10. Respondents are grouped into promoters, passives and detractors, and the score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.

New business local SEO is the process of establishing local search visibility for a business with no existing profile, reviews, citations or history. The constraint is not competition but absence — there is nothing yet for search engines to corroborate.

Nofollow is a link attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking signals through that link. Since March 2020 Google treats it as a hint rather than a directive, meaning it may still use nofollowed links for crawling and indexing purposes.

Noindex is a directive telling search engines not to include a page in their index, so it cannot appear in search results. It is applied through a meta robots tag in the page's HTML or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, and requires the page to remain crawlable to be read.

Off-page SEO covers everything affecting search visibility that happens outside your own website — backlinks, citations, reviews, brand mentions and reputation. For local businesses it includes the Google Business Profile, which makes it larger than on-page and technical combined.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising elements on a web page itself — content, title tags, headings, internal links, images and structured data — to help search engines understand it and to help people who land on it find what they came for.

An online review is public feedback a customer leaves about a business on a platform such as Google, Yelp or an industry site, usually combining a star rating with written comment. Reviews influence both local search rankings and the decisions of people reading them.

Open Graph tags are meta tags that tell social platforms and messaging apps how to display a page when its URL is shared — the title, description and image in the preview card. They are not a search ranking factor, but they determine whether a shared link looks worth clicking.

Organic traffic is website visitors who arrive by clicking an unpaid search result. It excludes paid clicks, direct visits, referrals and social traffic — and, for local businesses, it excludes the calls and direction requests that never reach the website at all

An orphan page is a page on a website that has no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else on the site. Because search engines discover pages mainly by following links, orphan pages are crawled rarely or not at all, and visitors cannot reach them by navigating.

Page speed is how quickly a web page loads and becomes usable. Google measures it through real-user field data rather than lab tests, primarily via Core Web Vitals, and it affects both search rankings and the likelihood that a visitor stays.

PageRank is the algorithm Google was founded on, which ranked pages by treating links as votes and weighting each vote by the authority of the linking page. The public PageRank score was retired in 2016; the underlying principle remains part of how links are evaluated.

Pagination is the practice of splitting a long list or article across multiple numbered pages. Google treats each page in a series as a distinct URL and no longer uses rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup, which it stopped supporting in 2019.

People Also Ask is a search results feature showing related questions that expand to reveal a short answer drawn from a web page, with a link to the source. The set of questions often grows as a user expands them, generating further related questions.

A practitioner listing is a Google Business Profile for an individual professional — a doctor, solicitor, dentist, agent or therapist — existing alongside the profile for the practice they work at. Google permits them under specific conditions and they are a frequent source of duplicate and merge problems.

Programmatic SEO is the practice of generating large numbers of pages automatically from a structured data set, using a template populated with different values. It works where genuinely distinct data exists per page and fails where the template is the only content.

A prospecting audit is a short analysis of a potential client's search visibility, produced before any engagement, to demonstrate specific problems and the value of fixing them. It is a sales tool rather than a full audit, and it works by being specific rather than comprehensive.

The Search Quality Rater Guidelines are a published Google document instructing human evaluators on how to assess the quality of search results. The ratings do not affect any individual site's rankings; they are used to evaluate and train Google's ranking systems.

Rank tracking is the practice of monitoring where a website or business appears in search results for chosen keywords over time. Traditional rank tracking reports a single position per keyword, which works for national organic search but misrepresents local results.

Ranking factors are the signals a search engine uses to order results. Google has never published a list of them, and the commonly cited figure of 200 comes from an offhand remark rather than documentation. A small number are confirmed; most circulating lists are inference.

Readability is how easily a reader can understand written text. Readability formulas score it using sentence length and word complexity, producing a grade level or index. Google does not use readability scores as a ranking factor.

Rebranding is changing a business's trading name, and often its domain and visual identity. For local search it splits the business's established entity across an old and new name, and the recovery depends on updating every source consistently rather than on the rebrand itself.

A reconsideration request is a submission asking Google to review and lift a manual action after the underlying problem has been fixed. It is reviewed by a person, and it succeeds or fails largely on whether the fix is genuine and the account of it is credible.

