These are general SEO definitions that will help you to better understand search engine optimization and how it works.
Content Relevance
This measures how relevant your website is to the search intent, needs, interests, or preferences of your reader. It’s very important to generate relevant, useful content to rank on Google. Google always wants to give the searcher the best possible answer to whatever they searched for.
Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content is the collection of pages on your website that you most want to rank for in search engine results. You would likely also use internal linking to point many other pages to these pages, further demonstrating their importance to users and to Google.
Crawler
A crawler is software designed to browse the internet systematically. Crawlers allow search engines to discover and process website pages so that they can be indexed and shown in search results.
Customer Journey
The customer journey is the path a user takes from when they first become aware of your brand, right through to the eventual purchase of your product or service, and even their experiences beyond the point of purchase. It’s very important to both map out what journey you would like your user to take, as well as check the journeys they actually take. If you have this information, you can see where they might be deviating from your plan and adjust your site and/or strategy accordingly.
Duplicate Content
This is content that appears on the web in more than one place. There are tools you can use to scan your site for duplicate content. You can use Siteliner to check your website. Aim to stay below 15% duplicate content.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is website content that doesn’t go out of date and is continually relevant to readers over an extended period – often years. It addresses common problems or questions many people have. It also doesn’t need frequent updates to remain relevant. Example: You could write a blog post about “how to write a book”. The information doesn’t change and it’s a topic people will be interested in long term.
Gated Content
This is content that visitors can only access after providing their contact information. Example: They need to submit a contact form with their name, email address and phone number, before being able to download a specialised eBook.
Google Algorithm
This is a set of rules that’s used by Google to rank matching results to a user’s search query. Google updates their algorithm often so that websites can’t cheat the system to rank higher in search results. There are major updates, but also plenty of minor ones. They update their algorithm 500-600 times per year.
Google Analytics (SEO Tool)
Google Analytics is Google’s free website tracking tool. It’s used to track website visitors and analyze how they interact with your website. It’s extremely important to have this setup on your website so that you can track your traffic.
Google Business Profile (SEO Tool)
This is a free business listing from Google that shows up in maps and web search results. Most often, you need a physical address for your workspace to qualify for a Google Business Profile. These are great for SEO because you can update your profile with a lot of relevant information. More importantly, people can leave you Google Reviews. These reviews require reviewers to post from verified Gmail accounts and therefore are more valuable. They demonstrate to users (and to Google) the quality of service customers might receive from you.
Google Search Console (SEO Tool)
This is another free (and very important) tool from Google that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s search results. You can track search impressions, click through rates, search queries, popular pages, and much more.
Holistic SEO
This is the practice of improving ALL aspects of your website to rank higher in search engines.
Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is when a single website targets the same keyword across multiple posts or pages. This is not good for SEO as it means your website is competing with itself for the top spot in the search rankings, which reduces the strength each of the pages with the same keyword. You should be targeting one keyword per page or post on your site.
Keyword Ranking
Keyword ranking is the organic ranking position in the search results for a particular keyword. This means that if a page on your website is in position 3 of page 1 of Google’s search results for ‘dog collars’, then your keyword ranking for the term ‘dog collars’ is 3.
Landing Page
A landing page is a website page where a visitor “lands” after clicking on a link in a specific marketing campaign or from somewhere else (like search results). Landing pages can be intentional (a button from an email newsletter link to a specific page). They can also be unintentional (Google might rank a random page on your website that you had not intended to rank).
Local SEO
Local SEO is when you optimize your online presence to rank higher in relevant LOCAL searches. This is especially important when optimizing for a geographical business. Example: A local bakery that can only efficiently serve customers within a particular distance from their premises.
Long-Tail Keyword
This is a phrase that’s a low-volume search query on a specific topic, example: ‘men’s black winter jacket to buy in New York’. These keywords are often easier to rank for. You should start with more of these when you begin your SEO campaign. As you rank for these, you can move on to trying to rank for more general keywords.
Organic Search Results
Organic results are search results that you have not paid a search engine to rank for you. They are not part of a paid search ad campaign (i.e. pay per click), and they can’t be influenced by advertisers. Organic SEO aims to boost your organic search results. This way, your site naturally rises in search results because it offers useful and relevant content to searchers.
Organic Traffic
This is the website traffic that results from your website’s ORGANIC search results. People are much more likely to click on organic results, rather than paid ads. It’s really important to improve your organic results as much as possible.
Primary Keyword
A primary keyword is the single, main keyword around which a web page is created and optimized. Think of it as the most important keyword on your website. All your other keywords are either directly or indirectly related to your primary keyword.
Search Intent
Search intent is the reason the searcher searchers for their particular query in a search engine. Different search intents can indicate different things, like potential click through rates or potential sales. Example: A user who searches ‘buy black boots South Africa’ is much more likely to buy something, while someone who searches ‘boots or shoes’ is more likely to be researching something. It’s also very important to conder the user’s search intent when creating content for a keyword. Think carefully about what the search intent of your keyword is and create content that answers the search intent. This will give your content the best chance of ranking.
Search Term
A search term (or search query) is a word or set of words that a person enters on a search engine like Google to generate specific results. Usually, you would try to match your targeted keywords to the search terms you think your target market will use.
Search Volume
Search volume is the number of times, on average, users look for a particular search query each month. Example: If your targeted keyword is ‘red hats’ and the search volume in your selected area is 10 000, then approximately 10 000 searches were made for the term ‘red hats’ on average across the preceding 12 months.
Short-Tail Keywords
This is the opposite of a long-tail keyword. It’s a much shorter phrase, or sometimes a single word, which means it’s a far more general term. Therefore, it has higher search volumes and much more competition. This makes it a more difficult term to rank for.
Thin Content
This is page content that has little or no value for the user. Not all pages need to rank on search engines. However, if you have a page you want to rank, its content must be clear, well-researched, and useful. It shouldn’t be thin and meaningless.
Transactional Query
This is a search query where someone is looking to purchase something but hasn’t yet decided where to buy it from. It shows a very clear search intent – the user intends to buy. You should be optimising sales pages (like product pages on a shop) for these types of search queries.
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