SEO + Digital Marketing Glossary

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AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation — the practice of structuring content to be cited in AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT answers.
AI Overviews: Google's generative summary that appears above the 10 blue links on ~52% of high-intent commercial queries (Q1 2026).
Anchor text: The clickable text of a backlink. Healthy mix: 60% branded, 25% generic, 12% partial-match, 3% exact-match.
Authority Score: Semrush's proprietary domain-authority metric (0-100). Roughly correlates 0.84 with Ahrefs DR in our sampled data.

Backlink: A hyperlink from one website to another. PageRank flows through them; without them organic ranking ceiling is low.
Black-hat SEO: Tactics that violate Google's spam policies — PBNs, cloaking, doorway pages, paid link networks. We don't do any of these.

Citation: A web-mention of your business NAP (Name/Address/Phone). 50+ local citations on consistent NAP is map-pack table-stakes.
Core Web Vitals: Google's page-experience signals: LCP (load), INP (interaction), CLS (visual stability). Tier-1 ranking factor since 2021.
CPA: Cost per acquisition — what you paid to win a conversion. The single most useful paid-ads efficiency metric.

Disavow: Telling Google to ignore specified backlinks. Used to neutralise toxic links you didn't create. Last-resort tool.
DR (Domain Rating): Ahrefs' proprietary 0-100 domain-authority metric. The de-facto SEO reputation score editors check before responding to outreach.

E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Google's framework for evaluating content quality — heavily weighted in YMYL niches.
Editorial backlink: A link earned through outreach where a real editor placed it in real article body context. Tier-1 in our taxonomy.

GBP (Google Business Profile): The free Google product that powers the map-pack 3-pack. Owns ~40% of local-search traffic. Different algorithm from web search.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation — alternative term for AEO. Same discipline, different acronym preferred by some agencies.
GSC: Google Search Console — Google's free webmaster diagnostics tool. Owns impression + click data for every URL Google has indexed.

Helpful Content System: Google's 2022+ algorithmic system that penalises thin, automated, or templated content. Per-page uniqueness is the threshold.
Hreflang: HTML attribute telling Google which language/region a page targets. Critical for multi-language sites; misconfigured hreflang is a top-5 international SEO issue.

IndexNow: Open protocol (Microsoft + Yandex; partial Google support) that pings search engines to crawl a new URL. One of our 4 indexer signals.
Indexing: The process of Google adding a URL to its searchable index. Unindexed = invisible. Median first-crawl time across our last 90 days: 38 hours.

Local SEO: Optimisation for map-pack visibility. ~40% GBP + 30% citations/reviews + 30% on-site. Different algorithm from organic web search.

Map pack: The 3-result Google Maps cluster shown above the 10 blue links for local queries. Different ranking factors from organic web search.
Mass-page SEO: Programmatically generating hundreds-to-thousands of unique pages from structured data (cities, procedures, products). Survives Helpful Content System only when each page has substantive per-entity uniqueness.

NAP: Name + Address + Phone. The three citation fields that must be byte-identical across 50+ directories for Local SEO to work.
Nofollow: HTML link attribute telling Google not to pass PageRank. Common on user-generated content. Mixed ~15% nofollow share is healthier than 100% dofollow.

On-page SEO: Optimisation directly on the URL: title, meta, headings, internal links, content depth, topical clusters. The bridge between technical and link-building.

PBN: Private Blog Network — a single owner running multiple "independent" blogs to sell paid backlinks. Black-hat. We refuse to use them.
PMax: Google's Performance Max ad campaign type. Black-box automation across all Google surfaces. ~60% of most accounts' spend now.
Programmatic SEO: Generating SEO pages from structured data templates. Different from mass-page; programmatic is the technique, mass-page is the deliverable.

Re-queue: Resubmitting a URL to our indexer if Google didn't crawl it on the first signal-fire. Auto-included in every paid indexer order.
ROAS: Return on ad spend — revenue divided by ad cost. E-commerce target: 3-5× typical, 6-8× for well-optimised accounts.

Schema markup: Structured data (JSON-LD) that tells Google what your page IS. LocalBusiness, Service, Product, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList are the must-haves.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page — what Google returns for a query. Modern SERPs have AI Overview, knowledge panels, map pack, before the classic 10 blue links.
Server-side GTM: Tag Manager running on your server (not client). Recovers the 20-40% of conversion attribution lost to iOS 14.5 + cookie deprecation.
Speakable schema: Markup that flags passages ready to be cited verbatim by AI search. Tier-1 GEO/AEO signal.

Tier-1 backlink: A backlink from a DR60+ real editorial publisher, do-follow, integrated into article body. The three tests must all pass.
Tier-2 backlink: A backlink from DR30-60 niche sites. Useful for amplifying tier-1 placements + diversifying anchor profile.
Topical authority: How much Google trusts your domain on a specific topic. Built via content depth + topical clusters + niche-relevant backlinks.

White-hat SEO: Tactics that comply with Google's spam policies. Slower than black-hat but defensible across algorithm updates. The only kind we sell.
Wongnai: Thailand's dominant local review platform — equivalent to Yelp in scope, but more deeply integrated into Thai local search. Citation must-have.

A-Z reference for AEO, AI Overviews, backlinks, citations, Core Web Vitals, GBP, schema, server-side GTM, tier-1 links, and 50+ other working terms.

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