The Ultimate SEO Glossary

A list of terms and definitions related to search engine optimization, digital marketing, and the Semrush toolkit. You can use this SEO glossary to understand the most common technical terms in the industry as well as some of the metrics and features unique to Semrush. 

123 • A • B • C • D • E • F • G • H • I • J • K • L • M • N • O • P • Q • R • S • T • U • V • W • X • Y • Z

123

301 redirect – An HTTP status code to indicate a permanent redirect forwarding one URL to another. Once a 301 redirect is added to a page, all users and bots that go to that page will automatically be sent to the redirected page. These redirects can help a website retain SEO value from a backlink going to a page that no longer exists.

302 redirect – An HTTP status code that indicates a temporary redirect, similar to a 301 redirect. The main difference between the two redirects is that a 301 is permanent, and a 302 is temporary. In terms of SEO, search engines will not pass along the trust signals from the backlinks pointing to an old page through a 302 like they would through 301.

307 redirect – An HTTP status code that indicates a temporary redirect – the resource requested has been temporarily moved to the URL given by the Location headers. The difference from 302 is that with the advent of HTTP 1.1, 307 has replaced it as a valid temporary redirect. While a 302 is a little vague, 307 states precisely that the requested URL has been moved to a temporary location and will be back in a while.

403 – An HTTP status code that indicates that a client is forbidden from accessing a valid URL. The server understands the request but can't fulfill it because of client-side issues.

404 – An HTTP status code that indicates when a webpage or document that can no longer be found by the server via the given URL.

500 Internal Server Error – An HTTP status code that indicates that the server, while working as a gateway to get a response needed to handle the request, got an invalid response.

502 Bad Gateway – An HTTP status code that indicates that the server has encountered a situation it doesn't know how to handle.

A

Access Log – A log file listing all requests for individual files made by people or bots on a website.

Ad Keyword – The query entered into a search engine that triggers Paid results.

Adobe Analytics – An analytics software made by Adobe that gathers data on real-time web analytics and marketing channels. It is similar to Google Analytics and can be used better to understand a website’s marketing segments and user interaction.

Ad Rank – A value used to determine your ad position (where ads are shown on a page relative to other ads) and whether your ads will show at all. Ad Rank is calculated using your bid amount, ad quality (including expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience), the context of the person’s search, and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.

Affiliate – An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.

Algorithm – A list of mathematical calculations and if/then statements that decide what action a computer program should take. 

Alt Text – A description of an image, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user unless the image is undeliverable or a browser is used that doesn’t display images. Alt–text is essential because search engines can’t always tell one picture from another.

AMPs (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – A project supported by Google to create mobile versions of webpages that load as fast as possible in search. These pages are built using a special set of HTML to make the page light and easy to serve quickly.

Anchor Texts – Texts that appear highlighted in a hypertext link that ultimately brings you to a specific webpage when clicked. They are only used for text backlinks, for images, it’s an alt attribute (see Alt text).

Authority Score – A proprietary Semrush compound metric used to gauge a domain’s overall quality and influence on SEO. The calculation is based on three main facets: 

Link Power: quality and quantity of backlinks

Organic Traffic: estimated monthly average of traffic 

Spam Factors (Natural Profile): indicators of manipulation or spam in the link profile

Average Difficulty – A metric used in Semrush, located at the top of the keyword chart, is the combined average keyword difficulty of every keyword result in a Keyword Manager list. This can give you a general understanding of how hard it will be to run an SEO campaign in this keyword’s market. The higher the percentage, the more difficult it becomes to get a high ranking for each keyword.

Average Position – The average value of all your rankings for the keywords in your campaign. In Semrush Position Tracking, for any keyword where you aren’t ranking, it will be calculated as a ranking of 100.

B

B2B – Business to Business – A business model in which the companies involved are exchanging goods and services. Sales to consumers are referred to as “business–to–consumer” sales or B2C.

B2C – Business to Consumer. The term business–to–consumer (B2C) refers to a business model of selling products and services directly between a business and consumers who are the end–users of its products or services. Most companies selling directly to consumers can be called B2C companies.

Backlinks – Incoming links to a website or web page from another resource.

Beta – A term used when software is in the final testing phase before being fully released to customers.

Black Hat SEO – The use of unethical or manipulative techniques to increase a website's search engine rankings.

Bot (robot, spider, crawler) – A program that performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content to plagiarize it for exploitation by the Spammer.

Bounce Rate – An Internet Marketing metric that tells you the percentage of users that land on one page of a website and then leave the site without viewing any other pages.

