SEO Terms Explained: A 60-Term Glossary for Business Owners

This glossary is for business owners and managers in India who receive SEO reports or proposals and want to understand them without a marketing background. After reading it you can question a report line by line, spot vanity numbers and brief an agency clearly.

SEO terms explained: how to use this glossary

Terms are grouped by where you meet them. The fifteen most searched terms get a heading of their own; the rest are defined in a sentence or two in lists, with the Indian angle noted where it matters.

Search results terms: SERP, impressions, CTR, local pack, rich results and AI Overviews

What is a SERP?

SERP stands for search engine results page: the page Google shows after a search. It now holds ads, an AI Overview, a map with three businesses, questions, videos and shopping tiles before the organic results, which is why position alone no longer tells you how visible you are.

What are impressions?

An impression is counted each time your page appears on a SERP, whether or not the searcher scrolled to it or clicked. Rising impressions mean Google is testing your pages for more searches; they are the earliest signal that SEO is working, usually months before clicks move.

What is CTR?

Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage. If your page appeared 1,000 times and was clicked 40 times, CTR is 4%. A page in position three with 2% CTR has a title problem, and fixing the title is often the cheapest SEO win.

Search Console metric	Meaning	Healthy sign	Warning sign
Impressions	Times a page appeared in results	Rising month on month	Sudden drop after a site change
Clicks	Visits from Google search	Rising with impressions	Flat while impressions rise
CTR	Clicks divided by impressions	3 to 10% for positions 1 to 5	Under 1% in the top five
Average position	Mean rank across all searches shown	Falling number (closer to 1)	Rising number with new keywords is normal

Local pack

The local pack is the map block with three business listings that Google shows for searches with local intent, such as "CA near me" or "dentist in Rajkot". It is powered by Google Business Profiles, not by your website alone, and for most service businesses in Gujarat it brings more calls than the organic listings below it.

Rich results

Rich results are search listings with extra elements: star ratings, prices, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs, video thumbnails, event dates. They come from schema markup and earn a higher CTR than plain listings; Google decides per query whether to show them.

What is an AI Overview?

An AI Overview is the generated answer Google places at the top of many SERPs, built from several web pages with links to its sources. Being one of those sources brings visibility even when clicks fall. It appears most for informational and comparison searches.

• Organic result: an unpaid listing earned through relevance, as opposed to an ad.
• Featured snippet: a highlighted answer box above organic results pulled from one page.
• People also ask: expandable related questions on the SERP; each is a content idea.
• Knowledge panel: the box on the right about an entity such as a company or person.
• Sitelinks: extra links under a result pointing to a site's inner pages, usually for brand searches.
• Zero-click search: a search where the user gets the answer on the SERP and visits no site.
• Branded search: a query containing your company name; a growth signal for brand awareness.

Crawling and indexing terms: crawl and index meaning, canonical URL and more

Crawl and index meaning

Crawling is Google's bot visiting your page and reading it. Indexing is Google storing that page in its database so it can appear in results. A page can be crawled and still not indexed if Google judges it thin or duplicate; Search Console shows this as "Crawled, currently not indexed". No index means no ranking, so indexing problems come first.

Canonical URL meaning

A canonical URL is the version of a page you tell Google to treat as the original when several addresses show the same content, such as with and without a trailing slash or with tracking parameters. Wrong canonicals are a common reason a page that should rank quietly sends its credit elsewhere.

• XML sitemap: a file listing the pages you want indexed, submitted in Search Console.
• Robots.txt: a file telling crawlers which parts of the site not to visit.
• Noindex: a tag telling Google not to list a page; useful for thank-you and ad pages.
• 301 redirect: a permanent forward from an old address to a new one that passes ranking credit.
• 404: the status for a page that does not exist; many of them from broken links waste crawls.
• Crawl budget: how many pages Google will fetch from your site in a period; a large-site concern.
• Google Search Console: Google's free tool showing searches, indexing status and errors for your site.
• Core Web Vitals: Google's page experience measures: load speed, interaction delay and layout stability.
• Mobile-first indexing: Google judges your site by its mobile version, which most Indian visitors use anyway.

Keyword terms: keyword difficulty, search intent and long tail keywords

Keyword difficulty

Keyword difficulty is an estimate of how hard it is to rank on page one for a phrase, usually based on the link strength of the pages already there. Scores come from third-party tools, not Google, so treat them as a rough guide. A new site should target low difficulty phrases first, often those with a city name attached.

Search intent

Search intent is what the searcher wants to do: learn (informational), compare (commercial), buy or enquire (transactional) or reach a specific site (navigational). Google ranks pages that match the intent, so a product page will not rank for a "how to" search and a blog post will not rank for "buy".

Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are longer, specific phrases with low individual volume, such as "payroll software for 40 employees in Rajkot", as opposed to head terms like "payroll software". They convert better, rank more easily and together make up most of a site's traffic. Our guide on keyword research for Indian businesses shows how to find them.

