[00:14]
On this week’s Engaging Marketeer podcast, I’m going to do something a little bit different, because it’s quite common in the business world, when you’re talking to somebody like me—who’s a bit of a nerd—or even the more nerdier nerds, you know, the ones that wear the beards, the anoraks, the thick glasses and carry a MacBook under their arm… you know, those kind of people.
But when they’re talking with business owners about digital marketing and search engine optimisation and all that stuff, they can get a little bit up themselves. They can get a little bit techy. They can get a little bit nerdy.
[00:44]
And it’s quite often that you don’t really have a clue what they’re talking about. Now, I used to do this a lot, but I have had a lot of training from various different speakers and events to learn not to talk technical. Not to say things that your target audience, the people in front of you—your viewers—are not going to understand.
So hopefully I don’t do that. Please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong. But I try to speak so that it’s clear what I’m saying and that everybody can understand what I’m talking about. So I won’t throw in loads of jargon.
[01:25]
Having said that, there are other people that do throw in loads of jargon, and often you’ve no idea what on earth they are talking about—and they like that. They like the fact that you don’t know what they’re saying, because they try to confuse you. Because if you don’t understand what they’re saying, then they’re probably very intelligent, and they’re probably worth paying lots of money for them to do whatever nonsense it is they’re trying to sell you.
[01:52]
So, in order to get over this—the fact that there are lots of digital marketing experts, gurus, call them whatever you will, out there who try to say things that you don’t understand because they’re trying to confuse you—we at Engage Web have put together our SEO Jargon Buster.
So, our search engine optimisation jargon buster contains an A to Z of all of the different types of jargon that you will hear people with beards and MacBooks under their arms talk about. You’ll see it mentioned in blogs, you’ll see it mentioned in posts on social media, you’ll see it talked about on websites such as Moz and Ahrefs and Search Engine Land, and you may not know what they are actually saying or what they mean.
[02:40]
Additionally, somebody may come to you as a digital marketing expert and try to sell their services to you. They may try to sell themselves as being the best SEO person the world has ever seen—and they’ll use lots of jargon, and you won’t necessarily know what they’re talking about.
They’ll throw it in emails at you, and they’ll throw it in reports to try to make themselves sound more intelligent.
So, this SEO Jargon Buster—there’s a link underneath the podcast. If you’re watching this on YouTube, it’s in the description. If you’re listening to this on iTunes, it’s in the description underneath the podcast. Spotify—it’s in the description underneath the podcast.
So please go to that link to download this for free.
[03:23]
I’m going to go through a couple of these right now so you know the kind of stuff that’s included in this SEO Jargon Buster.
But it is called How to Sound Like an SEO Expert Without Growing a Beard. That’s what we’ve called it. Because you don’t have to have a beard to understand this. If you’ve already got a beard, that’s okay. You don’t need to shave it off to understand it.
[03:45]
Let’s have a look—what’s on this SEO Jargon Buster now?
Crawl budget—that’s a good one. I’m starting at C: crawl budget.
So many people think that the more pages you have on a website, the better. It’s understandable. The more pages you have, the more content that you have, the more pages that can rank in Google.
But each website has its own crawl budget—a budget set to it by Google for how many pages Google is actually going to crawl on a given day.
Now, that’s bad, because if you’ve got a lot of pages on your website, you may have more pages than your crawl budget allows—which means you could have really good pages, really important pages, new blog posts for example, that don’t get indexed because your crawl budget is being spent up indexing pages that quite frankly shouldn’t be in Google’s index in the first place.
Like your contact page, your terms and conditions page, your categories page for products that just repeat because they’re on many, many pages at the same time.
So your crawl budget is something that digital marketing companies will talk to you a lot about—and that’s what it means. Every website has a different crawl budget. You may have more pages than your crawl budget allows. So your important content may not get indexed.
[04:58]
That’s covered in our guide on SEO Jargon: How to Sound Like an SEO Expert Without Growing a Beard.
We’ve also got citations and directories.
