SEO glossary
The terms, defined plainly.
Definitions of the search vocabulary that comes up inside SearchDone, written to be understood rather than to rank. Where a term is commonly oversold, that is said.
Cannibalisation
Competing with yourself
- Two or more of your own pages competing for the same query. Search engines have to choose, signals get split between the candidates, and the result is often that neither page ranks as well as one good page would. Usually fixed by consolidating the pages or making their intent genuinely different.
Canonical
rel=canonical
- A tag telling search engines which URL is the authoritative version of a page when several show near-identical content. Getting it wrong is one of the few on-page mistakes that can remove a page from the index entirely, which is why SearchDone treats canonical changes as higher risk than most.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Clicks ÷ impressions
- The share of people who saw your listing and clicked it. Expected CTR falls steeply with position, so the useful question is never the raw number but whether it is above or below what that position normally earns. Below-expectation CTR at a good position is nearly always a title and description problem.
Content decay
Slow decline
- The gradual loss of clicks and position as a page ages, competitors improve, or the query's intent shifts. Invisible week to week and obvious across a quarter, which is why it needs to be measured period on period rather than watched.
Core Web Vitals
LCP, CLS, INP
- Google's page-experience measurements: how quickly the main content renders, how much the layout jumps, and how responsive the page is to input. Real but frequently overstated — they rarely outweigh relevance, and the fixes are usually architectural rather than something a tool can apply.
Crawl budget
Attention, rationed
- The finite effort a search engine spends crawling your site. Rarely a concern below a few thousand URLs, and a serious one for large ecommerce catalogues where filter and sort parameters can generate near-infinite crawlable combinations that consume the budget without earning anything.
Impression
You were seen
- Your page appeared in results for a query. High impressions with few clicks means you are visible but not compelling, or ranking below the positions that earn clicks — two very different problems with two different fixes.
Indexability
Can it be listed
- Whether a page is eligible to appear in results at all. Broken by a noindex tag, a robots block, a canonical pointing elsewhere, or an error status. An accidental noindex on a production site is the single most expensive mistake in technical SEO.
Internal linking
How pages connect
- Links between your own pages. They distribute authority, tell search engines which pages matter, and help discovery. Orphan pages — reachable by no internal link — are a common and easily fixed waste.
Orphan page
Unlinked
- A page with no internal links pointing to it. It may be in the sitemap and technically indexable, but nothing on the site suggests it matters, and users are unlikely to find it by browsing.
Position
Average rank
- Where your page appears in results, averaged across impressions. An average is a blunt instrument: a page averaging position eight might rank third for some queries and fifteenth for others, so it is a starting point rather than an answer.
Redirect chain
A → B → C
- A redirect pointing at another redirect. Each hop adds latency and dilutes the signal being passed. Safe to flatten by pointing the first redirect directly at the final destination, which is one of the more clearly automatable technical fixes.
SERP
Search engine results page
- What is actually returned for a query — increasingly not ten blue links but a mix of AI overviews, snippets, People Also Ask, local packs, shopping and video. Ranking first below three other features is not the same as ranking first.
Striking distance
Nearly there
- A page ranking just outside the positions that earn meaningful clicks — commonly positions five to fifteen — on a query that already has real impression volume. Usually the cheapest wins available, because the demand is proven and the page already ranks.
Structured data
JSON-LD, schema
- Machine-readable markup describing what a page is about. It helps engines interpret a page correctly and can enable richer result formats. It is not a ranking lever, and no markup makes an AI assistant cite you.
Thin content
Not enough substance
- A page with too little of value to justify its existence — often auto-generated, duplicated across a template, or a location page with nothing but the place name changed. Length is not the measure; usefulness is.
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