• Search volume: estimated monthly searches for a phrase; Tier-2 city terms are often tiny but high value.
• Head term: a short, high-volume, high-competition phrase such as "ERP software".
• Keyword cannibalisation: two of your own pages competing for the same phrase, so neither ranks well.
• Title tag: the page title shown as the clickable headline in results; the strongest on-page signal.
• Meta description: the summary under the title in results; it affects CTR, not ranking.
• H1 and headings: the page's main heading and section headings; they tell Google the page structure.
• Alt text: a text description of an image for accessibility and image search.
• Internal link: a link from one of your pages to another; it passes relevance and helps indexing.
• Anchor text: the clickable words of a link; descriptive anchors help the target page.
• Thin content: pages with little unique value; they drag down the whole site.
• Duplicate content: the same text on several URLs, yours or others; Google picks one and ignores the rest.
• E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, judged most strictly for health and finance content.

Link terms: what is a backlink and the domain authority meaning

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Google treats it as a vote of confidence weighted by the linking site's authority and relevance. A link from an industry association or a Gujarat business news site counts; a hundred links from directories nobody visits count for little and can harm you.

Domain authority meaning

Domain authority is a score from 1 to 100 that third-party tools assign to estimate a site's overall link strength. Google does not use it or publish any equivalent. It is useful for rough comparison and useless as a goal; an agency promising to "raise your DA" is promising to move a number Google does not look at.

• Referring domain: a unique website that links to you; one link each from ten sites beats ten from one.
• Nofollow: a link attribute asking Google not to pass credit; common on social sites and comments.
• Link building: the work of earning backlinks through content, PR, partnerships and listings.
• Citation: a mention of your business name, address and phone on another site, with or without a link; a local ranking factor.
• NAP consistency: keeping name, address and phone identical everywhere, down to the +91 format.
• Toxic links and disavow: spammy links pointing at you, and the Search Console file that tells Google to ignore them.

Local, structured data and AI search terms: what is schema and the GEO meaning in SEO

What is schema?

Schema, or schema markup, is code added to a page that labels its facts in a standard vocabulary: this is a business, this is its address, this is a product with this price, these are FAQs. Google uses it to understand the page and show rich results, and AI systems read it to cite you accurately. See our schema markup for local business guide for the implementation.

GEO meaning in SEO

GEO stands for generative engine optimization: making your content the source that AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews quote when they answer a question. It overlaps with SEO but rewards direct answers, facts with numbers and consistent information across the web. In an older sense "geo" in SEO simply meant geographic targeting, such as city pages; context tells you which is meant.

• Google Business Profile: the free listing that powers your map pack presence, reviews and hours.
• Local SEO: ranking for searches with a place or "near me" in them, through the profile, reviews, citations and city pages.
• Structured data: another name for schema markup, usually written as JSON-LD.
• LLM: large language model, the technology behind ChatGPT and Gemini that generates answers from text it has read.
• AI citation: a link or mention of your page inside an AI generated answer.
• Hreflang: a tag telling Google which language version of a page to show, needed for English and Gujarati versions.
• Entity: a thing Google recognises as distinct, such as your company; consistent names and schema strengthen it.
• Technical SEO: the site-level work on speed, crawling, indexing and structure that lets content rank.
• Off-page SEO: everything done outside your site to raise its authority, mostly links and mentions.
• Algorithm update: a change to how Google ranks, announced or not; traffic shifts around these dates.
• Manual action: a penalty applied by a Google reviewer, shown in Search Console, usually for spam.

What we have seen in Rajkot: the terms owners misread most

JK Tech Hub reviews SEO reports with business owners across Saurashtra every month, and three misunderstandings keep costing people money. The first is impressions presented as results. A report for a bearings exporter in Rajkot showed impressions up 300% while clicks were flat; the pages were appearing for irrelevant searches. Once the owner understood CTR, the conversation moved to which searches those impressions came from.

The second is domain authority as a target. A pharma distributor in Ahmedabad had paid for months of directory links to push a third-party score while enquiries stayed flat. Learning that Google ignores that number moved the budget into content for buyer searches.

The third is the local pack. A two-outlet pharmacy in Rajkot assumed "ranking" meant organic position, while most of its calls came from the map block. Once the owner saw that the local pack depends on the Google Business Profile, reviews and citations, the effort went where the customers were.

How to use these terms when reading a report or hiring an agency

1. Ask for clicks and enquiries alongside impressions, split by branded and non-branded searches.
2. Ask which pages are indexed and how many are not, and why.
3. Ask for the search intent behind each target keyword and the page meant to serve it.
4. Ask for referring domains gained, with the list, not a domain authority figure.
5. Ask how local pack ranking and AI citations are being tracked, not just organic positions.

Related reading and next step

Go deeper with keyword research for Indian businesses, the website SEO audit checklist, how to choose an SEO company in Rajkot and the generative engine optimization guide. If you want a report that uses these terms honestly, see our SEO expert in Rajkot page. Send your current SEO report through the contact page or WhatsApp and we will explain it line by line and give a fixed quote for the work that matters.