Like everyone else, you have only one thing in mind: to be first on Google and become the world reference in your field. But the god of the web is tough on business. After having tried passivity, with no result, you have decided to call upon a professional SEO to gain positions. However, faced with this hybrid being, whose language is a happy mix of English, Latin and html, you put on a brave face and nod without really understanding what’s going on. Don’t panic, I have listed for you the key words to integrate to keep face and communicate almost safely.
Algorithm
The beast to slaughter! Google, Facebook or Instagram, all of them live only by their algorithm. Behind this word, a set of rules and criteria, kept scrupulously secret, whose purpose is to achieve the ranking of content by the search engine. In order to be ranked, we must offer Google what appears to be the most relevant answer to the question asked.
Analytics
The judge of peace! Generally provided by Google, the Analytics cover all the data that measure the performance of a website. Among them, we find the unavoidable KPIs, key performance indicators, such as the number of unique visitors, visit time, bounce rate, click rate… In this matter, Google Analytics is generous, your mission is to know how to sort to keep those which are really revealing of your success!
Backlink
The Holy Grail of SEO! Backlink is the permanent quest of the SEO in search of positions. Behind this, a vicious mechanism. The more links there are pointing to a page hosting one of your contents, the more relevant this page will be judged by Google. Your mission: to collect a maximum of these links to gain authority. Be careful though, to do the job, these backlinks must be qualitative, thematic and relatively natural. So, no more cross-links between sites that would be… without any link between them!
Tags
The essential accessory! Title tag or meta description, both are essential to SEO. Their role, describe in 65 characters for the title, 155 for the description, the content of the page and especially make the user want to click to generate free traffic. For this, no secret, you must find the perfect balance between target keywords and description attractive enough to arouse curiosity. As for the H1, H2, H3 tags, they correspond to the different levels of titling of your content. The bigger the title, the smaller its reference number. It’s logical!
Black hat
The borderline strategies! In the world of SEO, there are two clans: those who respect the recommendations of Google to the letter, the white hat, and the others, the black hat. In the black hat gang, adventurers who allow themselves to transgress the rules set by the engine to force the indexing of content by the algorithm. Often, it works. Just until Google notices. Then suddenly, one morning, you have nothing. Your site is banned from the Internet.
Buyer persona
The famous ideal customer! This is the one you must draw up a portrait of in order to understand how to make him give in to your temptation. Your objective: to identify who your target really is, what they are sensitive to, where to find them and how to convince them to buy. On average, a company’s buyers personae have 6 faces, including the customer to whom you don’t want to sell anything. This is a concept that must be integrated to avoid spending money, energy and vitality with a target that will take without ever giving!
Call to action
CTA is your secret weapon, the magic button that will lead you to success. Your mission: find THE wording that will trigger the movement, in this case, a click and then another until your objective has been reached. From the “Book an Awesome Demo” lead generator to the classic “Learn More”, it’s all about wording and color. To entice the customer, aim for precision and enthusiasm.
Convert
When a digital enthusiast is happy to have converted, or even transformed, it means that he reached his goal by getting you to do what he wanted you to do; that you responded positively to his call to action. Let’s be clear: you gave up valuable information. At random, your email address or your credit card number. In SEO, once ranked on a page, the number of conversions is a key indicator to measure the success of an action.
Semantic Cocoon
When your SEO suggests you to install a semantic cocoon, it’s because he’s caught with a furious desire to roll in a bed of keywords. His ambition is to create a silo in which to align all the queries likely to generate useful traffic. Here, the idea of the cocoon translates into a well-ordered tree structure, where the declinations of keywords are aligned, connected by well-anchored internal links. A technique that certainly makes you gain places, but does not guarantee conversions for all that.
Crawler
A real simulator, the crawler is a small (ro)bot, sent by Google to navigate from link to link until it finds the web page that offers the most relevant answer to the query. If Google has its own little army, which regularly wanders around to review your internal mesh, your SEO can also play with his own crawlers to understand the operation, isolate the flaws in the linking of pages and find the optimizations that will propel you in the golden triangle, the first 3 positions of a query.
Oncrawl SEO Crawler
CTR
Click-Through Rate is one of the metrics to watch closely to measure your return on SEO investment. After the glory of having landed in the first place, the click-through rate will translate the appetence of your audience for the content you offer. To calculate it, it’s simple, just divide the number of visitors who clicked on the link by the total number of impressions. In theory, the closer you get to the top, the higher the CTR. If, in practice, you see the opposite, it’s time to dive back into your tagging to reawaken your readers’ interest.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is one of the safest ways to get banned from Google, as it is contrary to good practices. Clearly, it is simply copying and pasting the content of a page on another, to the comma. As a result, Google finds itself with two identical pages to rank, which puts it in a bind, forcing it to give preference to one of the two. This is all the more annoying since the first to publish is not always the first to be indexed. To avoid any ambiguity, Google simply forbids to appropriate a content written by another, in the strictest respect of copyright.
