Topic-first SEO glossary

These are the words the Academy uses, in the order you meet them. Each gets a sentence or two and a link to the page that goes deeper. If a term in a keyword tool confuses you, the table at the end maps the common names onto ours.

The structure

• Theme. An area of your business. Home espresso. Coffee beans and grinders. Café equipment. A site has a few of them.
• Topic. One thing your customer is deciding. Choosing a home espresso machine. A topic has four to eight pages, and then it is done.
• Cluster. Keywords whose search results overlap. They belong on one page, because Google already treats them as one question.
• Page. One question of a topic, answered completely, the answer in the first two sentences.
• Topic map. Every theme, topic and page in one view, each page marked covered, gap, or already ranking. It is the plan. See Your topic map.

Demand

• Keyword. What people type. In topic-first SEO a keyword is an input: it tells you whether anyone is asking, and roughly how many. It is never the plan. See Keyword research as a demand check.
• Search volume. The tool's estimate of searches per month. Good for yes or no and for rough size. Not good to three digits.
• Search intent. What the person wants when they type it: to learn (fixing something counts), to choose, to buy, or to reach a site they already know. See Search intent.
• Result shape. What Google actually shows for a keyword: articles, shops, videos, forum threads, a map. It tells you whether an article can win there at all.

Winnability

• Winnable. A question where sites your size or smaller already rank in the top ten. Judged from the results themselves, never from a score. See Who ranks there, and whether you can win.
• Keyword difficulty. A number a keyword tool buys from a data vendor. For long-tail keywords it is mostly absent: in one test it existed for 8 of 400 keywords, and most tools show a default in the blank.
• Coverage. How many of a topic's questions you have answered. Coverage is what makes a site look like it knows the subject.

Pages

• Commodity content. A page any competent generalist could have written from the same brief. Correct, tidy, and substitutable. See Commodity content.
• Information gain. What your page adds that the top ten do not have: a number from your own work, a case, the mistake everyone makes.
• E-E-A-T. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Google's words for "has this person actually done the work". See E-E-A-T in practice.
• Blueprint. The outline for one page, built from the pages it has to beat: which questions, in which order, and what the top ten are missing. In SitePerfector this is generated per page.

Beyond your site

• Citation. An AI answer linking to your page as its source. Earned by answering one question properly and by being mentioned elsewhere. See How AI answers pick their sources.
• Mention. Your name or your site appearing somewhere you do not control: Reddit, LinkedIn, a podcast, a supplier's page.
• Backlink. A link from another site to yours. Still counts. See Link building for small sites.

Measuring

• Impressions and clicks. Google Search Console's two counts: how often a page appeared in results, and how often it was clicked. Impressions move first, often months before clicks.
• Enquiries. Contact forms, calls, sign-ups, orders from a page. The number that matters. See Which numbers to track.

Same thing, other names

Next

• Start step 2, Find your topics. The first page there turns your customers' questions into a topic list.
• The reasoning behind the words: Topic-first SEO: what it is, why it works.