The 10 SEO Terms Small Business Owners Should Know

10 SEO terms small businesses

marketing planA search engine optimization term guide for small business owners

Jargon is awesome, especially when you are dropping acronyms and business sounding words left and right. Jargon isn’t cool though when you have no idea what is going on.

SEO is becoming bigger and bigger and it is making its way beyond the internet marketing world into a fundamental business process. When perusing publications like Entrepreneur, Inc Magazine and Forbes you will see SEO has really become a topic that is unavoidable.

I decided to create a quick guide for small business owners with 10 SEO terms that will help you read a majority of SEO articles. With these 10 terms any small business owner should be able to sift through all the technical talk. This way when you’re reading an article or being sold SEO services you know what everything entails.

Quick note: I am not attempting to make this sound like a dictionary or an academic paper. The point is to be understandable. If you’d like a really juicy, academic source I’d recommend the following: Moz Glossary & SEO Book Glossary

Analytics

A program/software that will report data in regards to your website. Using this software you will be able to see data that includes website visits, user behavior, time on site and much, much more. The most popular is Google Analytics.

Back Link

A link from another website that points to your website.

Keyword

A keyword is the central tenet of SEO. Search engines revolve around what users type into the search bar and delivering results that are relevant. Keywords are the words that you want your business to appear/rank for when users type those words. All businesses are expected to determine their keywords to begin their SEO strategy.

KPI

Key Performance Indicator. This is an extremely important and often used term. KPI is essentially the metric or factor that you will judge your business’s success. This can be web visits, email sign ups, or purchases. KPI’s are the metrics businesses and internet marketers use to determine success and progress.

Landing Page

The page that a user will “land on” when they click on a result in a search engine.

Linkbuilding

The practice of growing links to your website. The ultimate goal is to increase the amount and quality of links pointing to your site to increase your google ranking.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing. This is an all-encompassing terms that includes any marketing processes that involves search engines and paid advertising.

Google snack pack example
Google Snack Pack example

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. The main priority of SEO is to ensure your business/website is ranking high on search engine results. SEO is usually associated with Google, but because other search engines do exist, SEO also encompasses the other search engines.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page

Snack Pack

Instead of the blue linked results, the snack pack is the table that features three business results, usually with snippets of information.

I wanted to keep the terms down to 10. This way the page wouldn’t become an overload of terms and subsequently make the page too long. For those small business owners who really want to dive in though, again I’d recommend diving into the resources I linked above.



The following two tabs change content below.

Jason Khoo

Founder at Zupo
Jason started freelancing in SEO back in college, sold his first agency and now is founder of Zupo, which is a SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends catching up on reading and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.

4 Comments

  1. I’ve been dealing with SEO for so long that it’s weird to think that it’s even possible to not know what all of these terms are… it’s weird how when you work with something long enough, you end up taking what you know about it for granted like that. Although I will admit, I actually didn’t know the business results were called the snack pack, so I did learn something! Thanks! Haha.

    1. I agree – snack pack was a new term for me too! Some of these terms do seem very basic but I bet a lot of people hear them, have sort of an idea but don’t really understand them – particularly a small business person that has no marketing background. Great round-up!

    2. Fred – I always forget about what people do and don’t know too. I was just in a meeting where I said “keyword” and the potential client made me stop and explain. So sometimes I make myself stop and think about if I might be in too deep for my clients’ sake.

      And the snack pack is specifically for the last Google update where it now only shows three results. The term hasn’t been universally adopted but most of the top seos are using the term now (Blumenthal, Jennifer Slegg, etc) so I figured it will catch on, unless Google decides to switch it up again!

  2. In today’s competitive market SEo is very essential. If you want your business to expand its presence online then Seo should be considered. Informative post thanks for sharing.

    Ragavi from Bizbilla

Comments are closed.