gloss·a·ry

301 Redirect

A permanent forward from an old web address to a new one. It sends visitors and Google to the right page, and the rankings the old page earned carry over. Skip it during a redesign and old links turn into dead ends.

Above the Fold

Whatever someone sees on the screen before they scroll. The name comes from newspapers, where the top half of the front page had to sell the paper. Your headline, what you do and how to reach you belong here.

Accessibility Overlay

A one-line widget that adds an accessibility toolbar and promises instant ADA compliance. It does not fix the code underneath, so the real problems are still there. In 2025 the FTC fined one overlay company $1 million for overstating what its tool could do.

Ad Spend

The money you pay Google directly for clicks on your ads. It is separate from what you pay someone to manage those ads.

ADA Compliance

WEB ACCESSIBILITY, WCAG

Making your site usable by people with disabilities: screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, readable color contrast. WCAG is the technical checklist most people use to measure it.

AEO

ANSWER ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Setting up your site so AI assistants and voice search can pull a clear, direct answer from it. Short answers to real customer questions, FAQ sections and schema markup all help. A close cousin of GEO.

AI Overview

The AI-written summary Google shows above the regular results for some searches. If your business gets mentioned there, you just skipped the line.

Alt Text

A short written description attached to an image. Screen readers read it out loud for people who cannot see the picture, and Google uses it to understand what the picture shows.

Backlink

A link from another website to yours. Links from trusted, relevant sites work like votes of confidence. Links from sketchy sites work like a bad reference.

Bounce Rate

The share of visitors who leave without doing anything. A high number usually means the page did not answer the question they came with.

Call to Action

CTA

The button or line that tells visitors what to do next. "Book a Discovery Call" beats "Submit" every single time.

Citation

Any online listing of your business name, address and phone number: Yelp, Apple Maps, the chamber directory. Google checks them against each other to decide how much to trust your details.

Click-Through Rate

CTR

The percentage of people who see your listing or ad and actually click it. If 100 people see it and 5 click, that is a 5% click-through rate.

CMS

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Software that lets you update your site without touching code. WordPress is the most popular one, and the one we build on.

Conversion

When a visitor does the thing you want: calls, books, buys or fills out a form. Your conversion rate is the share of visitors who do it.

Cookie Consent

The banner that asks visitors whether they are OK with non-essential cookies. Privacy laws like Europe's GDPR and California's CCPA set rules for what you have to tell visitors and when you need their OK. A good banner actually holds back tracking until the visitor chooses.

Cookies

Small files a website saves in your browser to remember things, like what is in your cart or that you are logged in. Some are needed for the site to work. Others track you for analytics and ads.

Core Web Vitals

Google measuring three things: how fast your main content loads, how quickly the page reacts when someone taps, and how much the layout jumps around while it loads.

Cost Per Click

CPC

What you pay each time someone clicks your ad. It goes up when more businesses are competing for the same search.

DNS

DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM

The internet phone book. It tells the world where your website and your email actually live. One wrong setting and both can go dark.

Domain

Your web address, like bullcitywebdesign.com. You rent it by the year, so make sure it is registered in your name, not your old web guy.

Domain Authority

A 1 to 100 score from the SEO company Moz that estimates how likely a site is to rank, based mostly on its backlinks. Useful for comparing sites, but it is Moz's number, not Google's.

Domain Registrar

REGISTRAR

The company you rent your domain name from, like GoDaddy or Namecheap. Domains renew every year or few years, and if the card on file has expired, your website and email can go dark.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. The yardstick Google's human quality raters use to judge whether content deserves trust. Real photos, real credentials and real reviews all count.

Featured Snippet

The answer box Google sometimes shows above the regular results, quoting a short chunk from one website. Clear, well-organized answers on your pages give you a shot at it.

GEO

GENERATIVE ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Making your business easy for AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews to find, understand and recommend when someone asks them for help.

Google Analytics

GA4

Google's free tool that shows who visits your site, how they found you and what they do once they get there. GA4 is the current version.

Google Business Profile

GBP, FORMERLY GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Your free listing on Google Search and Maps: hours, phone, photos, reviews and directions all in one spot. For a lot of customers it is the first impression, before they ever see your website.

Google Search Console

SEARCH CONSOLE

Google's free tool that shows how your site does in Google Search: which searches show you, how often people click, and any problems Google runs into reading your pages.

Hosting

The server where your website files live, rented by the month or year. Cheap hosting is like a cheap parking deck: fine until everybody shows up at once.

Impressions

How many times your listing or ad was shown to someone. Shown, not clicked. Clicks divided by impressions gives you your click-through rate.

Keyword

The words people type into Google when they need you. The trick is using the words your customers use, not the ones your industry uses.

Landing Page

A page built for one job, usually where an ad sends people. No distractions, one clear next step.

