The SEO Terms That Every Business Owner Should Know About

If you want to become a master of SEO, there’s a lot you need to learn. Search engine optimisation covers so many different things, many of which are known by acronyms. While this can make it useful when discussing SEO, it can get a little confusing trying to wrap your head around what everything means.

For help understanding some of the more essential terms, we’ve put this guide together. It’s worth familiarising yourself with everything here because SEO plays such a vital role in growing your business’ online presence. You can’t be at the top of your game without it. If you need any SEO service or marketing services visit Singapore Marketing Agency.

YMYL

A term that’s been cropping up in SEO over the last few years is YMYL. It stands for Your Money or Your Life, and it refers to content that can impact a person’s health, happiness, safety or finances.

Websites that deal with money advice, medical diagnoses, fitness, voting information, or political news can all be categorised as YMYL content, and are therefore subject to certain assessments. It’s vital that the information present on such sites is accurate, as failing to do so could negatively impact people’s wellbeing. So, Google’s algorithm tries to tackle anything that doesn’t meet their standards by knocking it down the search rankings.

Given the prevalence of fake news and the trust in news media being lower than 50% in most countries, it’s no surprise that YMYL content has recently been subject to a lot of scrutiny. There may be more efforts to neutralise such content in the future, but for now, this is Google’s way of filtering out the lies.

Black Hat SEO

There are many SEO techniques out there designed to boost your rankings and make your business a success. Unfortunately, not all of them are good practices. Some of these methods you’ll want to avoid, as any immediate impacts are negated by long-term issues.

Black Hat SEO is the umbrella term used to refer to any technique that tries to increase a site’s rankings by defying a search engine’s terms of service. They include things like keyword stuffing, content automation, doorway pages, sneaky redirects, and hidden text. While these practices can all help a site to perform better initially, once Google realises what’s happened, they can ban it entirely.

EAT

This is another term that’s proved incredibly relevant to SEO in recent years, not that Google is eager to admit the critical role that it plays.

If you’ve seen it crop up and wondered what is EAT, it stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are three qualities that a website should have online if it wants to be favoured by search engines and highlighted as a resource of interest.

How relevant EAT is to your business generally depends on what you do. If you deal with YMYL topics, then Google expects you to have these traits. Without them, you might struggle to stand out against other websites with similar content, and be penalised as a result.

Manual Action

Should a site do something that’s not to a search engine’s liking, it may receive a manual action. No business wants this, because it means all or part of their online content is blacklisted, which understandably makes it hard to grow and thrive.

Site owners can always check to see if they’ve been penalised in the Search Console and use the information there to work out how to fix things. Getting back on Google’s good side isn’t impossible; you simply need to correct your mistakes and have the search engine review you again. Should you meet their requirements, the penalties will be removed, though it may take some time before you start soaring back up the rankings again.

NAP

It’s essential that all information online related to your business is accurate. However, if there’s anything you absolutely must have correct, it’s your NAP. This stands for Name, Address, and Phone number, three things that you don’t want customers to be mistaken about when searching for your business.

NAP is particularly important when it comes to local SEO, as information about where you are can influence whether people buy from you or not. If your address is incorrect and customers can’t accurately track you down, that’s not going to do a lot of good for your business. They’re not the only reason your NAP information should be correct, though.

Google values consistency in listings, so if your name, address, or phone number says one thing on your website and another somewhere else, the search engine won’t be too happy. Previous reports have indicated that incorrect information can affect a business by as much as 16%. So, it’s important to ensure that everywhere which lists your name, address, and phone number is accurate.

There’s tons to know about SEO, a lot of which only matters if you’re the one dealing with your business’ online presence. However, these terms are still worth remembering, even if you don’t handle search engine optimisation, as you never know when this information might come in handy.