Content
Content is what you build and provide to your website visitors. Content can be in many forms, text, imagery, video, audio, software, tools, anything that a user can find and consume on your site.
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SEO Glossary - C
Cached Page
A Cached page is a page that has been downloaded and stored by Google on its own servers prior to indexing.
Google used to show you the cached version of a page as a SERP feature in “About This Result” so you could see what version current rankings were based on, but they removed this in early 2024.
Call To Action (CTA)
A Call To Action (CTA) is a term that describes any content on a webpage that is designed to encourage a visitor to respond to immediately. Examples include “Buy Now”, “Request a demo”, “Click here” buttons.
Canonical Tag
A canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) is a tag you can add to a webpage to define the URL of the webpage that can be considered the definitive version of the page.
This is extremely important on pages that can be found and served on a number of URLs.
Canonical URL
A Canonical URL is the definitive, original version of a webpage where a page may be available on a number of URLS.
You can define a page's canonical URL using a Canonical tag of all versions of the page that point to the Canonical version.
If you don’t define a canonical version then Google may decide to choose a canonical version for you, which may not be the version you want them to choose.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot based on a Large Language Model developed by OpenAI.
ChatGPT allows users to interact with it in a conversational style to request it to perform actions and produce output.
ChatGPT has become very popular within the SEO community for research, summarisation and content production. However, Google has started to crack down on AI produced content as of March 2024.
Churn and Burn
Churn and Burn is a Blackhat SEO strategy where a site owner is not looking to build a long term website, but instead looks to rank as quickly as possible using Blackhat techniques in the expectation of trying to rank and monetise the site for a short period before it is removed from the Google Index.
Citation
A citation is any reference to your business name, address and telephone number, whether including a backlink or not.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a Blackhat technique where the web server will serve different content to Googlebot than it will to normal users. The version that Googlebot sees is designed to rank the page and may be designed to rank well, but avoid monetisation for example.
The version that normal users see when they land on the page may be much more spammy and over monetised, the sort of content that Google may not rank so well.
Cluster
A cluster is a collection of related keywords that are defined as serving the same (or very closely related) intent and have been brought together by a keyword clustering process.
Cluster Page
A page on a website that covers the keywords that have been grouped together as a cluster with related intent. A cluster page can be related to a “hub” or “pillar” page.
CMS
CMS is short for Content Management System. A CMS is software for managing and building out pages and content on a website.
The most common CMS in use is Wordpress.
Commercial Intent
Commercial Intent is a term used to classify search queries where the user is trying to find a product or service that will solve a problem or need they have. With Commercial intent the user is probably not yet at the point of making a transaction, but is heading in that direction.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network is a service that allows you to have your website files cached (cached means copies of files from your origin website) on edge servers that are placed in locations worldwide.
Then when a user requests a page from your website the files that make up the page will be served by the CDN from the servers that are physically closest to the user. This speeds up the response of your website for users.
Content Gap Analysis
Content Gap Analysis is a research method where you identify all the content topic areas that your competitors are covering and look for gaps in your own content. The aim is then to fill any gaps you find with new content.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is the process of creating and sharing materials online, such as web pages, video, podcasts, books and social media with the aim of attracting an audience interested in the topics you are covering and the products and services you offer.
SEO is a complementary process to Content Marketing as without content you have nothing to optimise with or for.
Conversion Rate
The Conversion Rate is how many people who land on a webpage will take the action you want them to achieve after landing there. Say you have a page with a lead magnet and 10 in every 100 people who arrive at the page sign up for the lead magnet then you have a 10% conversion rate on that page. If you have a product page and 2 in every 100 people who view the product page make a purchase then that page has a 2% conversion rate.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimsation is not strictly SEO, but it is a very closely related discipline and to be a fully rounded online marketer you will need an appreciation of it.
CRO is the discipline of trying to improve the conversion rate of your website. Whatever the main action it is you wish a user to perform on a page (sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, complete a form, etc) CRO is the process of creating new versions of the page and then split testing the new version against the old one to see which converts better. If the test version performs better then that becomes the new version of the page and you can repeat the process to try and improve on that page.
SEO feeds into CRO as it’s important to balance any potential negative SEO effects of changes that might reduce traffic to the page that might outweigh any potential gain in conversion rate.
Core Update
Core updates are the most major of the Google updates that Google periodically makes to its algorithms. They are called core updates as they are carried out on the most core parts of Googles systems.
Core updates tend to take several weeks to roll out and can have significant impacts on the search engine results for many websites.
Core updates are usually officially announced by Google.
Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals are a set of metrics that Google measures to see how well a page serves users in terms of loading performance and readability. You can see Core Web Vitals scores for your pages in Google Search Console.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the amount of resource that Google allocates to a website for crawling your webpages. Well established sites with lots of pages and authority will be allocated much more crawl budget and will be frequently crawled. Newer less established sites will be crawled at a much slower rate.
Crawler
Software which crawls the web and downloads pages and follows links in pages to discover new pages such as Googlebot. See Web Crawler, Spider.
Crawling
Crawling is the process by which Google (and other search engines and services) discover content online. They crawl (download) pages and save the page contents and then look for links within that page to then further crawl.
The idea is that it is like a spider crawling across a web.
Crawling Software
Crawling software (such as the popular Screaming Frog) can be used to perform a crawl of your website to look for issues such as redirect chains, broken links and to check if all parts of your site are crawlable.
CTR (Click Through Rate)
CTR, short for Click Through Rate, is a metric that measures for any viewed link what percentage of people who see it choose to click it. So if you have 100 people view the link and 5 of them click it then the link has a CTR of 5%.
CTR is used in Google Search Console to show what the click through rate from the SERPS are when your web page appears in the results.
CSS
Short for Cascading Style Sheets, CSS is code used in conjunction with HTML to style websites. Covers elements such as fonts, colours and placement of elements.
Custom GPT
A Custom GPT is an extension of ChatGPT that allows you to add additional training (in the form of documents) and instructions. These CustomGPT’s can then be saved and shared with others.
