DIY SEO gets confusing fast because so much of the vocabulary is never actually explained — you’re expected to already know what a “crawl budget” or “canonical tag” is. This glossary defines every term a small business owner is likely to run into while doing their own SEO, organized by category, in plain language with no assumed background.
Bookmark this page. When you hit an unfamiliar term in another guide, a tool’s dashboard, or a conversation with a web developer, come back here first.
Basic Search Terms Everyone Should Know
These are the foundational words that show up in almost every SEO conversation.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The practice of improving a website so it appears higher in search results for relevant searches, without paying for ads.
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The page of results you see after searching — includes organic listings, ads, maps, and increasingly, AI-generated summaries.
- Organic search: Unpaid search results, as opposed to paid ads. SEO is entirely about improving organic visibility.
- Keyword: A word or phrase a person types into a search engine. “Best keyword” targeting means writing content around the actual words your customers use.
- Search intent: The real reason behind a search — whether someone wants information, wants to buy something, or wants to find a specific business or location.
- Ranking: Where a page appears in the list of search results for a given keyword. Position one is the top organic result.
On-Page SEO Terms
“On-page” refers to everything you control directly on your own website’s pages.
- Title tag: The clickable headline shown in search results for a page. It’s set in a page’s code and is different from the visible heading on the page itself.
- Meta description: The short summary text shown under a title tag in search results. It doesn’t directly affect ranking but strongly affects whether someone clicks.
- H1, H2, H3 (headings): The heading structure of a page, from largest (H1, the main title) to smaller subheadings (H2, H3), that organizes content for both readers and search engines.
- Alt text: A short written description attached to an image, read by screen readers and search engines since they can’t “see” a photo.
- Internal link: A link from one page on your site to another page on your own site — helps both visitors and search engines navigate and understand your content.
- URL slug: The part of a web address after your domain name (for example, “/custom-cakes” in yoursite.com/custom-cakes). Short, descriptive slugs help both users and search engines.
Technical SEO Terms
These relate to how your website is built and how well search engines can access it — the plumbing behind the scenes.
- Crawling: The process by which search engines discover pages on your site by following links.
- Indexing: After crawling a page, a search engine may store it in its index — the massive database it draws search results from. A page that isn’t indexed can’t rank at all.
- Sitemap: A file listing every important page on your site, submitted to search engines to help them find and index your content more completely.
- Robots.txt: A small file that tells search engines which parts of your site they should or shouldn’t crawl.
- Core Web Vitals: A set of specific measurements Google uses to judge page speed and user experience, including how fast a page loads and how stable it is visually while loading.
- Mobile-friendliness: Whether a site displays and functions properly on a phone screen — a requirement, not a bonus, since most searches now happen on mobile.
- Schema markup (structured data): Extra code added to a page that explicitly tells search engines what the content means (a review, a business address, a recipe) rather than making them guess.
Local SEO Terms
Specific to businesses that serve customers in a physical area.
- Google Business Profile (GBP): The free listing that controls how your business appears in Google Maps and local search results — hours, photos, reviews, and more.
- Local pack: The block of three local business results (often with a map) that appears near the top of Google for searches with local intent, like “plumber near me.”
- NAP consistency: Making sure your business Name, Address, and Phone number are identical everywhere they appear online — inconsistency confuses search engines and can hurt rankings.
- Citation: Any online mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number, typically in a directory (Yelp, Bing Places, industry-specific listings).
- Service area business: A business that serves customers at their location rather than a storefront customers visit — plumbers, cleaners, and mobile services are common examples, with their own Google Business Profile settings.
Off-Page and Link Terms
What happens beyond your own website that still affects your rankings.
- Backlink: A link from another website pointing to yours. Search engines treat backlinks (especially from relevant, reputable sites) as a signal of trust and authority.
- Domain authority: A third-party metric (not an official Google measurement) estimating how likely a website is to rank, based largely on its backlink profile.
- Anchor text: The clickable, visible text of a link. Descriptive anchor text helps both users and search engines understand what the linked page is about.
- Link building: The active practice of earning or acquiring backlinks from other websites.
Content and AI Search Terms
Newer vocabulary that’s become essential as AI-powered search tools have grown alongside traditional search.
- E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — the qualities Google’s guidelines say high-quality content should demonstrate, especially for topics that affect health, money, or safety.
- Helpful Content: Google’s framing for content written primarily to genuinely help a reader, as opposed to content written mainly to manipulate search rankings.
- AI Overview: An AI-generated summary that can appear at the top of Google search results, pulling information from multiple sources to answer a query directly.
- Featured snippet: A highlighted answer box that appears above regular results, pulled directly from a page’s content — often the direct target of well-structured, clearly answered content.
- Entity: A specific, well-defined thing (a business, a person, a place) that search engines try to understand and connect information to, beyond just matching keywords.
Measurement Terms
The vocabulary you’ll encounter inside free tracking tools.
- Impressions: The number of times your page or listing appeared in search results, whether or not it was clicked.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who saw your listing and clicked it — a strong signal of how compelling your title and description are.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave a page without taking further action, though this metric is increasingly considered less reliable on its own than engagement-based measures.
- Conversion: A visitor taking a specific desired action — calling, filling out a form, or making a purchase — the ultimate measure of whether SEO is working for your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between SEO and SEM?
SEO (search engine optimization) refers only to unpaid, organic visibility. SEM (search engine marketing) is a broader term that typically includes both SEO and paid search advertising, like Google Ads.
What does "crawl budget" mean, and does a small business need to worry about it?
Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given period. For most small business sites with a few dozen or a few hundred pages, this is rarely a real constraint — it becomes relevant mainly for very large websites with thousands of pages.
Is domain authority an official Google ranking factor?
No. Domain authority is a third-party estimate created by SEO software companies, not a metric Google itself publishes or confirms as a ranking factor. It's useful as a rough, directional comparison tool, not a precise measurement of how Google actually ranks a site.
What's the difference between a keyword and search intent?
A keyword is the literal words typed into the search bar. Search intent is the underlying reason behind that search — for example, the keyword "SEO" could carry informational intent (someone wants to learn what it is) or commercial intent (someone wants to hire help). Good content matches both.
Do I need to understand schema markup to do DIY SEO?
A basic understanding helps, but you don't need to write code yourself. Many website builders and plugins (like Yoast or Rank Math for WordPress) generate common schema types automatically once you fill in the relevant business or content information.
What does it mean if Google says my page isn't indexed?
It means that specific page isn't eligible to appear in search results at all, regardless of how well-optimized it is. Common causes include the page being brand new, a technical block in your robots.txt file, or Google judging the content too thin or duplicate to be worth including.
Terry has 30+ years in software and SEO. He’s the founder of Salterra Digital Services and SEO Spring Training, host of the Roundtable SEO Mastermind, and lead instructor at SEO University — teaching the exact tactics his team uses on client work.
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