The SEO Glossary

A quick reference for the terms you'll meet across OneClickSEO. Grouped by area - keyword and SERP concepts, technical SEO, and AI search.

Keywords & SERP

Keyword

A word or phrase people type into a search engine. The unit you research, target, and track.

Search volume

The estimated number of monthly searches for a keyword in a given country.

CPC

Cost per click - the average price advertisers pay for a click on that keyword. A proxy for commercial value.

Search intent

The goal behind a query. OneClickSEO labels keywords Navigational, High Intent, Pre-Purchase, Post-Purchase, or Comparison.

Keyword Difficulty (KD)

An estimate of how hard it is to rank for a keyword, shown as bands from Easiest to Hard. See Keyword Difficulty.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page - the page of results for a query, including organic links and features.

SERP feature

A non-standard result like a Featured Snippet, People Also Ask, Video, Map Pack, or AI Overview.

Featured snippet

A highlighted answer box at the top of some SERPs, pulled from a ranking page.

People Also Ask (PAA)

An expandable list of related questions on the SERP. A source of content ideas.

Keyword cluster

A group of keywords that share intent and can be targeted by a single page. See Keyword clustering.

Weak spot

A low-authority page ranking in the top results - a sign a keyword may be easier to break into.

Technical SEO & links

Crawl

The process of a bot fetching and following links across your site. A full crawl powers the Site Audit.

Indexability

Whether a page can be added to a search engine's index. Blocked by noindex, robots rules, or canonical conflicts.

Canonical

A tag that tells search engines which URL is the master version of duplicate or similar pages.

Noindex

A directive that tells search engines not to include a page in their index.

Redirect chain

A link that passes through two or more redirects before reaching its destination, wasting crawl budget.

Broken link

A link pointing to a page that returns an error (4xx/5xx). See Fixing broken links.

Anchor text

The clickable text of a link. Describes the destination to users and search engines.

Dofollow / Nofollow

Whether a link passes authority (dofollow) or is marked not to (nofollow).

Backlink

A link from another website to yours. Backlinks are a major ranking signal.

Referring domain

A unique website that links to a page. Counted separately from total backlinks.

Backlink gap

Referring domains that link to your competitors but not yet to you - your best link prospects. See Backlink Analysis.

Domain Authority (DA) / Page Authority (PA)

0-100 scores predicting how well a domain or page can rank. See Domain authority metrics.

Trust Flow / Citation Flow

Majestic metrics for link quality (TF) and link quantity/influence (CF).

Spam score

An estimate of how spammy a linking domain is. Lower is safer when prospecting links.

Core Web Vitals

Google's page-experience metrics for loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

AI search

AI Overview

Google's AI-generated answer block shown above organic results for some queries.

Answer engine (AEO)

Answer Engine Optimization - optimizing to be cited inside AI answers. See AEO guide.

AI Visibility

Whether AI engines mention and cite your brand for relevant prompts. Measured in the AI Visibility Tracker.

Citation

A source an AI engine references in its answer. In AI search, citations are the equivalent of rankings.

Mention rate

The share of AI checks where your brand is mentioned - your headline AI-visibility number.

Share of voice

Your visibility across a set of tracked keywords or prompts, relative to the total opportunity.