Keyword research training – List of terms 

List of terms mentioned in the 

Keyword research course 
We mention a lot of terms in this course which you might not be familiar 
with yet. Although we will explain these terms carefully in the course, it’s 
easy to lose track of which term serves what purpose. Below, we have 
compiled an overview of terms mentioned in this course, with short 
descriptions of what they entail. They are listed alphabetically. 
 
Algorithm (of a search engine):  
aspect of a search engine that decides which pages (that have been saved 
in the index) are shown in the search results, and in which order. How 
Google’s algorithm works is a secret and the factors that determine the 
ordering change regularly. 
 
Answer box (in Google): 
element of the search result that appears somewhere between the 
organic search results. Answer boxes give suggestions for questions that 
relate to the search query you typed in. 
 
Answerthepublic.com: 
a tool that can be used to come up with keywords. When you enter a term, 
it uses auto suggest results provided by Google and Bing to make a list of 
questions people search for concerning that term. 
 
Bounce rate: 
a metric that measures the percentage of people who land on your 
website, and do completely nothing on the page they entered. So they 
don’t click a menu item, a ‘read more’ link, or any other internal links on 
the page. A user bounces when there has been no engagement with the 
landing page, and the visit ends with a single-page visit. You can use 
bounce rate as a metric that indicates the quality of a webpage and/or the 

 
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‘quality’ of your audience. 

 
Commercial intent: 
people have a commercial intent, when they want to buy something 
sometime soon and they are doing research before making a purchase. At 
Yoast.com, we’ve created sales pages for our plugins and courses. 
 
Conversion: 
conversion happens every time a visitor completes a desired action on 
your website. That could be a click-through to the next page, a 
subscription to a newsletter, or a visitor buying your product.  
 
Copywriting: 
the act of writing text for the purpose of advertising of other forms of 
marketing.  
 
Cornerstone content:  
cornerstone content pieces are those articles on your website you’re most 
proud of. They reflect your business, communicate your mission and are 
extremely well written. These are the articles you would like to rank high 
in the search engines. Cornerstone articles are usually explainers; these 
articles combine insights from different blog posts. If you mark an article 
as cornerstone content in the Yoast SEO plugin, the content and SEO 
analyses become a little stricter. 
 
Crawlability: 
has to do with the possibilities Google has to crawl your site. Crawlers can 
be blocked from your site. There are a few ways to block a crawler from 
your website: in the robots.txt file, in the HTTP header or in the robots 
meta tag. If your website or a page on your website is blocked, you’re 
saying to Google’s crawler: ‘do not come here’. Your site or the respective 
page won’t turn up in the search results in most of these cases. 
 
Crawler (also: spider, bot, robot): 
aspect of a search engine that goes around the internet 24/7, following 
links from one web page to another and saving the HTML-version of all 
pages in a gigantic database (the index). Pages that are saved in the index 
could appear in the search results. 

 
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Google: 
the world’s most popular search engine. Google’s mission is to ‘organize 
the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. 
 
Google Ads: 
an online advertising service developed by Google, where advertisers pay 
to display brief ads within the Google ad network to web users.  
 
Google Ads Keyword Planner: 
a keyword research tool within Google Ads that allows you to find the 
right keywords. 
 
Google Analytics: 
a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website 
traffic. 
 
Google Search Console: 
a web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check 
their site’s indexability and optimize visibility of their websites. 
 
Google Trends: 
a tool by Google that can be used to compare the search frequency of two 
or more terms.  
 
Head keyword: 
your most important keywords. They form the basis of your keyword 
research sheet and keyword strategy. After identifying your head 
keywords, you can start coming up with longer tail keywords. Note: head 
keywords can consist of several words. 
 
Holistic SEO approach: 
an SEO approach where you focus on making every aspect of your site as 
good as possible in order to improve your ranking in the search results. 
Google’s mission is to build the perfect search engine that helps people 
find the best results for what they are looking for. At Yoast, we believe 
that making your website fit this goal is the way to go, and that this can 
be accomplished by using a holistic SEO approach. 

 
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Hummingbird update: 
a Google update that laid down the groundwork for voice-search. It pays 
more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole search 
phrase is taken into account, rather than just particular words. The 
Hummingbird update was released in 2013. 
 
Incognito mode: 
incognito or privacy mode is a privacy feature in some web browsers to 
disable browsing history and web cache. Searching incognito prevents 
search engines from taking previous searches into account when 
showing search results. 
 
Index: 
aspect of a search engine; a gigantic database where the HTML-versions 
of pages that the crawler has found are saved. Pages that are saved in the 
index could appear in the search results. Whether they do depends on 
how the algorithm of the search engine ranks it. 
 
Indexability: 
the search engine’s ability to add a page to its index. 
 
Informational intent: 
people have a informational intent when they are trying to find 
information on a specific topic. For example, for Yoast.com, we create 
blog posts for people looking for information on SEO.  
 
Internal link: 
a type of link on a webpage to another page or resource (e.g. an image or 
document), on the same website or domain. Internal links connect your 
content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They 
can establish hierarchy on your site, which enables you to give the most 
important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable, 
pages.  
 
Keyword: 
word or phrase you would like your website to rank for, so when people 
search for that keyword or phrase in a search engine, they should find 

 
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your site.  
 
