Digital Marketing Jargon Busting Part I – SEO

You might hear someone talking about your SERP results or SERP performance or even SERP analysis. What does this mean?

SERP is the Search Engine Results Page, or the page Google returns after you have typed something into the search bar, and your SERP result is the information displayed on this page

An image might help me to explain here. For example, we Googled “Best marketing agency in the Universe” – that universe being the village of Brantham on the Suffolk Essex border (Right: SERP. Below: SERP result):

Whilst your position on the SERP is dictated by various SEO ranking factors, not every part of your SERP result contributes to your SEO ranking.

The description (above) is included by search engines to help its users to make a more informed decision about which result to click. This gives you the opportunity to sell what is great about your business without worrying about including your keywords (although in an ideal world your keywords will be synonymous with what you do). The description is your free advert placed in front of an audience searching for your product, service, industry or even the question you can answer better than anyone else – use it!

Name, Address, Phone Number. NAP is as simple as it sounds. Honestly! Including your business Name, Address and Phone Number is incredibly important for Local SEO, it features multiple times in the 2018 Moz list of Local Search Ranking Factors.

Whether it is built into your website header, footer, or into your on-page copy, if you want to rank well locally for a service it is vital you are including NAP.

Google pulls in examples of your business NAP from numerous sources from across the internet – such as Google My Business, Companies House, Business Registries etc. – to compare with your site content. What does this mean? NAP works as a citation which adds legitimacy to your website and, by extension, your business.

TOP TIP: As Google ranks individual pages (rather than whole websites) if you want to rank well locally for a service you must include NAP on all pages you are aiming to rank for – not only your Home, About and Contact pages.

Crawler. Spider. Web Crawler. Web Spider. This common or garden bot exists under several guises, all a variation on the theme of its job of scuttling across the world wide web gathering information to report back to Google.

Its official job role is to crawl and index. What does this mean? In layman’s terms, crawlers turn the mountains of data on the web into something anybody can easily use, well almost anybody! Because the information accumulated by crawlers is what powers search engines. And what is a search engine other than a giant index of everything on the internet?

Keyword Stuffing is the practice of including an identified keyword, or keyphrase, multiple times within the same webpage, often to the detriment of its overall human readability, in attempt to dupe a search engine into believing your page is more relevant to a search query than it is. In the past, this tactic often generated much success, despite not being great for search engine users.

Luckily, Google has got much smarter (and continues to do so) and now understands when keywords are included within relevant, well-written, human-friendly content. It also knows when they are not and punishes offending pages accordingly.