A redirect chain occurs when a URL redirects to another URL that itself redirects, requiring multiple hops before the destination is reached. Each hop adds latency for the visitor and consumes an additional request for crawlers.

Referral traffic is visitors who arrive by clicking a link on another website, excluding search engines and, in most configurations, social platforms. It is the only direct evidence of which backlinks and listings actually send people.

A referring domain is a unique website that links to your site, regardless of how many individual links it sends. Fifty links from one domain count as one referring domain, which makes it a more meaningful measure of link profile breadth than total backlink count.

Related searches are the suggested queries Google displays at the bottom of a results page, and increasingly inline within results. They are drawn from actual search behaviour and show what else people looking for this topic tend to search.

Reputation management is the ongoing practice of monitoring, responding to and influencing what people find about a business online. For local businesses it centres on reviews, but extends to search results, social mentions, directory listings and press coverage.

Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, is an approach where an AI system searches a document source for relevant material and uses it to compose an answer, rather than relying only on what the model learned during training. It is the architecture behind most AI search features.

Review bombing is a sudden coordinated wave of negative reviews, usually from people who were never customers, triggered by a controversy, a competitor, or an online pile-on. It is distinct from a genuine cluster of complaints, and the two require opposite responses.

Review gating is the practice of screening customers before asking for a public review, so that satisfied customers are directed to review platforms and dissatisfied ones are routed to private feedback instead. It violates Google's policies and, in the US, the FTC's Consumer Review Rule.

Review removal is the process of asking a platform to take down a review that breaches its policies. Platforms remove reviews that violate content rules — spam, conflicts of interest, offensive material, off-topic content — but not reviews that are simply negative or unfair.

A review response is a public reply a business posts to a customer review. Responses are visible to everyone who reads the review afterwards, which makes them a signal of an attentive business and, in the case of negative reviews, an opportunity to give context.

Review schema is structured data that describes reviews and ratings for search engines, usually using the Review and AggregateRating types. Since 2019, Google has not shown review stars for LocalBusiness and Organization pages when the reviewed business controls the reviews itself.

Review sentiment is the meaning and tone expressed in review text, as distinct from the star rating attached to it. Sentiment analysis identifies which aspects of a business customers praise or criticise, and how that changes over time

Review velocity is the rate at which a business receives new reviews over time. A steady, consistent flow signals an active business and is generally more valuable than a large number of reviews arriving in a short burst and then stopping.

A review widget is an embedded element that displays reviews from Google or another platform on a website, usually pulled in automatically via a third-party script. It aids conversion and does not make a page eligible for star ratings in search results.

A rich result is an enhanced search listing with extra visual detail. Learn which types exist, what makes a page eligible, and which suit local business.

Robots.txt is a text file at the root of a domain that tells search engine crawlers which parts of the site they should not fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing, and it is a set of instructions that well-behaved crawlers follow voluntarily rather than an access restriction.

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the practice of improving a website's visibility in unpaid search results. It splits into three broad areas — on-page, technical and off-page — with local SEO as a distinct fourth discipline for businesses serving a geographic area.

SEO ROI is the return on investment from search engine optimisation, calculated by comparing the revenue generated against the cost of the work. For local businesses it requires counting conversions that happen off the website, and acknowledging what cannot be attributed.

An SEO retainer is a recurring fee, usually monthly, paid for ongoing search engine optimisation work. It covers continuous activity rather than a fixed deliverable, and typically includes a defined scope of work, agreed reporting, and a minimum term.

SERP stands for search engine results page — the page returned after a search. A modern SERP contains a mixture of ads, AI-generated answers, local packs, images, questions and other features alongside the standard organic listings, which occupy a shrinking share of it.

A SERP feature is any element on a search results page other than a standard organic listing — local packs, featured snippets, AI Overviews, knowledge panels, image carousels, People Also Ask and similar. Which features appear is one of the clearest indicators of a query's intent.

SERP volatility is the degree to which search results are fluctuating across a set of tracked keywords, usually expressed as a daily index by third-party tools. High volatility suggests widespread ranking movement, which may or may not correspond to a confirmed algorithm update.