Keyword research: 
the activity you undertake to come up with an extensive list of keywords 
you would like to rank for. 
 
Keyword stuffing: 
manipulating the ranking of a site in the search results by filling pages 
with (unrelated) keywords or numbers. 
 
Landing pages: 
the pages you want your audience to reach when they are searching for a 
keyword. 
 
Link building: 
there’s white-hat link building, where you build an engaged community 
and promote your website to relevant people, but there are black-hat 
strategies of link building as well. Some sites try to rank higher by buying 
links. This includes exchanging money for links, but also sending 
someone a free product in exchange for a link. 
 
Long tail keyword: 
even more specific and less common keywords than mid tail keywords. 
They often focus on a niche. The longer (and more specific) search terms 
are, the easier it will be to rank for the term. The length of long tail 
keywords is relative: they may consist of three or four words for big 
companies, they may consist of six or more words for smaller companies. 
 
Mid tail keyword: 
more specific and longer keywords than head keywords, derived from the 
head keyword they tie into. The length of mid tail keywords is relative: 
they may be very short for big companies, they may be quite long for 
smaller companies. 
 
Mission: 
a sentence describing a company’s function, markets, and competitive 
advantages; a short written statement of your business goals and 
philosophies. 

 
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Mobilegeddon update:  
a Google update that boosts sites that have mobile friendly pages in 
Google’s mobile search results. The Mobilegeddon update was introduced 
in 2015. 
 
Mobile indexing first index:  
a new index that Google is currently (2018) switching to. With this new 
index, Google will determine ranking based on the quality of the mobile 
version of a site instead of the desktop version.  
 
Navigational intent: 
people have a navigational intent when they want to access a specific 
website by entering them in a search engine. So, if people search for 
“Yoast”, they’re probably trying to reach our website Yoast.com.  
 
Niche: 
a smaller part of a market with specific needs. Defined by online 
dictionary Merriam Webster as “the situation in which a business’s 
products or services can succeed by being sold to a particular kind or 
group of people”. 
 
Organic search results: 
the non-paid search results. Google’s search engine results page (SERP) 
shows seven to ten organic links which fit your search the best. 
 
Page swapping: 
a trick for getting ranked for one page, and then, after the page has 
attained a good position in the search results, replacing that page for 
another. 
 
Paid search results: 
the paid search results, which are shown above the organic (non-paid) 
links. These links are ads; people have paid Google to put these links at 
the top of the site when people search for a specific term. 
 
Panda update: 
a Google update that tries to diminish those websites which are purely 

 
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created to rank in the search engines. The first Panda update was 
released in 2011 and Google has re-run this update periodically. 
 
Penguin update: 
a Google update that judges the links websites got from other sites. If the 
links turn out to be artificial (e.g. created by buying or exchanging), 
Google no longer assigns link value. The first Penguin update was rolled 
out in 2012. Google has re-run this update several times and it is now 
said to be run continuously. 
 
Possum update: 
a Google update that was released in 2016. After Possum, Google has 
shown more varied results depending on the physical location of the 
searcher and the phrasing of the query.  
 
RankBrain: 
a Google algorithm; a machine learning system that helps Google better 
decipher the meaning behind queries, and serve best-matching search 
results in response to those queries. RankBrain has a query processing 
and a ranking component. 
 
Ranking: 
getting your website in a high position in the search results of a search 
engine, like Google. The algorithm of a search engine determines the 
position your site gets in the search engine. 
 
Rich snippet: 
snippets that show more than just the title, slug, and meta description. 
They could show an image, a rating, and whether or not a product is in 
stock. Rich snippets stand out from other snippets, and thus they have a 
higher click-through rate. 
 
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): 
the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in 
Google’s - or another search engine’s - organic search results. 
 
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): 
page of the search engine that shows the (organic and paid) search 

 
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results that fit your search the best. 

 
Snippet: 
a result Google shows to the user in the search results. A snippet consists 
of a SEO title (in blue), the slug (in green), and the meta description (in 
black).  
 
Traffic potential: 
a score that gauges how often people use a certain search term in Google. 
Traffic potential is measured on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 means 
almost no one will ser 
 
Transactional intent: 
people have a transactional intent when they are looking to buy 
something after doing their commercial intent searches. For example, 
the sales pages at Yoast.com have multiple buttons through which people 
can buy our products immediately. 
 
Universal search: 
a method Google is using in delivering search results. In the universal 
search results, Google not only delivers links to sites that best match 
your search; it also embeds other digital content, such as news items, 
pictures and videos. 
 
Unique selling points (USPs): 
factors that set you apart from your competition, that make your 
company stand out from other companies.  
 
User experience (UX): 
how a person experiences using a product, such as a website, a mobile 
phone, or an app, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use. 
It’s all about how someone feels when using a particular product: does 
the product make you feel excited or happy, is it a joy to use it, does it 
help you effortlessly achieve what you’ve been aiming for? UX is 
important for SEO, because search engines want to provide people with 
the best result for their query. 
 
Voice search: 

 
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a search method that allows a user to use a voice command to search the 
internet.  
 
Virtual private network (VPN): 
a technology that creates a safe and encrypted connection over a less 
secure network, such as the internet.  
 
Yoast Suggest: 
a tool developed by Yoast that can be used to come up with keywords. It 
uses the Google Suggest functionality to find keyword expansions. 
 
 

 
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