Primary owner
The account with principal ownership responsibilities for a profile. Keep business control and agency access arrangements clear.
Related practical guide →Local search reference
Local SEO Glossary
Understand local search terminology, from citations and Google Business Profile to geo-grids, indexing and qualified leads.
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AI search
Search experiences that generate or summarise answers. Track the platform, query, date and sources; a single mention is not a stable visibility metric.
Related practical guide →Anchor text
The visible words in a link. Make them describe the destination and its usefulness in the surrounding sentence.
Related practical guide →Attributes
Structured details a platform offers about a business, such as facilities or service options. Select only accurate, applicable values.
Related practical guide →Average position
An aggregated search-report measure of observed positions. It is not a fixed rank for every user or location.
Related practical guide →Backlink
A link from another website. Evaluate its reader purpose and relevance, and distinguish editorial links from paid placements.
Related practical guide →Booking conversion
A completed booking defined by the business's measurement process. A click to a booking engine is an earlier stage.
Related practical guide →Brand query
A query naming the business or brand. Analyse it separately when assessing new-customer discovery.
Related practical guide →Breadcrumb
Navigation showing a page's place in a useful hierarchy, with links to its parents.
Related practical guide →Business category
A platform's classification of what the business is. Choose an accurate primary category and relevant additional categories.
Related practical guide →Business Profile
Google's record for an eligible business on Search and Maps, managed by authorised owners and managers.
Related practical guide →Canonical URL
The preferred URL declared for a page or duplicate content. It is a signal, and the search engine may select another canonical.
Related practical guide →Citation
A mention or listing of business information on another platform. Publication, accuracy and customer usefulness matter more than an arbitrary count.
Related practical guide →Click-through rate
Clicks divided by impressions for the same defined dataset. Avoid mixing counts from different reports.
Related practical guide →Content cluster
A collection of related pages organised around distinct reader tasks. Each page still needs a clear purpose.
Related practical guide →Core Web Vitals
Measures of loading, responsiveness and visual stability. Distinguish field data from individual laboratory tests.
Related practical guide →Crawlability
Whether a crawler can fetch a resource under the site's technical and access controls. Crawlability alone does not prove indexing.
Related practical guide →Directory
A platform organising business records for discovery or comparison. Choose ones relevant to the audience, business and country.
Related practical guide →Direction request
A request for directions recorded by a platform. It indicates an interaction, not a confirmed visit or purchase.
Related practical guide →Distance
The relationship between a business's location and the searcher's location as used in local results.
Related practical guide →Duplicate listing
An additional record that may represent the same business. Check eligibility and identity before seeking a merge or removal.
Related practical guide →Entity
A particular business, organisation, person or other thing being described. Keep its identity distinct from a page about it.
Related practical guide →GBP
An abbreviation for Google Business Profile. It replaced the Google My Business name; old product names still appear in search queries.
Related practical guide →Geo-grid
A set of fixed geographic sampling points used for local search observations. Results depend on the query and scan settings.
Related practical guide →Google Search Console
Google's website search-performance and indexing tool. It does not replace Business Profile performance reporting.
Related practical guide →H1
The main heading of a page. Use it to clearly identify the page's purpose for readers.
Related practical guide →Impression
An exposure counted according to a reporting platform's rules. It is not interchangeable with a visit.
Related practical guide →Indexing
A search engine's inclusion and processing of content in its index. Sitemap submission is not proof of indexing.
Related practical guide →IndexNow
A protocol for notifying participating search engines about URL changes. A successful receipt does not guarantee crawling, indexing or ranking.
Related practical guide →Intent
What a person is trying to understand or accomplish with a search. Map similar expressions of the same need to a useful page.
Related practical guide →Internal link
A link within the website's defined boundary. Use it to help readers discover relevant content and complete a task.
Related practical guide →JSON-LD
A structured-data format embedded in a page. Syntactic validity is separate from factual correctness and search eligibility.
Related practical guide →Keyword cannibalisation
A diagnosis sometimes used when overlapping pages compete for the same intent. Check query-to-page evidence before changing URLs.
Related practical guide →LocalBusiness
A Schema.org type for a real local business. Use appropriate subtypes and verified public facts when relevant.
Related practical guide →Local Pack
A local search result feature presenting businesses and map context. Its appearance can vary by query and interface.
Related practical guide →Local SEO
Work to improve discovery and customer journeys for searches where a place or service area matters.
Related practical guide →Location page
A page about a real branch or useful local service context, with information specific to the customer's decision.
Related practical guide →NAP
Name, address and phone. Focus on accurate identity and contact details rather than harmless punctuation differences.
Related practical guide →Noindex
An instruction asking a supporting search engine not to index a page. The crawler must be able to access the instruction.
Related practical guide →Organic result
An unpaid search result. Paid advertising does not buy a better organic local rank.
Related practical guide →Prominence
How well-known a business is, one of Google's stated local-ranking considerations.
Related practical guide →Qualified lead
An enquiry that meets the business's explicit qualification criteria. Define those criteria before reporting growth.
Related practical guide →Relevance
How well a business matches the search need. Accurate categories and service information help express that fit.
Related practical guide →Review gating
Filtering customers so only those expected to be positive are encouraged to post a public review. Avoid this practice.
Related practical guide →Review velocity
The rate of new reviews over a defined period. It is an operational observation, not a universal guaranteed ranking formula.
Related practical guide →Robots.txt
A file directing cooperating crawlers' access to paths. Blocking crawling is not a reliable substitute for a noindex instruction.
Related practical guide →Service-area business
A business that travels to customers. Eligibility and public-address rules differ from a customer-facing storefront.
Related practical guide →Soft 404
A response that appears successful but provides missing-page or irrelevant content. Returning the homepage for every unknown URL can create this problem.
Related practical guide →Structured data
Machine-readable descriptions of page content or entities. They must reflect the visible, verified information.
Related practical guide →UTM parameters
Campaign labels added to URLs for compatible analytics systems. Keep them consistent and free of personal information.
Related practical guide →Visibility score
A tool-defined summary of observations. Check its denominator, cutoff and handling of missing data before comparing scores.
Related practical guide →XML sitemap
A file listing preferred URLs for discovery. Use real canonical page URLs, not section fragments.
Related practical guide →Zero-click search
A search interaction that does not lead to a website click. It can still lead to other actions, but those outcomes need evidence.
Related practical guide →Sources and further reading
- Google: improve local ranking
- Google: business representation guidelines
- Google: SEO Starter Guide
- Google: LocalBusiness structured data
Official documentation explains platform rules. Examples and workflows are editorial guidance; illustrative businesses are fictional. See our editorial policy.