Schema markup is structured data added to a page's code that describes its content in a standardised vocabulary search engines understand. It does not change what visitors see, but it can make a page eligible for rich results and helps search engines identify the entities a page describes.

A scope of work is the document defining what an engagement includes, what it excludes, what each party is responsible for, and how delivery is measured. In an SEO retainer it is what makes the ongoing work checkable rather than a matter of opinion.

Google Search Console offers two property types: a domain property covering all subdomains and protocols, and a URL-prefix property covering only one exact protocol and subdomain combination. Choosing the wrong one splits data across variants.

Search intent is the underlying goal behind a search query, what the person is actually trying to accomplish. It is usually grouped into four types: informational, navigational, commercial and transactional, and matching your page to the right one is a prerequisite for ranking.

Search operators are special commands added to a Google query to filter or refine results — restricting to one site, matching an exact phrase, or searching within titles. They are free diagnostic tools and their output is approximate rather than authoritative.

Search volume is an estimate of how many times a keyword is searched in a given period, usually expressed as a monthly average. The figures come from sampled and modelled data rather than direct counts, and most tools report national totals rather than local demand.

Seasonality is predictable variation in search demand over the year, driven by weather, holidays, term dates, tax deadlines and similar cycles. It makes month-on-month comparison unreliable and year-on-year comparison the honest default for most local businesses.

Semantic HTML is the practice of using HTML elements according to their meaning rather than their appearance — a heading element for a heading, a list element for a list, a button element for a button. It makes a page's structure machine-readable.

Semantic search is search that interprets the meaning and intent behind a query rather than matching the literal words. It uses context, entity understanding and language models to work out what a searcher wants, and returns results that answer it even when the wording differs.

A service area is the geographic coverage a business declares on its Google Business Profile — the cities, regions or postcodes it serves. It is displayed to customers and used for eligibility, but it does not determine where the business ranks

A service area business, or SAB, goes to the customer instead of serving them at a shop, office or other public-facing location. Think plumbers, electricians, cleaners, locksmiths, mobile groomers and other businesses that carry out their work at the customer’s property.

A service level agreement is a commitment to measurable standards of service — response times, turnaround, availability, reporting frequency — with defined consequences if they are not met. It covers how work is delivered, not what results it produces.

A service page is a page dedicated to one thing a business offers, written to rank for searches about that service and to convert the people who arrive. It is usually the most commercially important page type on a local business website.

A session is a single visit to a website, comprising all activity within a period of engagement. A user is a unique visitor, who may have multiple sessions. In Google Analytics 4 both are derived from event data and are counted differently from Universal Analytics.

Share of local voice, or SoLV, is a measure of how visible a business is across a geographic service area relative to its competitors. It is calculated from grid scan data, expressing visibility as a share of the total available rather than as an absolute position.

Site architecture is how the pages of a website are organised and connected to one another through navigation, internal links and URL structure. Good architecture makes every important page reachable in a few clicks and groups related content so that search engines understand how it fits together.

A site migration is any significant change to a website's structure, platform, domain or protocol that alters its URLs or how content is served. It is the single highest-risk routine event in SEO, and most migration losses are caused by preventable errors rather than by the move itself.

Sitelinks are additional links to pages within a site, displayed beneath a search result. Google generates them algorithmically from site structure and user behaviour, and there is no markup or setting that requests them.

The skyscraper technique is a content and link building method: find high-performing content on a topic, produce something more comprehensive, then approach the sites linking to the original. It was popularised around 2015 and works considerably less well than it did.

Social signals are engagement metrics from social platforms — likes, shares, comments and follower counts — sometimes claimed to influence search rankings. Google has repeatedly stated they are not used as direct ranking factors.

A staging site is a non-public copy of a website used for development and testing before changes go live. It must be kept out of search results, and the method used to block it is the most common source of catastrophic launch errors.

A star rating is the average score of a business's reviews, usually displayed to one decimal place out of five. It is the most prominent element of a local listing and one of the strongest influences on which business a searcher chooses.

