15 terms
Search
- SEO
- Search engine optimisation. Everything done so a page is found in the unpaid results. Not to be confused with SEA, where the placement is bought.
- SERP
- The results page of a search engine. Long since more than a list of links: maps, questions, images and AI answers all appear there.
- Keyword
- The term somebody types into a search. More important than the words themselves is the intent behind them: to learn, to compare or to buy.
- Long tail
- Longer, rarer searches such as "contractor room Duisburg with kitchen". Individually low in volume, together often the larger share, and usually with clearer intent.
- Backlink
- A link from someone else's site to yours. Counts as a recommendation. Bought links breach Google's guidelines and can do harm.
- Crawler
- A program that fetches pages automatically so they can be indexed. Also called a bot or spider.
- Indexing
- The act of taking a page into the search engine's collection. Without it there is no visibility, however good the page is.
- noindex
- An instruction not to index a page. Set by accident, it is one of the most common causes of a site suddenly disappearing.
- Canonical
- A statement of which address is the authoritative one when the same page is reachable under several. Stops versions from weakening each other.
- Sitemap
- A list of all addresses of a site in XML format. Helps search engines miss nothing. It does not replace internal linking.
- robots.txt
- A file in the root directory telling crawlers what they may fetch. Real access control, unlike several other files with a similar reputation.
- Structured data
- Extra details in the source code that machines read unambiguously, such as address, opening hours or prices. Helpful by Google's own account, but not required.
- Core Web Vitals
- Three measurements of user experience: LCP for the largest element to appear, INP for the response to input, CLS for layout shifts. Targets are 2.5 seconds, 200 milliseconds and 0.1.
- Core update
- A larger change to Google's assessment systems, several times a year. Positions shift afterwards without anything on the site having changed.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. Not a metric but a framework Google uses to have content quality judged.
7 terms
AI answers
- GEO
- Generative engine optimisation. The attempt to appear in AI answers. There is no separate rulebook: Google's AI features use the same ranking systems as search.
- AI Overviews
- An answer generated by Google above the results, assembled from several sources. Being cited there brings visibility without a click.
- AI mode
- A search view in which the answer takes centre stage and the list of results moves into the background.
- LLM
- Large language model. The technology behind systems such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. It predicts likely sequences of words; it does not look anything up.
- AI crawler
- Bots that gather content for AI systems, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. They can be allowed or blocked individually in robots.txt.
- llms.txt
- A proposed file summarising a website for AI systems. Google explicitly does not evaluate it and lists it among the measures that have no effect.
- Hallucination
- A fabricated but convincingly worded statement from an AI system. The reason why details about your own business should be consistent and machine readable.
5 terms
Advertising
- SEA
- Search engine advertising. Paid ads above or beside the results. Works immediately and stops just as immediately when the budget ends.
- CPC
- Cost per click. What an ad costs each time somebody clicks. On its own it says nothing about whether the ad pays off.
- Conversion
- The action you want: an enquiry, a call, a booking, a purchase. Without a defined conversion, campaign reporting is just moving numbers around.
- ROAS
- Return on ad spend. Useful in retail, awkward for services, where weeks pass between an enquiry and an order.
- Retargeting
- Ads shown to people who have already visited your site. Effective, but delicate under data protection law and not permitted without consent.
5 terms
Social media
- Reach
- How many people saw a post. High reach without the right audience is worthless.
- Impression
- Every single display, including repeats to the same person. Always higher than reach and easily misread.
- Engagement
- Reactions such as comments, shares or saves. More telling than plain numbers because it shows involvement.
- UGC
- User generated content, for instance photos from satisfied customers. More credible than advertising material, but it needs permission to use.
- Community management
- The day-to-day handling of comments and messages. The part most people underestimate, and the one that decides your reputation.
4 terms
Measurement
- Analytics
- A tool for evaluating visits. As a rule it needs consent and therefore a cookie banner. For many small sites the insight is worth less than the effort.
- Bounce rate
- The share of visits without a further action. A high figure is not automatically bad: somebody who finds your phone number and calls counts, technically, as a bounce.
- Attribution
- Assigning a sale to the touchpoints before it. Blurry in practice, because a customer searches, compares, thinks it over and calls weeks later.
- Search Console
- A free Google tool with real search data about your own site: queries, positions, technical errors. The most reliable source there is.
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