LLM

LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL

The kind of AI behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. It learns from huge amounts of text and answers questions in plain language, and more people now ask one before they ever open Google.

Local SEO

SEO aimed at nearby customers. It is how a Durham plumber shows up for "plumber near me" instead of a company two counties over.

Long-Tail Keyword

A longer, more specific search like “emergency plumber in south Durham.” Fewer people search it, but the ones who do are usually ready to hire someone.

Malware

Malicious code hackers sneak into a site to steal data, send spam or redirect your visitors somewhere shady. Google can flag an infected site, and that warning scares off almost everyone.

Map Pack

LOCAL PACK

The three businesses Google shows with a map at the top of a local search. Land there and the phone rings. Miss it and a lot of people never scroll far enough to find you.

Meta Description

The short summary that can show under your page title in Google results. It does not directly boost your rankings, but a good one gets more people to click.

NAP

NAME, ADDRESS, PHONE

The three details Google wants to match everywhere your business shows up online. A different phone number on Yelp than on your website confuses everybody, Google included.

On-Page SEO

Everything on the page itself that tells Google what it is about: the title tag, headings, the words you use, links to your other pages and image alt text.

Organic Traffic

Visitors who find you through the regular search results, not ads. You do not pay for each click, which is why it is worth building.

Page Speed

How fast your page loads and becomes usable. Slow pages lose visitors before they ever see what you offer.

Pay-Per-Click

PPC

Ads where you only pay when someone clicks, like Google Ads. It buys you a spot at the top today while SEO builds your spot for the long haul.

Phishing

A fake email, text or login page built to trick you into handing over a password or payment info. A common one: an “urgent” notice that your domain or website is about to expire, with a link to pay. Be cautious with anything urgent you were not expecting. Do not click the link or reply. Delete it, or report it as phishing in your email app.

Plugin

An add-on that gives a WordPress site a new feature, like forms, SEO tools or a booking calendar. Handy, but every plugin is code that needs updates, and out-of-date plugins are one of the most common ways sites get hacked.

Quality Score

Google's 1 to 10 rating of how well your ads, keywords and landing page match what people are searching for. A higher score usually means you pay less per click and show up higher.

Responsive Design

A site that rearranges itself to fit phones, tablets and desktops instead of shrinking into a tiny, unreadable version of itself.

Review Management

Asking happy customers for reviews, answering every review (yes, the cranky ones too) and keeping an eye on what people say about you online.

Schema Markup

STRUCTURED DATA

Behind-the-scenes code that labels your content for search engines: this is our phone number, these are our hours, this is a review. It helps Google understand you and show richer results.

Search Intent

What the person searching actually wants. “Plumber near me” wants a phone number right now. “How to fix a leaky faucet” wants instructions. Pages rank best when they match the intent.

SEO

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

The work of making your website easier for Google to find, understand and trust, so it shows up when people search for what you do.

SERP

SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGE

The page you see after you search. These days it is ads, the Map Pack, AI Overviews and more, with the regular results pushed further down.

Service Area Business

A business that goes to its customers, like a plumber, cleaner or mobile groomer, instead of having customers come to a storefront. On Google Business Profile you can hide your address and list the areas you serve instead.

Sitemap

A file that lists the pages on your site so search engines can find all of them. It usually lives at an address ending in sitemap.xml and gets submitted through Google Search Console.

Spam

Junk nobody asked for. On a website it usually means fake form submissions and bot comments. Good forms filter it out before it ever reaches your inbox.

SSL Certificate

Encrypts the connection between your site and your visitors. It is the padlock and the https in the address bar. Browsers warn people away from sites without one.

Technical SEO

The behind-the-scenes work that lets Google crawl and understand your site: speed, mobile-friendliness, sitemaps, redirects and clean code. Great content cannot rank if Google cannot read it.

Title Tag

The clickable headline for your page in Google results, and the text on the browser tab. One of the simplest and most important SEO settings on every page.

Uptime

The share of time your site is up and working. Uptime monitoring checks your site around the clock and sends an alert the minute it goes down.

VPS

VIRTUAL PRIVATE SERVER

Hosting where your site gets its own reserved slice of a server instead of sharing with hundreds of other sites. Faster and steadier. Home Run sites run on ours.

WCAG

WEB CONTENT ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES

The international rulebook for web accessibility, published by the W3C. Version 2.2 is the current one, and level AA is the target most laws and lawsuits point to.

Website Backup

BACKUP

A saved copy of your whole site, files and database, kept somewhere else. If a hack, a bad update or an accidental delete breaks the site, a backup puts it back the way it was. On the Website Health Plan they run daily.

WordPress

The open-source software behind a huge share of the internet, including every site we build. You own it, you can edit it, and nobody can hold it hostage.

Zero-Click Search

A search where the person gets their answer right on the results page, from an AI Overview, a featured snippet or the Map Pack, and never visits a website. It is why showing up on the page matters as much as getting the click.