Citations are crucial now because AI has become more and more prevalent. So if somebody were to search in Google for a particular phrase—a question or an answer to a problem—Google will now put in an AI overview. That’s also in our SEO Jargon Buster.
The AI overview is the description at the top of Google that is automatically created by artificial intelligence to pull together information and answers from various different sources. And the citations are the websites that are listed within that source.
So you can be a citation within Google’s AI overview. If it’s answering a question that you are an expert on, it might use you as a reference—as a citation.
Equally, AI search bots like ChatGPT will use AI citations. You could become a citation for ChatGPT. So when someone is asking a question, of which you are the expert and you know the answer to—and it’s on your website, which is the important part—your website could be used as a citation.
[06:01]
Let’s stick with the C’s. Let’s go with canonical tag.
This sounds like a game show, doesn’t it? Canonical tag!
This is something else that digital marketing companies will talk about. And what the hell is it?
The canonical tag is something on your website. It’s a single tag on each page used to tell search engines if the content is the main piece of content—the main page—or if another page has similar or equal content that should be ignored.
This happens when you have large websites with duplicate content, or the content can be found on different pages.
For example, the most common use of this would be if your website can be accessed in Google using www.yoursite.com and also just yoursite.com without the “www”. If they can both be accessed, that technically means that’s two separate pages for Google—even though it’s the same page.
So the canonical tag will tell search engines like Google which is the one that you want indexed, which is the main page—so that Google doesn’t think, “Oh, you’ve got two duplicate pages here. You’re trying to pull a fast one and make your website look bigger than it actually is.”
[07:29]
Let me scroll down here and have a look at something else…
Featured snippets. Everybody loves a featured snippet—although these days not many people are going to be getting them.
A featured snippet is what used to appear at the top of Google when you searched for a common phrase or question—“how to do something” for example—and Google would pick the most important website on the internet that answered that phrase.
If it was your website, you could get hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of visitors per month to that particular page.
But featured snippets have almost all been replaced now by AI overviews—because Google hates you. Google hates businesses. It hates your websites. It wants to keep all the traffic for itself.
So featured snippets are mostly gone now. There are still a few out there, but for most searches they’ve disappeared and been replaced by AI overviews—which is why it’s important to become a citation in an AI overview, to reclaim that lost traffic.
[08:49]
Let’s have a look—what else have we got?
Google Trends—another great one. I love Google Trends.
We had somebody talking to us recently saying that their business wasn’t seasonal. Their business was completely the same all year round.
Really?
Let’s have a look at Google Trends, which tells you what is being searched for at specific points throughout the year, to see whether your business really is seasonal.
And—quelle surprise—it was seasonal. They were getting higher searches in a particular month than at any other time of the year, because what their clients were looking for was heavily influenced by that time of year. Which was Christmas, by the way.
So if you look at Google Trends, which is a completely free tool, you can type in any search query you want, and it will tell you when that query is most searched for throughout the year.
[09:55]
So, for example, if you were to type in “general election”, obviously the search volume for that will spike around an actual election. If you typed in “Donald Trump”, the search might spike whenever he says something stupid—which, let’s face it, is pretty much every day. But you get the idea.
Google Trends helps you plan your content, your blogs, your activity throughout the year so that you know when something is going to be topical—when people are actually going to be looking for it.
And again, that’s in our SEO Jargon Buster.
So scroll below this podcast. Find the link. Click the link. Go and download the SEO Jargon Buster.
[10:43]
That’s all I’ve got for now. I don’t want to go through the whole thing because there are dozens—maybe a hundred or so terms. I don’t even know how many are in there. Loads.
It’s alphabetical. It covers everything your SEO expert, your digital marketing company, your friendly guy with a beard and a MacBook is going to say to you to make you think he’s more intelligent than he actually is.
Download the SEO Jargon Buster. You’ll know all of these terms. You’ll know what they mean. And you’ll also be able to use the tools they talk about in the Jargon Buster.
Thanks for listening to the podcast. I’ll catch you on the next one.