Breadcrumbs – Website navigation in a horizontal line above the main content, which helps the user to understand where they are on the site and how to get back to the root sections.

C

Call to Action (CTA) – What you want your target audience to do after receiving your marketing message. The call to action (CTA) clearly articulates the next step. Some examples are: “Learn More,” “Contact Us,” “Shop Now,” “Follow Us,” and “Sign Up.” A/B testing offers a great opportunity to experiment with different calls to action and optimize your messages with the CTAs that get the best audience response.

Canonical URL – A solution for solving issues related to duplicate content. If you have two webpages on your site that have duplicate content (for example, example.com/shoes/red and example.com/shop/red–shoes), making one of them the canonical URL tells search engines you want that page to be the one displayed in search results over the other. The html element for this would look like: 

<link rel=canonical href= “https://example.com/shoes/red” />

Carousel – A SERP Feature consisting of a set of scrollable images displayed near the top of a SERP. The Image Carousel differs from the standard image result in that the Carousel will bring you to a new SERP for the image that you select.

Conversion Rate – The percentage of user actions taken after total clicks on a display ad or other digital asset. Your marketing strategy defines your actions, which commonly include clicking on a second link, downloading an asset such as a B2B (business-to-business) white paper, or signing up to receive special retail offers. The formula is: conversions/interactions = conversion rate. The higher your conversion, the more successful your campaign.

Click Potential – Metric used to gauge the predicted chance of getting a click-through to your website if your search result occupied the top position of the SERP. Click Potential depends on the presence of SERP Features that would hinder searchers from clicking on organic website results.

Clickstream Data – Data collected about the users while they browse through www in a web browser. This data can be used to understand how people navigate websites and pages on the Internet.

Com. – In Semrush, “Com.” stands for Competitive Density or the level of competition in Google Ads; this metric is measured from 0 to 1. The higher the number – the greater the competition.

Common Keywords – Keywords for which multiple domains rank among the top Google search results.

Competitors in Google Ads – The websites that rank for the same queries as the analyzed domain in Google Paid results.

Competitors in Organic Search – Sites that compete with the analyzed website in organic search results.

Content – The part of a web page intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding, and boilerplate HTML are not usually considered to be content. Page content refers to all the information contained in a website. Page content can be displayed as text, links, images, audio, animation, or videos. Search engines have a limited ability to recognize images, animation, video, and audio. In these instances, search engines use file names or alt attributes to determine the contents of a page. Therefore, important information needs to be given in text–form to make it accessible to search engines.

Content Management System (CMS) – Programs such as WordPress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so choose. 

Content Marketing – A strategic marketing approach that entails creating and distributing content (blog posts, ebooks, videos, infographics, etc.) that is valuable to an audience. The valuable content attracts attention to a brand, builds an audience, and eventually helps grow revenue.

Conversion (Goal) – Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Ad clicks, sign-ups, and sales are examples of conversions.

Core Web Vitals – An initiative by Google to highlight and describe a set of specific factors that shows URL performance grouped by status (Poor, Needs Improvement, Good), key metrics (CLS, FID, LCP), and URL groups (groups of similar web pages). The report is based on three metrics measured by actual user data: LCP, FID, and CLS.

Core Web Vitals (in Semrush) – A set of metrics in Site Audit that measure the loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a website. Specifically, it measures the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which judges the perceived load speed of the page, and the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift in the visible page content. The third Vital is called First Input Delay (FID), which quantifies the user experience when the user first interacts with the page. However, this is a user-centric metric that cannot be recreated in a lab environment so, instead, Site Audit uses Total Blocking Time (TBT), which, according to Google, is an excellent lab-based proxy for FID.

Cost % – A Semrush metric (shown in both the Organic Positions & Advertising Positions reports) based on the overall Traffic Cost shown on the top left of your report. This represents how much of the overall cost being displayed comes from a given keyword. You will notice a Cost % for each keyword the queried domain ranks for. This represents how much of the overall cost being displayed comes from a given keyword.

CPC (Cost Per Click) – This metric represents how expensive the average advertising bid on that particular keyword would cost across the databases in Semrush. Each database that contains this keyword will be displayed along with the corresponding CPC in that region.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions) – A statistical metric quantifying the average value/cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M – from the Roman numeral for one thousand.

Crawl budget – Google defines crawl budget as “the number of URLs GoogleBot can and wants to crawl” on a website. It is affected by GoogleBot’s crawl rate and also how popular your pages are. Read more from Google here.

