What the words mean.
The jargon on this site, in plain language. If a word here is doing work you did not ask for, that is worth knowing before you pay anybody for it.
Every trade has words that keep outsiders out. Ours has more than most, and an agency that leaves them unexplained is not being technical, it is being hard to check.
These are the words we use on this site and what each one actually means. Nothing here is a promise about what any of them will do for you: that argument lives on the pages themselves.
- SEO
- Search engine optimisation: the work of making a site the thing Google shows when somebody searches for what you sell. It is not one job but several, and most of it is ordinary work done carefully.
- GEO
- Generative engine optimisation: the same idea aimed at ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity instead of a results page. It is young enough that anybody selling you certainty about it is selling you something.
- AI search
- Asking an assistant a question instead of typing keywords into Google. The answer names a few businesses and the person asking rarely checks further, which is why being one of them matters.
- ranking
- Where your page sits in a list of results. It moves by the day, differs by who is searching and from where, and a single number for it is always an average of many different answers.
- map listing
- The box with your shop, your hours and your reviews that appears above the ordinary results. For a business people walk into, it is usually seen more often than the website is.
- Google Business Profile
- The free account where you edit what the map listing says. The listing is what a customer sees; the profile is where you control it. Claiming it costs nothing and takes about twenty minutes.
- times shown
- How often your page appeared in front of somebody, whether or not they clicked. It measures reach and not interest, and rising numbers are the earliest sign anything is working.
- clicks
- How many people actually chose your result and arrived on your site. The only number on this list that corresponds to a real person deciding to visit you.
- click rate
- Clicks divided by times shown, as a percentage. It answers a narrower question than it looks: not whether people want what you sell, but whether your title and description earned the click.
- audit
- A read of a site against what search engines and readers need from it, written down. Ours names what is wrong, what it costs you and what we would do about it, in that order.
- custom software
- A tool built for one business instead of rented from a company that built it for everybody. Worth it when the way you work is the thing that makes you money, and not otherwise.
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