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Does all that SEO jargon that’s thrown around in your monthly reporting start to sound like a foreign language to you? Trust us, we’ve been there. That’s why we felt it was important to create the Digible SEO Dictionary! Our dictionary consists of important terms that will help clients get a better understanding of SEO, while also making reporting a lot easier to understand. So, grab a pen and paper and let’s get down to business.
Search engine bots are also known as crawlers or spiders, these bots are what crawl your site’s content and place the content it finds into the search engine’s index. Bots can also crawl your site at certain frequencies like weekly, monthly, etc. based on how your web developer has set up your sitemap. At times, you’ll need to keep an eye out for inflated spam traffic, which can be misinterpreted as bot traffic. These bots are crawlers with IP addresses (oftentimes from other countries) that consistently hit web pages - often times reloading 100 times per minute. This traffic is automatically found by Google to be spam so it will not cause data pulling issues - in most cases. This is not a common issue, and regular crawlers do not affect site traffic with their routine pulls.
This can also be referred to as “inbound links” which is when another website links to your website.
This can include a variety of searches/queries that include the brand or company’s name.
(i.e. The Lofts Apartments Denver, CO)
Citations help searchers find local businesses and can impact local search ranks. Citations are most commonly what listing management providers handle. Some prime examples of citations include Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, ILS (Zillow, Apartments.com, ApartmentGuide), etc.
This is the process of search engine bots finding your website pages, going through the content of your website, and discovering any new or updated pages that might need to be added to the search engines index. This is usually something that happens weekly or bi-weekly depending on your site directives in the code.
This is a free service provided by Google to boost your local visibility in the SERPs and on Google Maps. You can also add information about your business into this listing’s “Info” page like your business’s website, phone number, address, hours, review, question & answers, Google Posts, as well as pictures of the property.
A feature within GMB that allows businesses to create content directly within the SERPs. Users can find Google Posts at the bottom of their business’ knowledge panel. Google Posts have four different post options; What’s New, Event, Offer, and Product. What’s New Google Posts are live for 7 days, while the other post options time range varies based on the date range selected.
A feature within GMB that allows businesses to display their products (property floor plans) directly within the SERPs. Users can find these products in the business’ knowledge panel. These products are up indefinitely until you go in and manually change them or take them down.
Google can't see pictures, so image alt tags can provide Google bots better context/descriptions for the images on the site so the search engine crawlers can index the images properly. These also help users on your website who are blind or visually impaired better understand the images on your site when using screen readers.
The process of organizing and storing the content that was found on the website when it was crawled by bots.
This panel shows up in the SERPs for branded queries/searches and displays information about a business. The knowledge panel show information about a local business like the business name, address, phone number, hours, website, location, reviews, directions, and more.
The practice of increasing search visibility for brick and mortar local businesses.
Any online mention of the name, address, and phone number for a local business. Examples of local citations include Facebook, Yelp, ILS, etc.
These are queries that are typically three and four keyword phrases that are very specific to what the user is searching for.
(i.e. dog-friendly apartments in downtown Denver)
This is the snippet that is displayed in the SERPs under the meta title that essentially summarizes that page’s content and purpose for searchers. This snippet can be 155-160 characters max.
This is the title/name of a website’s page. This helps search engines know what a page’s content is about. This is the clickable title/name of a website’s page that is displayed within the SERPs. Typically you can have a maximum of 50-55 characters for meta titles, anything over that will get truncated in the SERPs. Best practice for meta titles would be including what the page is about, the property’s name, the term “apartments”, and the city if it can fit under the character limit.
(i.e. Sitemap | The Lofts Apartments in Denver)
It is important that your business’ name, address, and phone number is consistent and accurate across all citations, as this is an essential factor for improving a site's rank in the SERPs.
This includes searches/queries that do not contain the brand or business’s name.
(i.e. apartments near me)
This is when a website sends users and search engines to a different URL on the same domain from the one that the user or search engine requested. These are often used to redirect broken pages to live pages to create a better user experience. (Most common redirects include 301 and 302)
The practice of engaging with customers and prospects off-site via social media, reviews, etc.
This stands for the “search engine results page” - the page you receive after searching something in the search box via Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
This is an XML document containing a list of pages on your website that tells Google and other search engines what you want to be indexed. Sitemaps help make it easier for Google to find your site's pages. You can use free tools or work with web developers to build a sitemap and submit them directly to Google via Google Search Console for the most efficient crawling and indexing.
What users type into the search bar.
Phew, now that included quite a few definitions and to be honest, we’ve barely even scratched the surface of all SEO jargon! But that’s a rabbit hole we’ll go down another day. Hopefully, now you feel refreshed and educated on your SEO vocabulary and next month’s reporting will seem a lot clearer.
Wanna dive even deeper into the world of SEO? Hit us up!