Crawler (bot, robot, spider) – A program that performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content to plagiarize it for exploitation by the Spammer.

CRM – The practice of customer relationship management (CRM). The goals of CRM are to retain current customers, increase their spending, and convert prospects into new customers. CRM technology is used to manage information such as a summary of each interaction, indicators of intent to purchase, and purchase history. Analytics is also used to provide real-time insight into cross-sell and upsell opportunities at the individual customer level.

Cross Group Negatives – A method of optimizing a Google Ads campaign via implementing one ad group’s keywords as another ad group’s negative keywords. This prevents your ads in separate ad groups from competing against each other and harming the click-through rate/quality score.

CSS – Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language that describes how HTML elements (e.g., color, fonts) should appear on webpages and adapt when viewed on different devices.

CTR (Click–through rate) – A metric that represents the percentage of clicks over impressions of a hyperlink or PPC advertisement, measuring how effective the link or ad is at attracting traffic.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – A measure of how much a webpage unexpectedly shifts during its life. For example, if a website visitor loaded a page and, while they were reading it, the banner loads and the page jumps down, that would constitute a large CLS score. It’s one of the key metrics used in Core Web Vitals.

D

Declined Keywords – In Semrush, these are keywords for which a domain has seen a decline in rankings but still remains in the top 100 ranking positions.

Destination Site – The site that the user visits directly after leaving a domain.

Direct Traffic – Traffic from users navigating to your site through a browser's address bar without going through a third party.

Disavow – If your backlink profile includes a high number of spammy, artificial, or low–quality inbound links that may be harming your rankings – and don’t have the ability to get them removed for a legitimate reason (e.g., the link exists on a site you have no control over) – you can use Google’s Disavow Tool tool to tell Google to ignore those links.

Disavow File – A list of backlinks that can be sent to Google in order to not take them into consideration when reviewing your site for a potential Google Penalty. If you have backlinks that may create the risk of receiving a Google Penalty, you can add them to a Disavow list and send the information to Google. In Semrush, you are able to create a disavow txt file in a Backlink Audit campaign.

Display Ads – A type of online advertisement that combines text, images, and a URL that links to a website where a customer can learn more about or buy products. These ads can be static with an image or animated with multiple images, videos, or changing text. Some display ads educate about the product, while others are designed to entertain and engage through simple games or puzzles. Banner ads are a common form of display ads.

Duplicate Content – Content that appears in more than one location on the Internet. Duplicate content can confuse search engines when deciding which page to index in a search, and in turn, this hurts the website’s SEO.

E

Ecommerce (electronic commerce) – Refers to the buying and selling of goods and services over the Internet. Ecommerce can be classified as business–to–business (B2B), business–to–consumer (B2C), or consumer–to–consumer (C2C).

Engagement rate (Social Analytics) –  A total number of likes and comments on an Instagram or Facebook post, divided by the number of people who saw the post, multiplied by 100.

Engagement rate (Social Tracker) – A metric that shows how much engagement the social profile was able to get relative to the size of their audience and amount of posts. The formula we use to calculate the engagement rate number is:

<total engagement rate> = <total engagement> / <number of posts> / <audience> * 10000

Estimated Accuracy – A metric in the Traffic Analytics report that gauges the accuracy of the data presented. Since accuracy is dependent on the size of the data sample used to estimate the domain traffic, larger websites will generally have higher accuracy than less popular websites.

Estimated Traffic – A metric calculated by Semrush showing the estimated amount of traffic for a given website. There are three tools in Semrush that can estimate website traffic: Domain Analytics, Traffic Analytics, and Position Tracking. 

In Domain Analytics, we present estimated organic and paid traffic based on the keyword positions that we see a website ranking for, the monthly volume of those searches, and average click-through rates per position. This estimation is solely based on traffic from Google search (either organic or paid).

The second place is Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer. This tool estimates the website’s total traffic based on clickstream data and the estimation takes into account traffic from multiple sources – search, direct, referral, social, and advertising traffic.

Position Tracking has an estimated organic or paid traffic metric that is based on the local search volume and the rankings that the domain occupies for keywords that are being tracked in the campaign. In this tool, estimated traffic represents a daily estimated number of visits.

F

Facebook Engagement – A sum of shares, likes, reactions (wow's, sad's, angry's, etc.), and comments made on all posts during the selected time period.

Featured Snippet – A SERP Feature that appears at the top of some Google search results and gives summarized answers to specific questions asked within Google.