A subdomain is a separate section of a site at blog.example.com; a subdirectory is a folder at example.com/blog/. Google says it handles both, and in practice a subdirectory is the safer default because it keeps everything within one site's accumulated authority.

A table of contents is an in-page list of links to sections of the same page, using anchor links to let readers jump directly to what they need. It aids navigation on long pages and can occasionally produce jump-to links in search results.

Technical SEO is the practice of making a website easy for search engines to crawl, render and index, and fast and stable for the people using it. It covers site architecture, crawl control, indexation, performance, structured data and mobile usability.

Thin content is content that provides little or no value to the reader relative to what they were looking for. It is defined by usefulness rather than length — a short page that fully answers a question is not thin, while two thousand words of filler is.

Third-party review platforms are review sites other than Google — Trustpilot, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Feefo and sector-specific platforms. Each has its own rules, audience and value, and spreading review effort across too many of them usually produces weak profiles everywhere.

Time to first byte, or TTFB, is the time between a browser requesting a page and receiving the first byte of the response. It measures server responsiveness rather than page rendering, and it sets a floor under every other loading metric.

A title tag is the HTML element that defines a page's title. It appears as the clickable headline in search results and in the browser tab, and it is generally the strongest on-page ranking signal as well as the main influence on whether a result gets clicked.

A topic cluster is a group of related pages covering one subject in depth, organised around a central pillar page that introduces the topic broadly, with supporting pages covering specific aspects. All the pages link to each other and to the pillar.

Topical authority is the degree to which a site is treated as a credible, comprehensive source on a particular subject. It is not a metric Google publishes or measures directly, but covering a topic thoroughly and well is consistently associated with ranking better across it

A toxic link is a backlink that an SEO tool has scored as potentially harmful. The term originates with third-party software vendors, not with Google, and the scores reflect each vendor's own model rather than any signal Google publishes or uses.

A URL slug is the part of a web address that identifies a specific page, appearing after the domain and any folder path. A good slug is short, readable, descriptive of the page's content, and stable over time.

UTM parameters are tags added to the end of a URL that tell analytics software where a visitor came from. Five standard parameters — source, medium, campaign, term and content — are read automatically by Google Analytics and most other platforms.

User-generated content, or UGC, is any content about a business created by its customers rather than by the business — reviews, photos, social posts, videos, forum comments and question answers. For local businesses, reviews and customer photos are the dominant forms.

Video SEO is the practice of making video content discoverable in search — through where it is hosted, how it is marked up, and the text that accompanies it. It covers both video appearing in web search results and ranking within platforms such as YouTube.

Voice search is searching by speaking rather than typing, using an assistant such as Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa. Voice queries tend to be longer and more conversational, and on a speaker-only device the assistant reads a single answer rather than presenting a list.

Waze is a navigation app owned by Google, with its own business listing system separate from Google Business Profile. Businesses can claim a listing and, in some markets, advertise to drivers near their location.

Web accessibility is the practice of building websites that people with disabilities can use, including those relying on screen readers, keyboard navigation or magnification. It is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions and overlaps substantially with technical SEO.

Web hosting is the service providing the server a website runs on. It affects search performance through server response time, uptime and location — and on budget shared hosting it can impose a performance ceiling that no amount of front-end optimisation removes.

White label SEO is an arrangement where one agency performs SEO work that another agency resells to its clients under its own brand. The client typically does not know the supplier exists, and the reselling agency owns the relationship and the reporting.

Word count is the number of words on a page. It is not a ranking factor and Google has confirmed there is no minimum. Longer pages often rank well because thorough coverage and length correlate, not because length itself is rewarded.

An XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs on a site that the owner wants search engines to crawl, optionally with metadata about when each was last modified. It helps search engines discover pages but does not guarantee they will be crawled or indexed.

Yelp is a business review and listing platform. For local SEO it functions both as a significant citation source and as a review platform in its own right, with rules that differ sharply from Google's — most notably a prohibition on asking customers for reviews.

A zero-click search is one that ends without the user clicking through to any website, because the answer appeared directly on the results page. Featured snippets, AI Overviews, knowledge panels and local packs all resolve queries without a visit.