Plain English
What these words actually mean.
Our industry hides behind vocabulary. Here's the whole dictionary, in language you'd
actually use out loud. If anyone ever makes you feel stupid for asking, walk away.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
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The work that gets your business to show up when someone types a question into Google.
The classic version: you're competing for a spot in the list of blue links.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
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The work that gets your business named inside the answer an AI writes. Someone
asks ChatGPT "best roofer near me" — AEO is why you're one of the three it lists.
- Schema (structured data)
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Hidden labels on your website that spell out, in a format machines read, exactly what
your business is: name, address, hours, services, prices. Your visitors see no
difference. Search engines stop having to guess.
- Citation (two meanings)
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Confusingly, the word does double duty. In local SEO, a citation is a listing of your
name, address, and phone on another site — Yelp, directories, chambers of commerce. In
AI search, being cited means being named as the source of an answer. We do both.
- Core Web Vitals
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Google's health check on your pages. It measures three things: how fast the page shows
up, how quickly it responds when tapped, and whether things jump around while loading.
Fail it and you rank lower.
- Local pack (map pack)
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The box of three businesses with a little map that sits at the top of local Google
searches, above everything else. For most local businesses, this is the single most
valuable piece of real estate on the internet.
- Google Business Profile
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The free listing that controls how you appear in Google Maps and the local pack. It
used to be called Google My Business. It is almost always the cheapest, fastest win
available to a local business.
- AI Overview
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The AI-written summary Google now puts above the blue links. Many people read
it and never scroll. If you're not in it, you may as well not be on the page.
- Crawling & indexing
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How search engines find your pages (crawling) and file them away to show people later
(indexing). If a page was never crawled, it cannot rank — it doesn't exist as far as
Google is concerned.