Follow Links – Links that have an influence on the rankings of the linked site. These links help communicate a signal of trust in a web page to search engines.

G

GDPR – The General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.

Google Search Text Ads (formerly Google AdWords) – Google's link auction network, also used for advertisement, where most keywords are sold on a cost-per-click basis.

Google Search Text Ads Keywords – Keywords that a domain has targeted with their search ads campaigns.

Google Search Text Ads Top – The advertising block of Google Ads that appears above the Organic results in Google’s search results.

Google Search Text Ads Bottom – The advertising block of Google Ads that appears below the Organic results in Google’s search results.

Google Search Text Ads Traffic – An estimated monthly amount of visitors coming to a website from Google Ads.

Google Search Text Ads Traffic Price – Estimated monthly expenses for a Google Ads campaign.

Google AdSense – Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google.

Google Algorithm – Algorithms are a list of mathematical calculations and if/then statements that decide what action a computer program should take. The Google algorithm is the rules-based system Google uses to sort through hundreds of billions of websites to deliver relevant results to users’ search queries. The results are ranked in order of relevance on the search engine results page (SERP). The algorithm also uses personal context, such as your current location and past search history, to tailor the results.

Google Analytics (GA) – A free web analytics service provided by Google. It brings you detailed analytics about the activity on your website.

Google Looker Studio – A free online tool that lets you customize visual reports using data from various sources.

Google Business Profile – A free service offered by Google that local businesses can use to verify their information and improve their visibility on Google Search and Google Maps.

Google SE Traffic – The estimated monthly amount of visitors coming from the first 100 organic Google search results.

Google Search Console – A free analytics service (formerly titled Webmaster Tools) provided by Google that offers data on a domain’s search visibility and performance. It can be used in the assessment of a website’s crawlability and SEO.

GoogleBot (robot, spider, crawler) – Google’s program that performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content to plagiarize it for exploitation by the Spammer.

H

Heading Tag – An HTML tag that indicates the levels of the headings within a webpage or document. These tags form a hierarchy from the highest level of importance/organization to the lowest: 

from <h1> to <h6>

Using heading tags to relevantly indicate the levels of your webpage helps search engines understand your content better, which is good for SEO.

Heat Map – A map that represents the data and uses color to communicate areas of highest use or likelihood. A click map is a special type of heat map that shows which parts of web pages receive the most clicks. Using a scale of red (“hot”) to blue (“cold”), areas, where people look or click the most, are labeled with red. Web designers can combine the data from an eye-tracking heat map and a click map to position call-to-action buttons where they are most likely to be seen and clicked.

Heatmap (Listing Management) – A representation of your rankings around your target area based on keywords on a hyper-local level in Google maps. This tells you exactly where and how well your SEO efforts are paying off.

Historical Data – The data that allows you to perform research on keywords and domains from previous months. Domain Analytics and Keyword Analytics historical data goes back to January 2012. PLA historical data goes back to September 2013. Traffic Analytics' historical data goes back to January 2017.

Hreflang Tags – An HTML tag that helps search engines find and display content in a specific language when a website uses multiple languages. For example, Hreflang tags can help search engines in the United States find a page in English while a similar search performed in Mexico would return a page in Spanish. Hreflang pages also solve the problem of duplicate content penalties. Hreflang tags help search engines understand when content is customized to specific audiences rather than being duplicated as a search engine optimization (SEO) trick.

HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) – a web security policy mechanism that helps to protect websites against protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking. It allows web servers to declare that web browsers (or other complying user agents) should interact with it using only HTTPS connections, which provide Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL), unlike the insecure HTTP used alone.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) – A standard markup language or “markup” which is used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of search engines and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.

HTTP – The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a protocol for fetching resources transferred from a computer server to a web browser.

HTTPS – A secured protocol for fetching resources that uses a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt data transferred between a website and a web browser. HTTPS is a minor Google ranking factor.

I

Improved Keywords – In Semrush, these are keywords for which a domain is still ranking within the top 100 positions but has moved up in ranking since its previous position within the top 100 results.

Indexed Pages – A page that has been visited by a bot, analyzed for content and stored by a bot in its index.

Internal LinkRank – A Metric that measures the importance of website pages in terms of link architecture based on a 100-point scale (from 0 to 100). If a page is linked by many authoritative pages within your website, it will have a high LinkRank score.

IP address – A unique numerical label that identifies a device on the internet or local network. 

J

Javascript (sometimes abbreviated JS) – a computer programming language used to make dynamic elements for the world wide web. It is one of the most widely used coding languages on the Internet, along with CSS and HTML.