Featured snippet
Featured snippets are the short extracts that appear at the top of the page on Google as soon as you type in a question type query. The goal, to put forward the essence of the answer, without having to click. This is called Zero Position. Good or bad plan? In this matter, everyone has their own religion. Some people see it as an opportunity to get all the clicks, others see it as a way for Google to capture the information without redirecting the traffic.
Search intent
Clearly, when it comes to SEO, it’s the intent that counts. Your goal is to understand the expectations that lead your user to type a query in order to provide them with the expected answer to their search. Globally, search intentions are divided into 4 categories:
- Informational queries: the user is looking for an answer to his question, he wants to learn, understand something. For example: how to change a seal?
- Navigational requests: here, the Internet user is looking to land on a specific page without knowing the address. He therefore asks Google for a boost, generally by specifying the brand and the function. Ex: Darty customer service
- Transactional requests: the Internet user is looking to acquire something without having yet fully decided where, what and how. These requests are easily recognizable by their semantic nature. For example, “flower delivery in Paris”.
- Commercial queries: with these queries, the Internet user seeks to finalize his purchasing decision. At the crossroads of information and transaction, they include keywords such as “best”, “comparative”, “good plan”… e.g.: best hotel in Paris.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a totally outdated SEO technique in 2021. A real affront to the artificial intelligence with which Google is equipped, it consists of producing content around a single keyword, repeated by dozens and declined in synonyms, in the hope of ranking on the query. Besides the stylistic heaviness, this method is definitely ineffective in semantic SEO.
Internal linking
Like the human body, your site needs to connect its different elements to form a whole. To do this, you place links here and there to navigate from one page to another. The internal mesh is the panoramic view of all the links attached to the same domain. When the link points to a page outside this domain, it is called an external link.
Link Building
Complementary to internal linking, the creation of external links can feed the reputation of your website. The more links a page gets from another site, which points to it, the more Google will consider it an authority in its sector and give it visibility in search results.
Long Tail
A query qualified as long tail is simply made of a long sequence of keywords. Generally, the more precise the user types a keyword, the clearer his intention is, and then his potential to convert. Another SEO advantage of this technique is that long tail queries usually generate a lower search volume. They are therefore more accessible and less competitive. In this case, you should think in cumulative traffic!
Pillar Page
Pillar Content is, as its name suggests, the foundation of your semantic SEO strategy. Its goal: to concentrate all the information on a given theme in a single, clearly structured space with plenty of internal links. Your goal: to include all the keywords of the semantic cocoon as well as the possibility to explore the subject in more detail thanks to links to pages dedicated to the most competitive queries.
Ranking
Ranking is the unit of measurement of your SEO performance, and reflects the ranking of your domain among the results displayed by Google on a given query. Clearly, on page 2, nothing happens. And to get to page 1, you need to be patient and technical. The grail, staying stuck between position 1 and 3 ad vitam eternam.
Redirection
Like on the highway, redirecting consists of sending traffic from point A to point B, using a dedicated route: the redirection link. A relatively common use when the site is being redesigned and the urls already indexed are modified. Otherwise, the generated traffic ends up directly in the trash!
Request
A query is the request sent by an Internet user to a search engine. Formulated in the form of keywords, it translates the search intention. Depending on the goal, we are used to associate certain keywords, such as “buy”, “near”, …
SERP
Pure SEO jargon, this acronym of Search Engine Results Page is simply the results page displayed by Google when you express a specific request. SERPs are an obsession of SEOs and reflect the ranking of content that can, according to the Google algorithm, provide a relevant answer to the request validated by keyboard or voice.
Sitemap
If your site was a book, the sitemap would be its summary. Intended to help the search engines to identify all the urls attached to the domain, then all the pages of your site, the sitemap is a must that it is recommended to keep up to date to enjoy all its benefits.
Bounce rate
The sentence! Among the KPIs to watch closely, the bounce rate reflects the number of visitors who left your site after visiting a single page. Paired with the time spent on the site, it demonstrates the interest in your content. Not to be neglected in your SEO strategy, because generating traffic is good, keeping it and converting it is better!
User Experience
Sometimes abused by SEOs, user experience is about to take its revenge. Now imposed by Google as a key ranking factor, the UX will weigh more and more in the indexation. For now, Google simply expects your site to have a correct display speed, interactivity and visual stability. All of this, transcribed into metrics not to be exceeded… This is the Google Page Experience!
SEO is constantly evolving, specialists regularly add new words and expressions to their vocabulary. To keep up with the latest developments, you need to know the right terms and use them wisely. This glossary gives you an overview of the essential terms used daily by SEOs, free to complete it with elements specific to your needs!
