If you have just entered the world of online marketing, or recently started learning how to push a website up the rankings with SEO, you have probably heard teammates or an SEO agency use words that sound like a foreign language. What exactly are Crawl, Backlink or Schema Markup? And what do processes like Link Building or an SEO audit actually involve?
No need to worry about getting lost in the conversation. This article gathers the SEO terms you will run into most often and explains them in plain language. By the end, you will be able to talk with your in-house marketing team or brief an external digital agency smoothly. Save this page and open it whenever you hit a word you have forgotten.
1. Basic SEO Terms You Should Know
Before going deeper into the technical side, let's start with the words that act as the first button of getting a site to page one. These are the core terms.
1.1 Keyword
A keyword is the word or phrase people type into a search engine when they want to know something, such as “cat cafe Sukhumvit” or “how to fix a leaking pipe”. It is both the heart and the starting point of all SEO work, because once you know what your customers or target audience tend to type, you can create content or adjust your website to serve exactly those searches.
1.2 Search Intent
Search intent is the real need hiding behind the keyword. If someone types “iPhone 15 review”, the intent is to gather information before choosing a phone. If they type “buy iPhone 15 promotion”, they are shopping and ready to pay. Understanding these differences is what helps an SEO specialist understand the goal and craft content that answers each intent as closely as possible.
1.3 SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
The SERP is the results screen that appears right after you hit the search button. It gathers the top-ranking links together with ads, maps and videos. The ultimate goal of anyone doing SEO is to get their website to the top of that first SERP, because that is where searchers click the most.
1.4 Organic Traffic
Organic traffic means visitors who arrive at your website naturally, not through paid ads on the search engine. It is a key SEO metric because these visitors typed a keyword and chose your site on the SERP themselves, which usually signals a clear interest in buying or using the service behind that keyword (high-intent traffic).
2. SEO Terms About Content and Keywords
Once the basics are in place, it is time for the content and keyword group, which matters just as much.
2.1 Keyword Research
Keyword research means using tools to find out what people are searching for in a given period: which words face heavy competition, which get fewer searches but convert well, and which relate to your website or business. The findings tell you which keywords deserve content and where you can build an edge over competitors.
2.2 Search Volume
Search volume is the number showing how many times per month a keyword is searched on average. It helps you judge which keywords draw enough demand to be worth targeting. High-volume words usually come with plenty of competitors too, so picking a mid-volume keyword that matches real buyers can make ranking easier and close actual sales more effectively.
2.3 Focus Keyword
The focus keyword (or main keyword) is the core keyword that defines what a page is about. It states the main topic clearly, carries a broad meaning and matches the main search intent, for example “acne treatment” or “car rental”. You can then develop it into more specific long-tail keywords.
2.4 Long-tail Keyword
A long-tail keyword is a longer, very specific keyword, usually the focus keyword followed by three or four extra words. “Running shoes” can be extended into “women's running shoes for flat feet”. Long-tails get far fewer searches than focus keywords, but the people typing them know exactly what they want, so they are easier to convert and often the gap where you can beat competitors in SEO.
2.5 Meta Title & Meta Description
The meta title is the text that acts as the headline of a web page, while the meta description is its short summary. In SEO terms, both appear in your listing on the SERP, and when they are interesting and catch the eye, they pull more people to decide to click into your website.
2.6 Heading (H1, H2, H3...)
Headings are the titles that organize content into groups and levels: the main heading (H1), subheadings (H2) and deeper levels (H3 and beyond). Good heading structure helps readers find the information they need faster, and it also tells Google's bots what the page focuses on.
3. Technical SEO Terms
These terms may sound harder to digest, but they pay off when you work with a developer team.
3.1 Crawl
Picture Google running millions of tiny robot programs (called crawlers, or bots). Crawling is these robots climbing through web pages to read and collect information about what each site covers. If a website's structure is too tangled, the bots struggle to do their job and rankings can suffer.
3.2 Index
After the bots finish crawling, the collected data is organized into an index: gathered, analyzed, interpreted and stored so each page can be matched with the right keywords and shown on the SERP. If your website is not indexed, Google simply cannot present it, and customers will not find your pages in the search results.
3.3 Schema Markup
Schema markup is a set of behind-the-scenes data that tells Google's bots what each page on your website is, for example a product review, a product page or an educational article. It gives crawlers more context about your content and supports better placement on the SERP.
3.4 XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a back-end file that works like a floor plan of your website, submitted to Google to show how many pages exist, how they are arranged and which ones matter most, so the bots can explore and index everything faster and more completely.
4. SEO Terms About Trust and Link Networks
SEO is not only about your own website. It also involves other websites across the online world.
4.1 Backlink
A backlink is a link from an outside website pointing back to yours, whether it comes from a content citation, a mention, or buying backlinks in ways that stay within the rules. The more quality, business-relevant backlinks you earn, the more Google sees your site as trustworthy and deserving of higher rankings.
4.2 Link Building
Link building is the process of earning those quality backlinks through different strategies, such as creating content interesting enough to be shared widely, doing PR with partner websites, or working with business partners to publish articles that link back. That is what makes link building for SEO a challenging process with real influence on SERP rankings.
4.3 DA & PA (Domain Authority & Page Authority)
DA and PA are scores from third-party tools that estimate how trustworthy a website is. They are not official Google scores, but SEO specialists and marketing teams use them as a standard yardstick for measuring link building results. The higher the DA and PA, the better the chances of ranking well. They break down as:
- DA (Domain Authority): the trust score of the whole domain
- PA (Page Authority): the trust score of an individual page
5. SEO Terms About Measurement
Beyond the SEO processes and steps themselves, measurement terms matter just as much.
5.1 CTR (Click-Through Rate)
CTR is the ratio of searchers who click through to your website compared with those who saw it on the SERP. A CTR of 2% means 100 people searched and saw your site on Google, but only 2 clicked in. A low CTR can be a sign that your meta title is not compelling enough yet.
5.2 Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the share of visitors who click into your website and immediately close the tab or hit back without viewing any other page. A high bounce rate can be a warning that the content does not answer the search intent, or that a technical problem is hurting the user experience (UX).
5.3 SEO Audit
An SEO audit is a website check-up that hunts for weak spots, from loading speed and link structure to metadata and more, so you can patch the leaks and lift the site's overall performance.
6. SEO Terms in the AI Era
AI technology has been changing industry after industry, and SEO is no exception, which is why more businesses and digital agencies now offer AI SEO services.
6.1 AI Search & Zero-click Search
As more people search for information through AI (using ChatGPT or Google's AI features, for example), AI search tends to hand over a finished summary of exactly what was asked. That creates the zero-click search phenomenon: users get a complete answer without needing to click into any website at all.
6.2 GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
With consumer behavior shifting toward AI, classic SEO alone may not be enough. A newer discipline called GEO has emerged: tuning your data and website so AI systems pick your content as a reference when they compose answers for users.
SEO vocabulary can look complicated, but once you slowly work through where each term comes from, you will see none of it is beyond reach. Understand the ideas properly and apply them the right way, and both the jargon and the work itself stop being difficult.
If you want a marketing team in Bangkok that can plan and measure SEO with precision, push your website's rankings where you want them and free you up to run the business, Relevant Audience is ready to be your partner. Take a look at our end-to-end SEO services.