K

Keyword – A word or expression used as a query in an online search engine.

Keyword (Google Ads) – The term on which the website is bidding on in Google Ads and is found amongst the top Paid results in Google for it.

Keyword (organic) – A term for which a domain is ranking amongst the Organic results in Google. Semrush monitors the top 100 organic results to provide organic keyword rankings data.

Keyword (related, in Keyword Magic Tool) – A term with a similar SERP in Google’s top-20 results.

Keyword Cannibalization – Special case of duplicate content when 2 or more pages with the same or similar content are competing for the same keyword. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.

Keyword Density – The percentage of words on a web page that is a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high, the page may be penalized for keyword stuffing.

Keyword Difficulty – The estimation that shows how difficult it would be to compete in organic search for a certain keyword. The higher the estimation, the harder would it be to compete with the current websites ranking at the top of Google.

Keyword Overview – The main keyword analytics tool for a word or phrase that is queried in the Semrush search bar.

Keyword Research – The process of uncovering keywords worthy of use for SEO and SEM campaigns.

Keyword Stuffing (Keyword spam) – The excessive reuse of the same keyword on one page.

Knowledge Graph – A SERP Feature located at the top or right-hand side of the page that provides a quick profile on a query along with images and related searches.

L

Landing Page – The page to which a visitor is led via a click anywhere in a digital location or a link in the search result.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – One of the three Core Web Vitals metrics that represents how quickly the main content of a web page is loaded. Specifically, LCP measures the time from when the user initiates loading the page until the largest image or text block is rendered within the viewport.

Link – An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.

Link Building – The digital marketing practice of actively working to generate more incoming links to a site for the benefit of the website’s SEO. Common tactics include outreach, link baiting, linking in comment sections, and more.

Link Juice – Trust/authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.

Linkbait – A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links.

Local Finder – A subset of Google Search containing extended listings of local businesses (that appears after clicking on “More Places”).

Local Pack – A SERP Feature consisting of a list of relevant local businesses with contact information, direction, and a map.

Local Teaser – A SERP Feature, very similar to the local packs, but more oriented towards reservation-based businesses like hotels and restaurants. The feature shows a map with different results listed on the map's left-hand side.

Long Tail Keyword – A search query that usually contains 3-4+ words. These are keywords with low monthly search volume but describe a specific intention and have a higher probability of conversion through SEO or PPC. You can find long tail keywords in Semrush by using the Keyword Magic Tool and adding filters for a number of words, keyword difficulty, volume, and more.

M

Manual Sanctions (Manual actions) – Google’s term for a penalty. Google will take manual action on a website after a human reviewer (i.e., a Google employee) manually reviews a website to confirm whether it has failed to comply with Google’s Webmaster guidelines. Penalized websites can either be demoted or removed entirely from search results. Manual actions can be assessed to the entire website or just certain web pages. Manual penalties are noted in the Search Console.

Market Consolidation (in Market Explorer) – A measure of websites’ traffic in relation to the market they are in and is an indicator of the amount of competition among them. It is based on the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index and reflects the division of market share among market players.

Match Score (in Market Explorer) – A metric that reveals which domains offer the best potential partnership or advertising opportunities. The score is generated using traffic and overlap metrics.

Meta Description – A short description of a webpage implemented through an HTML tag in the <head> part of the page. This description is what appears under the title of a webpage on a search engine results page. In the written form the tag looks like:

<meta name= “description” content = “short description of the page here (no more than 160 characters).”/>

Meta Tags – Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page that furnish information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META titles and description tags because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

Meta Title – A meta tag and an important part of website optimization, and it's distinct from the headline on the page itself. It acts as a name tag for the web page. The title is displayed on your browser tab and tells you what page you're on. Meta titles are also read by search engine robots and seen by users searching the web. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result and are important for usability and SEO. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content.

Microdata – A type of specification used to nest metadata within existing content on the page that is embedded in the HTML content in order to improve readability, and analyze elements of a web page. This type of markup language allows search engines to point out specific elements of a piece of content such as a product rating.

Minification – The process of minimizing code and markup involved in your web documents and scripts. As a result of minification, websites can see faster page loading times and improve their user experience.

Mirror Site – An identical site at a different address.

N

NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) – A term used to describe the most basic necessary information that a business should list online. Having a business’s NAP consistent across all online citations is an important factor in local SEO.

National Level Data – The data that takes into consideration an aggregate of search engine positions all over the country to provide search results that avoid bias from specific locations. Viewing national-level data is a way of gauging how you're doing against competitors on a national level.

