SEO & AI Glossary

The degree of fluctuation in search engine rankings for a keyword or set of keywords over time, often spiking during Google algorithm updates.

Three DNS-based email authentication standards that verify a sender's identity and instruct recipient mail servers on handling failures.

The key performance indicators used to evaluate the health and growth trajectory of a Software-as-a-Service business.

SEO strategies tailored to software-as-a-service businesses, focusing on product-led content, comparison pages, and use-case targeting.

Structured data code added to a page's HTML that helps search engines understand its content and enables rich results in SERPs.

A design approach where scroll position drives meaningful changes — pinned sections, animated transitions, transformations of imagery and type as the user moves down the page.

A software system that indexes web content and returns ranked results in response to user queries — including Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and AI-powered answer engines.

The practice of gaining visibility in search engine results through both paid advertising (PPC) and organic optimisation (SEO) — though the term is often used for paid search specifically.

The practice of improving a website's visibility in organic search engine results to drive qualified traffic.

The page displayed by a search engine in response to a user's query, containing organic listings, paid ads, and various rich result features.

An expanded view of SEO that considers the full user experience from the SERP click through to on-page engagement, satisfaction, and task completion.

Google's experimental AI-powered search feature (now AI Overviews) that generates a conversational summary at the top of search results.

The underlying goal or purpose a user has when entering a search query—what they are actually trying to accomplish.

Ensuring that a web page's content type, format, and angle match what users are actually looking for when they search a target keyword.

Special commands typed into a search engine query to filter, refine, or expand results — used by SEOs for site audits, competitor research, and link prospecting.

The average number of times a keyword is searched per month across a search engine, used to gauge audience size and opportunity.

HTML that uses elements according to their intended meaning — headings, nav, article, section, aside — helping search engines understand content structure and hierarchy.

Search technology that understands the intent and contextual meaning of queries rather than matching keywords literally.

An NLP technique that identifies and extracts subjective opinions—positive, negative, or neutral—from text data.

The time a web server takes to respond to a browser's initial request — also known as Time to First Byte (TTFB) — a foundational factor in page speed and Core Web Vitals.