The plain English glossary.

The work of making your website show up when people search Google for what you sell. It covers how the site is built, what the pages say, and who links to you.

Showing up in searches that have a place attached, like "landscaper near me" or "cabinets West Palm Beach". It leans on your Google Business Profile, your reviews and location pages on your site.

Making your business show up in answers written by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Instead of ranking a link, the goal is to be the business the AI names and describes correctly.

Writing your pages so they answer the exact questions people ask, so search engines and AI tools can lift the answer straight from your site.

Your free listing on Google that shows your hours, address, phone, photos, reviews and posts in search and on Google Maps. It used to be called Google My Business.

Extra code on a page, invisible to visitors, that labels what the content is: a business, a service, an FAQ, a review, an event. Also called structured data.

A file on your website (usually sitemap.xml) that lists every page you want search engines to know about, with the date each one last changed.

A link from someone else's website to yours. Search engines treat each one as a vote that your site is worth showing.

A keyword is the phrase someone types or says into a search. Search intent is what they actually want when they type it: to learn, to compare, to buy, or to find a place nearby.

The AI-written summary Google shows at the top of many search results, above the usual links. It pulls from a few websites and cites them.

A program that search engines and AI companies run to read websites page by page, following links as it goes. Also called a bot or spider. A robots.txt file on your site tells crawlers what they may and may not read.

Google's three measurements of how a page feels to use: how fast the main content shows up, how quickly it reacts to a tap, and whether things jump around while loading.

Designing the website for a phone screen first, then adapting it for tablets and desktops, instead of the other way around.

A single page built for one purpose and one audience, usually where an ad, email or search result sends people. It has one message and one thing to do next.

The thing you ask a visitor to do next: call, book, get a quote, start a project. Usually a button or a short form. "Above the fold" means it is visible before anyone scrolls.

The share of visitors who do the thing you wanted: fill out the form, call, book. One hundred visitors and three forms is a three percent conversion rate.

Your domain is your web address (yourcompany.com). DNS is the set of records that tells the internet where that address points: which server hosts the site, where email goes.

The certificate that puts the padlock and "https" in front of your web address. It encrypts what passes between the visitor and your site.

The service that keeps your website's files on a server connected to the internet so people can load it. Modern hosting also handles speed, security and backups.

The tool you log into to change words, photos and pages on your site without touching code. WordPress is the best known. Many modern sites use a lighter one or a simple admin screen built for the owner.

An instruction that sends anyone visiting an old web address to the new one automatically. A 301 is the permanent kind, and it carries the old page's search standing over to the new page.

Building the site so people with disabilities can use it: readable text contrast, labels a screen reader can speak, keyboard navigation, captions on video. The standard is called WCAG.

The one place where every lead, customer, call, email and note lives, so anyone on your team can see where a deal stands. It replaces the spreadsheet, the sticky notes and your memory.

A person who has shown interest in what you sell and left a way to reach them: a form, a call, a booked meeting, a message. Not yet a customer.

The stages a lead moves through on the way to becoming a customer, laid out left to right: new, contacted, quoted, won or lost. Each stage holds the deals currently sitting in it.

Ranking leads by how likely they are to become good customers, using what they told you and what they did. A qualified lead is one that passes your bar: right service, right area, right budget, ready soon.

The form on your site (or sent by link) that collects what you need to know about a new inquiry before the first call: contact details, what they want, where, when.

How long it takes you to respond after someone reaches out. Measured in minutes, not days.

A planned series of messages (email, text, call reminders) that goes out automatically after a lead comes in or a quote is sent, spaced over days or weeks.

Where a lead came from: Google search, Google Business Profile, a referral, an ad, a sign on a truck, a specific landing page.

An "if this, then that" instruction in your software: when a form is submitted, create a lead and text the owner; when a deal is marked won, send the welcome email.

The total revenue a customer brings over the whole relationship, not just the first job. Repeat work, maintenance plans and referrals count.

A chat tool powered by a large language model that answers questions, drafts text and helps with tasks in plain conversation. Claude and ChatGPT are examples. A business can put one on its website or inside its own tools.

An AI that does not just answer but takes steps: looks things up, fills in forms, sends messages, updates records, and works toward a goal across several actions with limited supervision.

The underlying AI model that reads and writes text, trained on a very large amount of writing. It is the engine inside assistants and agents. Claude, GPT and Gemini are large language models.

A prompt is what you type to an AI. A system prompt is the standing instruction set behind the scenes that tells an assistant who it is, what it knows, what tone to use and what not to do, before any user says a word.

A way of giving an AI your own documents to work from. Before it answers, it looks up the relevant pages from your files and reads them, so answers come from your information rather than general memory.

When an AI states something false with full confidence: a price you do not charge, a service you do not offer, a policy that does not exist.

The context window is how much an AI can read and keep in mind at once in one conversation. It is measured in tokens, chunks of text roughly three quarters of a word long. Usage is often billed by the token.

An open standard for connecting an AI to the tools and data a business already uses: a CRM, a calendar, a database, a scheduling app. Think of it as a universal plug between the AI and your systems.

The limits you put on an AI: topics it will not discuss, actions it needs approval for, data it cannot see, and a hand off to a person when it is unsure.

Building software by describing what you want to an AI in plain English and letting it write the code, then testing and adjusting by conversation rather than by hand.

The way one piece of software talks to another. Your CRM has an API so your website form can create a lead in it; your payment processor has one so your app can charge a card.

An automatic message one system sends to another the instant something happens: "a form was just submitted", "a payment just cleared". The opposite of checking every few minutes.

Where your software stores its information in an organized way: customers, jobs, invoices, messages. The spreadsheet behind the app, but built to hold a lot and never lose a row.

One piece of software serving many separate customers, each seeing only its own data, the way one apartment building houses many tenants behind their own locked doors.

A native app is installed from the App Store or Google Play and built for that phone. A web app runs in the browser at a web address. A progressive web app (PWA) is a web app that can be added to the home screen and feel installed.

How software confirms who is logging in: password, email link, text code, Google sign in. Authorization is the related step of deciding what that person is allowed to see and do.

A setting stored outside the code, like a password, an API key or a database address. The code reads it at startup, so secrets never sit in the source files and the same app can run in test and live modes with different settings.

Pushing a new version of a website or app live. Modern setups do this automatically when code changes are approved, with a preview version to check first and a one click way to roll back.

Software whose code is public and free to use, change and build on. Much of the modern web runs on it: WordPress, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL.

Connecting two tools so they share data without someone copying it: the form into the CRM, the CRM into the calendar, the calendar into the text reminder.

Measuring what people do on your website and in your tools: how many came, from where, what they looked at, and whether they did what you wanted.

Google's free tool for measuring website traffic and behavior. It replaced the older Universal Analytics and is built around events (what people did) rather than page views alone.

Google's free tool that shows how your site performs in search: which searches showed your pages, how often people clicked, and any problems Google found while crawling.

A heatmap colors your page by where people click, tap and scroll. Session recordings replay anonymous visits so you can watch where someone got stuck. Microsoft Clarity does both for free.

One screen that shows the handful of numbers you care about, updated automatically from the systems that hold them. No logging into five tools, no spreadsheet exports.

A number you have decided matters enough to watch regularly, because it tells you whether the business is moving the right way: leads per week, close rate, average job size, response time.

Working out which marketing effort gets credit for a lead or sale. Simple attribution credits the last click; fuller models share credit across the ad, the search and the referral that all played a part.

The share of time your website or app is actually working and reachable. Monitoring tools check every minute or so and alert you when it is down.