Negative Keywords – Keywords that allow you to choose what not to target with a Google Ads campaign. Just like regular keywords in an ad campaign, negative keywords can be set with match types such as exact match, phrase match, and broad match. When you add a negative keyword to your campaign, your ads will not appear in the search results for that search. This practice helps advertisers save budget and maximize ROI.

Noindex – A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link codes, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link.

Not–provided – A default placeholder that Google Analytics displays in the Keywords report to hide the most popular keywords that drive organic search traffic to a website. In order to discover these hidden keywords, you need to use a third-party tool like Semrush or Google Search Console. This was implemented by Google in 2011 in an effort to protect the privacy of searchers.

Number of Results – The amount of all search results in the search engine returned for a search query.

O

Online Visibility – The overall presence of a business or brand on the Internet. Improving online visibility allows a business to reach more customers and make more money. This can be achieved through digital marketing campaigns, SEO, PPC, Public Relations, social media marketing (SMM), blogging, and outreach among other strategies.

Open Graph – A form of markup that you can add to the metadata of a webpage that will enable your content to become a rich object when shared via social networks. This protocol allows objects on your website like videos, images, and audio files to appear in the timeline when your link is over Twitter, for example.

Organic Search Results – The search results that are unpaid and generally organized by relevance, popularity, and common usage.

Orphaned Pages – Pages of a website that have no internal links pointing to them from within the website. This can be harmful to SEO as orphaned pages are harder for search engines *and users* to locate than pages with internal links.

Outreach – A method of proactively acquiring backlinks to your website by contacting other website owners.

P

Page Title – An HTML tag, also known as a title tag that specifies the title of a webpage. The code is placed within the header tag (<head>) of a webpage’s HTML. The text written in the tag is what will appear as the page’s clickable title when it ranks on a search engine results page. For this reason, page titles are highly important to SEO. In the written form the page title looks like:

<title>Title of Page</title>

Page View – The event where a user views a web page one time.

Pagination – The division of web page content into numbered pages, commonly organized with numbered navigation at the bottom of a page and parameters in the URL.

Position or Pos (SERP) – Position of the site’s page for the search query in Google at the moment of data collection.

PPA (Pay Per Action) – An Internet advertising model similar to Pay Per Click except for publishers only get paid when click-throughs result in conversions.

PPC (Pay Per Click) – An internet advertising model used to draw traffic to your website by using ads (Google Ads) where the advertiser pays a price for each click.

Public Relations – A marketing discipline concerned with managing a person or brand’s public reputation and communications. PR practices include writing and distributing press releases, outreach, and forming public partnerships.

Purchase Conversion (in Market Explorer and Traffic Analytics) – A metric that shows a possible number of visits that ended with some conversion. It’s calculated based on the clickstream data and considers conversions like “thank you” page visits, checkout pages, etc.

Q

Quality Score – A Google’s measurement for the quality of an ad and is based on a handful of factors, including expected click-through rate from the SERP the relevance of the ad to the keyword relevance of the landing page to the ad, and keyword.

Query – A word or phrase entered into a search engine.

R

Readability Score – A metric based on the Flesch–Kincaid test of readability that describes how difficult is to understand the text, has a range from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the passage. Semrush will suggest the average of your top ten rivals’ readability scores as the goal for your content’s readability.

Redirect – Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page, such as when a site is moved to a new domain or in the case of a gateway.

Referral Traffic – Traffic that is being sent to your site from a web source (backlink) outside the SE and SM. For example, whenever someone clicks on a hyperlink from another site that directs to yours, it would be considered Referral Traffic.

Referrer – The search result, domain, or social media source, from which a website visitor originates.

Relevancy – A metric that shows the extent to which the site corresponds to the searcher's query according to the search engine's algorithm.

Results – The amount of all search results returned for a keyword.

Reviews – A SERP Feature that can be displayed along with a domain's result in Google Search. It can indicate the customer experience and satisfaction with a commercial business, specific product, or types of media (like books or movies), among others. The rating that coincides with your reviews will always be located directly under your link and will display your "star" rating as well as how many reviews you have.

Rich Snippet – A rich snippet on a search engine result displays extra information associated with a URL. For example, review stars, business hours, images, and categories are all examples of rich snippets that can appear with a regular result. These bits of information appearing on SERPs are the result of applying structured data markup to your website and labeling your site’s information accordingly. Some rich snippets can also be referred to as SERP features.

