SEO and Digital Marketing terms and definitions

The Local Pack refers to the feature on Google’s results page which has a map and a list of three local businesses.

Link baiting is the process of creating content for the purpose of getting other websites to link to it. An example of link bait might be an infographic with lots of helpful information. This provides an attractive piece of content for other webmasters to link to, or embed in their own site with a link back to the source.

Lazy loading is a web development technique which defers the loading of non-critical resources until the point at which they’re needed. This makes webpages load faster, which creates a better user experience.

Lifetime value refers to the ‘worth’ of a customer - it is an estimate of the average revenue that a customer will generate over their time as a customer. For example, if you have a subscription-based business model and the average customer subscribes for 20 months at a rate of £100 per month, then the LTV is £2,000.

Each time a web server receives a request for content, either by a user or by a robot such as Googlebot, it’s recorded in a log file. SEOs can analyse these log files to see how search engines are crawling their sites. Log file analysis can show areas where crawl budget is being wasted, find pages that aren’t being crawled often, and find errors such as 404 and 500 errors.

Long tail keywords are specific phrases that are longer than usual and show higher purchase intent.

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a method to retrieve information to help search engines recognize the proper context of words and documents.

Link building is a process of getting a link from other websites to help increase your organic visibility and ranking.

Schema markup is a vocabulary of tags that can be added to HTML to improve the way that search engines read and understand webpages. Specific to websites for physical businesses such as shops, restaurants and clubs, local business schema specifies attributes like the address, opening hours and reviews to help the website to appear in rich snippets on the search engine results page.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This is a concept used by search engines to find the hidden (latent) relationships between words (semantics) to improve understanding (indexing). LSI explains how search engines can understand that a search term and web content can mean the same thing, even if they don’t use the same words. Rather than matching search queries exactly to words on a page, search engines use complex calculations to identify context and synonyms.