The glossary
This work has more jargon than it needs. Here is what the terms actually mean, in the order they tend to come up.
The one place every lead and every customer lands, with what they asked for, when they were answered, and where they came from. This practice sets one up in your name and hands you the keys.
Why it matters. A lead in an inbox is a note to yourself. A lead in a CRM is a record the whole business can act on, and the only way to know which of them turned into customers.
The three pieces of contact information that identify your business: what you are called, where you are, and how to reach you.
Why it matters. Google cross checks your NAP everywhere it appears. When the versions disagree, it trusts none of them, and a business it is unsure about is a business it is slower to show.
A block of machine readable facts in the page's code: your hours, your phone number, your address, your prices, your reviews. People never see it. Search engines and AI assistants read it first.
Why it matters. It is the difference between a machine guessing what your business is from your paragraphs and being told outright. Guessing produces worse answers, and increasingly the answer is all the customer sees.
A score out of 100 from Lighthouse, the auditing tool built into Chrome and served free by Google at PageSpeed Insights. Its SEO category checks the technical basics a search engine needs before it can do anything useful with a page: a real title, a description, links it can follow, valid markup, and a robots file that is not accidentally shutting it out.
Why it matters. It is free, it takes a minute, and it is entirely within your control. It says nothing about how competitive your market is, which is the point: any business can score 100, so scoring less is worth knowing about.
How long a visitor waits before the biggest thing on the screen, usually the headline or the main photo, has finished drawing. Google grades it from what real visitors experience on their own phones and connections: under 2.5 seconds is good, over 4 is poor. It is one of the three Core Web Vitals, the speed numbers Google publishes for every page it knows about, and on its own a quarter of the PageSpeed performance score.
Why it matters. It is the closest thing to a stopwatch on the moment a customer decides your site is working. Most of it is set by what has to download before that first headline can appear, which is a list you control.
Google storing a page so it can be shown in results. Crawling is Google visiting the page; indexing is Google keeping it. A page can be crawled and still never indexed.
Why it matters. A page that is not indexed cannot rank for anything. It is not competing and losing, it is absent.
Making a business legible to AI assistants, the way SEO makes it legible to search engines. Same idea, different reader.
Why it matters. More people now ask an assistant instead of scrolling results. If your facts are not readable, you are left out of an answer that never showed a list of alternatives.