Robots.txt – A public file used by webmasters that gives instructions to bots about how to crawl their websites. Bots will read the robots.txt file before visiting URLs, and the file has the ability to tell bots not to visit specific directories (folders/subfolders) with a “disallow” command. This file can also tell a bot the specific URLs of a website's sitemaps if there are multiple sitemaps for a single site. To find a domain’s robots.txt, enter /robots.txt after the TLD. For example, semrush.com/robots.txt.

ROI (Return On Investment) – A ratio between net income and investment to analyze and quantify the return on investment, and thus the cost/benefit of different schemes.

Root Domain – The highest hierarchical level of a website that contains all subdomains and subfolders within it. The root domain is followed by a period and the TLD (.com, .org, etc). For example, example.com is a root domain, while blog.example.com is a subdomain within it.

S

SaaS (Software as a Service) – A model of delivering software through a subscription-based license hosted from a central location on the web. Semrush is an example of a SaaS, along with other services like Gmail, Netflix, or Salesforce.

SAB (Service Area Business) – A business that may or may not have a local storefront but offers services by traveling to customers’ locations. Common examples include delivery services, plumbers, landscaping companies, etc. Specifying your service area to Google within Google Business Profile (former Google My Business) is an important part of local SEO.

Schema.org – A website that published the documentation and guidelines for using structured data markup.

Scraping (Web Scraping, Screen Scraping, Web Data Extraction, Web Harvesting etc.) – This is a technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites whereby the data is extracted and saved to a local file in your computer or to a database in table (spreadsheet) format.

SE Traffic Price – Estimated monthly price for an Ad campaign for the same amount of organic traffic as shown in the Domain's report.

Search Engine (SE) – A program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.

Search Traffic – Traffic that comes to your site directly from a search engine.

SEM (Search engine marketing) – A professional service with the goal of bringing more traffic to a website through Search Engines. Tactics include PPC (pay–per–click) advertising, Google Shopping, Social Media Marketing, SEO, Content Marketing, and more.

Semantic Core – Group of the keywords most accurately determining the direction or context of the website. By analyzing the keywords in a Semantic Core, search engines can more accurately match a website's content with relevant user queries, ultimately leading to higher rankings and more targeted traffic.

Semrush Rank – A custom ranking for domains. This indicates how much of a presence a domain has on the Internet based on organic rankings and search traffic. This number is calculated based on the visibility of the domain’s ranking for the keywords that are displayed in our database. The amount of information we show for this domain will be based on how we get our data.

SEO (Search engine optimization) – A number of practices with the goal of acquiring more organic traffic to a website from search engines. Tactics include making changes to the technical and content aspects of a website in order to improve its visibility.

SERP – Stands for Search Engine Results Page, and is the listing of all the web pages, advertisements, and SERP features given by a search engine in response to a query.

SERP Features (same as Rich Snippet) – A SERP feature is any result on a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that is not a traditional organic result. The most common SERP Features are paid results, featured snippets, local packs, knowledge panels, etc.

SERP Source – Refers to a snapshot of the Search Engine Results Page where Semrush gathered its data. When Semrush determines a ranking for a domain/keyword, you can see the ranking reflected in the SERP Source. Once you click the icon, a pop–up window will be displayed asking you to “View the SERP”, and then you can see the screenshot.

SERP Volatility – The change in the positions on SERP that are usually caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters whose rankings slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.

Serviceable Available Market (SAM) – The amount of demand within the Total Addressable Market from individuals who are ready and able to purchase an offered product or service.

Share of Voice (in Semrush) – A metric that considers the total combined volume of all of the keywords in a Position Tracking campaign, and shows the ratio of traffic that each site gets. This metric is weighted by the actual number of searches and estimated traffic rather than just by the number of keywords. Share of voice represents how often a website shows up out of every search, not just every keyword. 

Sitelinks – A SERP Feature that shows the domain's main page as well as more specially, targeted internal links.

Sitemap.xml – An XML file listing the URLs of a website. This file communicates to bots and crawlers what files and information are available on a site. When search engines are crawling a website, they will review the sitemap to understand what is important and how to navigate the site to find documents and files to crawl and index. This is different from a site map HTML file, which is used to show people the areas of a website.

SMM (Social media marketing) – a professional service that uses social media platforms to promote a product or service on the Internet.

Social Traffic – Traffic that comes to your site from various social media platforms.

Split Testing – Sometimes referred to as A/B Testing, the process of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or another marketing asset with just one varying element. For instance, if you’re A/B testing a headline, you would create two versions of the same page with only the headline changed, and would then track which version performs better.

