SEO Glossary
The A - Z on SEO.
Authority: This is the weight or value a search engine gives a page in relation to a search query. A key guiding principle of Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines. Many SEO strategies focus on methods that improve the authority of a website and its content.
A/B Testing: Comparing two versions of a website – version A with version B, against performance outcomes.
Backlinks: A link from another website to yours. For example, a link from a popular food blogger to your restaurant’s page. The more backlinks you have from high quality websites, the better for your SERP position. Backlinks are one of the most important elements in your SEO strategy.
Buyer Persona: A composite customer profile that describes your ideal customer, their needs, concerns, behaviours and demographic information, informed by quantitative data and market research.
Competitor Benchmarking: Comparing competitor organisations and businesses against common metrics.
Content Auditing: A review of website content that identifies those pages that aren’t performing and why.
Conversion: When a site visitor becomes a customer.
Conversion Rate: The ratio of site visitors who become customers (or meet your site’s desired goal). A high conversion rates means many of your site visitors are going on to engage with your brand/become customers.
Conversion funnel: This refers to the Customer’s Journey, and is usually depicted visually through a graphic that ‘funnels’ your site visitors towards a CTA, and ultimately, conversion.
Customer Journey: The user experience of your customers, from first interaction to final interaction (pre and post purchase).
CTA: Call To Action. Any design or text that prompts an immediate response from the user, or compels them to act in a certain way. Sign Me up, Shop The Sale, Learn More! are examples of CTA buttons.
Core Web Vitals: These are three factors Google uses to measure and understand the overall user experience of a website. These factors are essentially measurements of speed and interaction – Largest Contentful Paint (LCD), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Digital PR: A marketing strategy that aims to improve backlinks and social media mentions through creative PR.
Dynamic Content: This is when a website provides different content in response to the behaviours of individual users, like personalised product recommendation and real-time updates.
E.E.A.T.: Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust. A guiding principle outlined in the Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines that is used to evaluate the quality of website content, and influences page ranking.
Engagement Rate: The ratio of users who saw a social media post, and interacted with it by commenting, clicking, or sharing. This information tells businesses which content elicits a response from users.
Evergreen Content: Content on your website that is always relevant, and unaffected by trends, time, or seasons. Good quality evergreen content is highly valuable and contributes to your site’s authority.
Lab Testing: Using automation to test a website or mobile platform to better understand how your site behaves and responds to a multitude of conditions. This assists in developing design and interaction strategies.
Link: Also known as a hyperlink. This refers to any link on your website to another. This can include pages within your website or elsewhere on the internet.
Link building: Also known as link acquisition. This is a targeted PR-type strategy to generate backlinks through multiple avenues. Key method includes encouraging high authority websites to include links to yours.
Local SEO: This refers to optimising elements of your SEO strategy for local or regional search enquiries, to ensure you are discoverable to users in your location. Local SEO is an often overlooked, yet powerful strategy for businesses with brick and mortar shopfronts or product delivery boundaries.
Meta Data: This is the information a search engine sees on a webpage, and is used to populate search results information – this is what users see on a SERP.
Multivariate Testing: Testing multiple elements of a website at once to determine which variation performs best.
On Page SEO: This refers to SEO mechanisms on your website, such as Keywords, Page Speed Optimisation, Meta Data, and Content.
Off Page SEO: Strategies to improve your domain authority that occurs outside your website. This includes Link Building, social media, email and paid search marketing.
Page Speed: The time it takes for all content to load on a webpage, and often refers to the time it takes for a search engine to receive information from a server. Page ranking is used by Google to determine the quality of user experience, and faster pages will sit higher on SERPs.
UX: User experience, how the user experiences a website or software system.
Referring Domain: The website (or domain) that has a backlink to your site.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page. The page a search engine returns in response to a search query.
Tag: A snippet of code added to a URL to collect data for analytics and transfer this data to digital marketing tools. Examples include the Google Ads conversion tag. Tags enable digital marketers to better track user behaviour.
Tag Management System: Also known as TMS, this is a type of software platform that manages multiple tags without needing to understand code.
