The minimum vocabulary of local SEO

Search and results

Local SEO

Everything that makes a business visible in searches tied to a place, for example "dentist Milan" or "near me". It is not only about the website: your Google business listing, your reviews and the consistency of the name, address and phone number published around the web all count.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page, the page a search engine shows after a query. Beyond the classic links it holds maps, answer boxes, images, videos and ads, and it changes shape depending on the question. Studying the SERP for a keyword tells you more than any volume estimate.

Keyword

The word or phrase somebody types to look for something. A keyword is not chosen on search volume alone: how competitive it is and how close it sits to what you actually sell matter just as much. Long, specific phrases bring fewer visits but readier customers.

Search intent

The reason behind a search: to learn, to compare, to buy or to reach a specific site. A page ranks when it answers the right intent, not when it repeats the keyword. If the SERP shows nothing but product pages, a guide will struggle to break into the top results.

Google Business Profile

The free listing that appears on Google Maps and in local results with opening hours, address, phone, photos and reviews. For a business with a physical location it is often the first thing a customer sees, before the website. It deserves the same care as a shop window.

How search engines read a site

Crawl

The step in which a search engine visits the pages of a site by following links. If a page is never crawled it cannot be stored either, so it will never appear in the results.

Indexing

Adding a page to the search engine archive, after the crawl. Being indexed is the minimum condition for appearing in results, but it guarantees nothing about position. A page can be indexed and stay invisible simply because nobody searches for what it says.

Sitemap

A file, usually sitemap.xml, listing the addresses of the pages you want search engines to discover. It does not force indexing: it helps pages be found sooner, especially on new or very large sites.

Canonical

A tag that declares which address is the official version of content reachable through several URLs. It stops the engine treating multiple copies of the same page as separate and splitting the quality signals between them. It is a strong hint, not an order.

Schema markup

Structured data added to the page code, usually as JSON-LD, that states explicitly what the page is about: an article, a product, a local business, a frequently asked question. It helps engines understand the content and it unlocks rich results.

Core Web Vitals

The three measures Google uses to judge the experience of a page: how quickly the main content appears, how responsive the page is to input and how stable the layout stays while it loads. They do not overturn a ranking, but they separate pages of similar quality.

Content and authority

Meta description

The short text describing a page that the engine may show under the title in the results. It is not a direct ranking factor, but it influences how many people decide to click. Google rewrites it often, so clarity matters more than hitting an exact length.

Anchor text

The visible text of a link. It tells both the reader and the search engine what they will find on the other side, so it should describe the destination instead of saying "click here". This applies to internal links as much as to links you receive from other sites.

Backlink

A link pointing from another site to yours. It works like a citation: the relevance and trustworthiness of the source count, not the number. A few links from credible sites in your field are worth more than hundreds of bought ones.

Domain authority

An estimate, produced by third party tools and not by Google, of how strong a domain is compared with others. It is useful for benchmarking against competitors and for following a trend over time, but it is not an official score and it plays no part in search algorithms.

E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the criteria Google uses to describe content quality in the guidelines it gives its human raters. It is not a score you can read anywhere: you demonstrate it with a named author, cited sources and verifiable information. It weighs most in fields where wrong information can do damage, such as health and money.

Duplicate content

Substantially identical text living at several addresses, within one site or across different sites. It rarely triggers an explicit penalty. More often it leads the engine to pick one version to show and ignore the rest.

Cannibalisation

What happens when two or more pages on the same site target the same keyword and the same intent. Instead of reinforcing each other they compete, and the engine keeps swapping one for the other without settling. The fix is usually to merge them or to make them clearly different.

Visibility inside artificial intelligence

AEO and GEO

Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization: working so that the answer to a question cites your business inside an answer engine or a generative assistant, not only inside a list of links. The levers are the familiar ones applied more strictly: clarity, structured data and verifiable sources.

LLM visibility

How often a brand is named or cited as a source by large language models, for example ChatGPT, when they answer questions in its field. You measure it by asking assistants the same questions at regular intervals and recording mentions and cited sources. It is a young, noisy measure: read it as a trend, not as a league table.

The numbers you see in reports

Search Console

The free Google tool that shows how your site appears in search: queries, impressions, clicks, average position and indexing problems. It is the most reliable source you have, because the data comes straight from Google and covers only your site.

Impressions

The number of times one of your pages appeared among the results for a search, even without being clicked. It grows as you widen your coverage of topics and keywords, which makes it the first sign that editorial work is paying off.

CTR

Click Through Rate, the percentage of people who click after seeing your result. It is clicks divided by impressions, and it depends mostly on position, title and meta description. A low CTR from a good position usually means the title is promising the wrong thing.

Average position

The typical position of your site in the results for a given search, averaged across the period observed. An average hides wide swings between devices, places and days, so always read it alongside impressions and clicks.

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