Sponsored – An attribute that is used for all paid/sponsored content. To mark sponsored content, add the rel="sponsored" attribute to the corresponding link:

<a href="http://www.awesomeurl.com/" rel="nofollow sponsored">Link text</a>

SSL Certificate – A small data file that encrypts and protects digital information. When a certificate is implemented by a site, it ensures a secure connection between a web server and web browser, protecting the information of the Internet user and website. When a website uses an SSL certificate it will add the padlock icon and https to the website’s address.

Structured data (markup) – A semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs.

Subdomain – An area of a website within a root domain that has its own address indicated by its name and a period before the root domain. For example, blog.example.com is a subdomain within the example.com root domain.

Subfolder – a subfolder is a section within a website indicated by a slash “/” after the TLD and the name of the folder. For example, example.com/subfolder is a subfolder within the example.com domain.

T

TF-IDF (Term Frequency — Inverse Document Frequency) – A way of measuring how important a certain term is for comprehension and the subject of an entire document. Basically, it tells you how important the target phrase is based on how frequently it is mentioned within the set of text.

Time on Page – The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking away. This can be used as an indication of the quality and relevance of the page’s content.

Title Tag – An HTML tag, also known as a page title that specifies the title of a webpage. The code is placed within the header tag (<head>) of a webpage’s HTML. The text written in the tag is what will appear as the page’s clickable title when it ranks on a search engine results page. For this reason, title tags are highly important to SEO. In the written form the title tag looks like:

<title>Title of Page</title>

TLD (Top Level Domain) – Represents the extension of a domain (.gov, .org, .edu, .com, etc.)

Topic Efficiency (in Topic Research) – A qualitative metric that represents the ratio between a topic’s search volume and difficulty. A higher Topic Efficiency score is generally the result of higher volume and lower difficulty. High Topic Efficiency can represent a good topic to target with content marketing efforts.

Total Addressable Market (TAM) – The total demand from all individuals within your target market. This number includes demand from those who need an offered product or service, even if they’re not willing, ready, or able to make a purchase.

Total Blocking Time (TBT) – metric measures the total amount of time between First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to Interactive (TTI) where the main thread was blocked for long enough to prevent input responsiveness. This metric is also recommended to be used as a replacement for FID in lab testing scenarios for Core Web Vitals.

Total Engagement (Social Tracker) – A sum of all audience interactions on a social network over your set date range. Since each network has different ways to engage people, we measure engagement differently on each network. By default, the date range in the tool is set to the past 30 days, but it can be adjusted to measure engagement over a longer or shorter period of time. Total engagement on each network is calculated in the following way:

• Facebook: sum of shares, likes, reactions (wow's, sad's, angry's, etc), and comments made on all posts during the selected time period.
• Twitter: sum of all likes, retweets, and mentions of Twitter handle during the selected time period.
• Instagram: sum of all the likes and comments on a post.

U

UGC (User-generated content) – User Generated Content is any form of content written and published on the user side of an online platform. Common cases include posts on social media sites, comment threads, forums, or other websites where users can interact and publish their thoughts. UGC is also a rel attribute's value that labels links within all user-generated content, including comments and forum posts. The UGC value may be omitted if the content is created by contributors or noteworthy authors. To make a UGC link, add the rel="UGC" attribute to the corresponding link, i.e:

<ahref="http://www.awesomeurl.com/" rel="nofollow UGC">Link text</a>

URL (Google Ads) – The landing page to which a user is redirected after clicking on an ad in Google Ads.

URL (Landing page) – The landing page to which a user is redirected after clicking on a search result.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) – A web address of a page or document on the World Wide Web. Internet users can enter a URL in a browser to find a page they are looking for. For example, https://www.semrush.com/kb/925–glossary is a URL.

V

Visibility % (in Position Tracking) – A metric that refers to how visible the domain, subdomain, or URL you're tracking is across the results pages of the keywords added to your project. This will be the metric displayed in the line graph in your project. If this number is at 100% this would mean that the domain, subdomain, or URL being tracked is ranking in the 1st position for all of the keywords in the campaign target.

Volatility (in Semrush) – A metric that measures the overall amount of change happening to search engine results.

Volume (Search Volume) – The average number of monthly searches for a keyword. Search volume is a measure of the total number of searches that are performed through search engines, expressed as the average monthly volume during the previous 12–month period.

W

White Hat SEO – SEO techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERPs.