On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I’m doing something a little different.
If you’ve ever spoken to a digital marketer – especially the beardy ones with a MacBook tucked under their arm – you’ve probably been hit with a wall of jargon. You know the type. They throw around acronyms and buzzwords like confetti, and it’s not always clear whether they’re trying to help or just confuse you.
Truth is, they often want you confused. Because if you don’t understand what they’re talking about, it makes them look smarter. And if they seem smart, maybe you’ll pay them more.
I used to fall into that trap myself. But over the years, through training and speaking gigs, I’ve learned the value of plain English. When I speak to business owners, I try to explain things in a way anyone can understand. No fluff. No showboating. No tech for the sake of it.
Unfortunately, not everyone works that way.
That’s why we’ve created the SEO Jargon Buster at Engage Web – an A–Z guide of terms you’ll hear in SEO reports, marketing pitches, blog posts, and LinkedIn threads. It’s designed to cut through the nonsense and help you understand exactly what these terms mean, why they matter, and when you should care.
You can download it for free. The link is in the description of this podcast, whether you’re on YouTube, iTunes, or Spotify.
But to give you a flavour of what’s in it, here are a few highlights.
Crawl Budget
Most people assume the more pages a website has, the better. More content equals more chances to rank, right?
Not necessarily.
Every site has a crawl budget – that’s the number of pages Google will crawl and index during a given period. If you exceed your crawl budget, your most important pages – like new blog posts or service pages – might not get indexed. Instead, Google could waste its time on pages like terms and conditions or bloated category pages that don’t add any value.
Understanding your crawl budget is key to making sure Google sees the right content.
Citations (And Why AI Has Made Them Even More Important)
With AI becoming central to search, citations are more valuable than ever.
When you search a question on Google now, chances are you’ll see an AI Overview – a box at the top summarising the answer using information from multiple sources. If your website is used in that summary, it becomes a citation. The same goes for tools like ChatGPT when they reference websites as sources.
So, if your content answers a specific question really well, and it’s on a publicly accessible page, your site can be cited by AI. That gives you more visibility without needing to rank in the traditional way.
Canonical Tags
Canonical what?
A canonical tag is a bit of code that tells search engines which version of a page is the one they should index.
For example, your site might be accessible at both www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com. To Google, those could appear as two separate pages – even if the content is identical. That can cause problems with duplicate content.
A canonical tag helps avoid this by telling Google which page is the primary version. It’s especially important on larger sites with repeated or duplicated content across different URLs.
Featured Snippets (RIP)
Remember those handy little boxes at the top of Google that answered your question directly?
They were called featured snippets – and if your website earned one, it could bring in thousands of visitors a month.
Sadly, those days are mostly over.
Google has largely replaced featured snippets with AI Overviews. It now wants to keep people on Google, not send them off to your site. That means it’s even more important to be cited in those AI Overviews if you want to reclaim some of that lost traffic.
Google Trends
Here’s a free tool I absolutely love.
Google Trends shows you how interest in a search term changes throughout the year. It’s incredibly useful when planning blog content or marketing campaigns.
We had a client recently who insisted their business wasn’t seasonal. A quick look at Google Trends proved otherwise – their traffic spiked around Christmas. That insight changed how we approached their content.
You can try it yourself. Just type in any keyword and it’ll show you when people search for it the most. It’s an easy win that too many businesses overlook.
This is just a small taste of what’s inside the SEO Jargon Buster. The full guide includes dozens more terms, each one explained in plain English. It’s designed to help you make sense of the stuff your marketing agency throws at you in reports and meetings.
You’ll not only understand what they’re talking about – you’ll be able to challenge them when they try to pull a fast one.
So, if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by SEO talk, download the SEO Jargon Buster today. You’ll find the link just below this podcast, wherever you’re listening or watching.
Thanks for reading – and I’ll catch you on the next episode of The Engaging Marketeer.
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
