SEO glossary

The jargon, in plain English — so you never have to learn it.

Every term that comes up inside SearchDone, defined to be understood, with a note on what the product does about it. Where a term is commonly oversold, that's said too.

You don't need to know any of this to use SearchDone. Your action plan is written in plain English; this page is here for the curious.

Cannibalisation Competing with yourself: Two or more of your own pages competing for the same search. Google has to choose, the credit gets split, and often neither ranks as well as one good page would. SearchDone shows you both pages with their numbers so you can pick a winner.
Canonical The page's official address: A tag telling Google which version of a page is the real one when several look alike. Getting it wrong is one of the few on-page mistakes that can remove a page from Google entirely. SearchDone finds missing and wrong canonicals and fixes them — always with your approval, because of that risk.
Click-through rate (CTR) Clicks ÷ impressions: The share of people who saw your listing and clicked it. It falls steeply with position, so the useful question is never the raw number but whether it's above or below what that position normally earns. A low rate at a good position is nearly always a title and description problem — which SearchDone can rewrite for you.
Content decay Slow decline: The gradual loss of clicks as a page ages, competitors improve, or what people mean by the search shifts. Invisible week to week and obvious across a quarter. SearchDone checks for it every week and can rewrite the page in your voice.
Core Web Vitals Page speed and stability: Google's page-experience measurements: how quickly the main content appears, how much the layout jumps, and how responsive the page is. Real but frequently overstated — they rarely outweigh relevance, and the fixes are usually a rebuild rather than a setting.
Crawl budget Google's attention, rationed: The finite effort Google spends reading your site. Rarely a concern below a few thousand pages, and a serious one for large shops where filter and sort options generate near-infinite combinations that consume it without earning anything.
Impression You were seen: Your page appeared in Google's results for a search. High impressions with few clicks means you're visible but not compelling, or ranking below the positions that earn clicks — two different problems with two different fixes.
Indexability Can Google list it: 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. An accidental noindex on a live site is the single most expensive mistake in technical SEO.
IndexNow Tell search engines now: A way of telling Bing, Yandex and other search engines that a page has changed, so they re-read it in minutes instead of whenever they next get round to it. SearchDone does this automatically after every verified change.
Internal linking How your pages connect: Links between your own pages. They spread authority, tell Google which pages matter, and help people find things. Broken ones lose visitors; SearchDone finds and removes them with your approval.
Metadata Title and description: The headline and blurb Google shows for your page in its results. The first thing a searcher sees and the cheapest thing on a site to improve. SearchDone writes better ones and saves them to your site once you approve.
Orphan page Unlinked: A page with no links pointing to it from the rest of your site. It may be technically listable, but nothing suggests it matters, and visitors are unlikely to find it by browsing.
Position Average rank: Where your page appears in results, averaged across all the times it was shown. A blunt instrument: a page averaging eighth might rank third for some searches and fifteenth for others, so it's a starting point rather than an answer.
Redirect chain A → B → C: A redirect pointing at another redirect. Each hop adds delay and leaks credit. Safe to flatten by pointing the first redirect straight at the final destination.
SERP Search engine results page: What Google actually shows for a search — increasingly not ten blue links but a mix of AI overviews, snippets, questions, maps, shopping and video. Ranking first below three other features isn't the same as ranking first.
Striking distance Nearly there: A page ranking just outside the positions that earn real clicks — roughly positions four to twenty — for a search that already has volume. Usually the cheapest wins on any site, because the demand is proven and the page already ranks. SearchDone finds these first.
Structured data Behind-the-scenes labels: Machine-readable code describing what a page is about. It helps Google understand a page correctly and can unlock 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 existing — often auto-generated, copied across a template, or a location page with only the place name changed. Length isn't the measure; usefulness is.

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