A practical SEO glossary covering traditional SEO, Local SEO and AI Search.

Answer Engine Optimisation — structuring content so AI-powered search experiences can understand, summarise and reference your content.

Generative Engine Optimisation — improving how content and brands are understood and referenced across generative AI search experiences such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

Google's AI-generated summaries that may appear within search results for certain queries, combining information from multiple sources.

Google's page-experience metrics — LCP, INP and CLS.

Google's framework for evaluating Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness within content and websites.

Google's classification for topics that can influence a person's health, finances, safety or major life decisions.

A page targeting customers in a specific city, region or service area to improve visibility for location-based searches.

A page designed around a specific product, service, location or campaign to attract targeted organic traffic.

Google Business Profile — the map-pack listing formerly known as Google My Business.

Name, Address and Phone Number — business information that should remain consistent across your website, Google Business Profile and other online directories.

Structured data that helps search engines understand the meaning and context of a webpage.

Optimising a website's technical foundation so search engines can efficiently crawl, index, render and understand its content.

The process of storing webpages within a search engine's database so they can appear in search results.

An external website's link pointing to your site — a core ranking signal.

Earned media coverage that produces authoritative backlinks — the white-hat approach to authority building.

Private Blog Network — a black-hat backlink tactic we never use.

Grouping URLs by topic and configuring internal linking so authority flows within each silo.

Reviewing server logs to see what Googlebot is actually crawling — the ground truth of crawl budget.

An emerging proposal that provides AI systems with a structured overview of a website's most important content and resources.

Helping search engines and AI systems understand the real-world people, organisations, products, locations and topics associated with your website.

Search Engine Results Page — everything Google shows for a given query.

The purpose behind a user's search query, such as finding information, comparing options or making a purchase.

The top-3 Google Business Profile results shown alongside a map for local queries.

The percentage of SERP impressions that convert to clicks.

An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page should be treated as the primary URL when similar or duplicate content exists.