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Glossary · 7 terms
Authority, links and local SEO are how a search engine decides whether to trust a site rather than merely understand it. For a local business the two halves are connected: the same signals that establish credibility nationally are what qualify you for the map pack in your own city. The seven terms below cover both.
How a search engine decides a site is worth believing.
A backlink is a link from another website pointing to yours — one of the strongest signals search engines use to judge how trustworthy and authoritative a site is.
Not all backlinks are equal: a link from a well-known, relevant site in your industry carries far more weight than dozens of links from low-quality directories. Quality and relevance matter more than raw quantity.
Anchor text is the clickable, visible words in a hyperlink — the text a search engine reads as a clue about what the linked page is about.
Descriptive anchor text ("our Los Angeles SEO services") gives search engines more useful context than generic anchor text ("click here"), both for the page being linked to and for internal navigation across your own site.
Domain authority is a third-party score (not an official Google metric) that estimates how likely a website is to rank well, based mainly on the quantity and quality of its backlinks.
It's useful as a rough, comparative benchmark against competitors, but it's not something Google itself uses to rank pages — treat it as a directional signal, not a target to chase directly.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — the qualities Google's search quality guidelines say raters should look for when judging content quality.
It's not a single measurable ranking factor, but a framework reflected across many real signals: author credentials, first-hand experience, citations from other trusted sources, accurate information, and a secure, transparent site. AI tools reward the same underlying qualities when deciding what to cite.
The same argument, made to a search engine that already knows where you are.
Local SEO is optimizing a business's online presence to rank well for searches tied to a specific place, like "plumber near me" or "SEO agency in Los Angeles."
It relies heavily on signals outside your own website: your Google Business Profile, consistent NAP details across directories, and reviews. A technically excellent website with a neglected Google Business Profile will still struggle to show up in the local map pack.
A Google Business Profile is the free business listing that appears in Google Maps and the local search results, showing your address, hours, reviews, and category.
It's the single biggest factor in local search visibility, and it also feeds directly into Google's Knowledge Graph — an outdated or incomplete profile can undercut an otherwise well-optimized website.
NAP consistency means your business Name, Address, and Phone number are written exactly the same way across your website, your Google Business Profile, and every directory that lists you.
Inconsistent NAP data — a suite number here, an abbreviated street name there — makes it harder for search engines and AI tools to confidently confirm you're one single, trustworthy business rather than several different, uncertain listings.
No. It is a third-party score invented by SEO tool vendors to estimate strength, and Google has said repeatedly it uses nothing of the kind. It is useful for comparing two sites at a glance and misleading when treated as a target to raise.
It is the wrong unit. One link from a publication your customers actually read outweighs a hundred from directories nobody visits. Relevance and genuine editorial intent decide the value; the count mostly measures effort.
A complete, actively maintained Google Business Profile in the correct primary category, consistent name, address, and phone details everywhere they appear, and a steady flow of recent reviews. Proximity to the searcher is weighted heavily and is the one input you cannot optimise.
By making authorship and evidence visible. Name the person who wrote the page and say why they are qualified, publish first-hand specifics rather than a summary of what others have written, cite sources, and keep pages dated and current. Google is looking for signals a reader would also find reassuring.