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SEO & GEO glossary

71 definitions of the vocabulary you will hear in a pitch, an audit or a reporting meeting — from crawl budget to AI Overviews. Every entry answers the question first, then explains why it matters and what it changes in practice.

AllFundamentalsTechnical SEOContentLinks & authorityLocal SEOMeasurementAI search & GEOBuying SEO

C

Core update

A core update is a broad, periodic revision of how Google assesses quality and relevance across all queries. It re-sorts winners and losers without targeting any specific site.

CPC (cost per click)

CPC is the price an advertiser pays for one click in a search auction. In SEO it is used as a proxy for the commercial value of a query.

E

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: the framework Google's quality raters use to judge content, and a useful proxy for what its systems reward.

K

Keyword difficulty

Keyword difficulty is a tool-specific score, usually 0-100, estimating how hard it would be to rank on page one for a query — mostly derived from the backlink profiles of the pages already there.

Keyword research

Keyword research is the process of finding the queries a market actually types, estimating their demand and commercial value, and grouping them into the pages that will serve them.

L

Long-tail keyword

A long-tail keyword is a specific, low-volume query — usually three words or more — that faces less competition and converts far better than the broad head term it belongs to.

S

SEA (paid search)

SEA is advertising on search results, paid per click through an auction. It buys immediate visibility that stops the moment the budget stops.

Search intent

Search intent is the goal behind a query — to learn, to compare, to buy or to reach a specific site — and matching it is the single strongest predictor of whether a page ranks.

Search volume

Search volume is the estimated number of times a query is searched per month. Every third-party figure is a model with wide error bars, not a measurement.

SEO (search engine optimization)

SEO is the practice of earning visibility in the unpaid results of search engines by making a site technically accessible, genuinely useful and credibly referenced elsewhere on the web.

SERP (search engine results page)

A SERP is the page a search engine returns for a query. Modern SERPs mix organic links with ads, featured snippets, map packs, shopping carousels and AI-generated answers.