Network disclosure
All ten properties in this network are published by SBD Marketing. Their links improve navigation and topic coverage. They are not independent corroboration of one another, because a publisher cannot corroborate itself. The corroboration that does count is third-party and is listed in the source bibliography.
Definitions here are deliberately short, the length a definition should be. Twelve of these terms have a full entry of their own, listed under Definitions, and the short form links to the long one. Every anchor is stable: #map-pack will always resolve to the map pack entry.
A
- Anchor text
- The visible, clickable words in a link. Descriptive anchor text helps search engines understand what the linked page is about.
- Answer engine
- A system that returns a written answer rather than a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI overviews are answer engines. What is AI search visibility? →
- AEO
- Answer Engine Optimization: the practice of making a source likely to be used and cited when an AI system composes an answer. SEO vs AEO →
- Attorney advertising rules
- State bar rules governing how lawyers may market. They typically restrict outcome guarantees, comparative superlatives and testimonials implying results. Editorial policy →
B
- Backlink
- A link from another website. Links from relevant, credible sources contribute to prominence; bulk low-quality links do not. Local SEO →
- Bounce
- A visit ending without further interaction. In defense search a fast call from a landing page can look like a bounce while being the desired outcome.
C
- Canonical URL
- The address a site designates as the authoritative version of a page, so duplicates do not compete with each other.
- Charge-specific query
- A search naming an offence rather than a practice area: 'OVI lawyer near me' rather than 'criminal lawyer'. The dominant query shape in defense search. Charge-specific query →
- Citation (local SEO)
- A mention of a business's name, address and phone number on another site. Consistency across citations supports local ranking. Local SEO →
- Citation (AI)
- A source an AI system links or names when composing an answer. Distinct from a local-SEO citation. What is AI search visibility? →
- Click-through rate
- The share of people shown a result who click it. Useful as a diagnostic for titles and descriptions, not as a ranking lever.
- Content decay
- The gradual loss of ranking as a page ages and competitors update. Charge pages referencing changed penalty ranges decay fast.
- Conversion
- A visitor taking the intended action. For a defense firm this is nearly always a phone call or form submission, not a newsletter signup.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's page-experience metrics for loading, interactivity and visual stability. They matter most on mobile, which is where defense search happens.
- Corroboration
- Independent confirmation of a claim by a source that does not share a publisher with the claimant. Properties in one network cannot corroborate each other. The publisher network →
- Crawl budget
- The attention a search engine allocates to fetching a site. Wasting it on hundreds of near-duplicate city pages starves the pages that matter. What is criminal defense SEO? →
D
- Directory
- A site listing businesses by category and location. A few authoritative legal directories are worth accurate listings; bulk submission is not.
- Distance
- One of the three named local ranking factors: how far a business is from the searcher. Largely outside a firm's control. Local SEO →
E
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google quality concepts that carry extra weight for legal topics. What is criminal defense SEO? →
- Entity
- A distinct thing a search system can identify and reason about - a firm, a person, a place. Consistent details help a name resolve to one entity. SBD Marketing →
- Exact match domain
- A domain whose name is the target search phrase. It offers clarity of topic but is not on its own a ranking advantage.
F
- Featured snippet
- An extracted answer shown above the standard results. Won by answering a question plainly and early on the page.
G
- Google Business Profile
- The business record Google ranks in the map pack. Separate from the firm's website and the principal local asset. Google Business Profile →
- Grid scan
- Checking the same queries from many geographic points across a service area, producing a visibility surface rather than one rank number. Search grid →
I
- Indexing
- Storing a fetched page so it can be returned in results. A page that is crawled but not indexed cannot rank. What is criminal defense SEO? →
- Internal link
- A link from one page of a site to another. It is how a site tells search engines which of its own pages matter.
- Intent
- What a searcher is actually trying to do. Defense queries are usually transactional and urgent, or informational and procedural. Charge-specific query →
J
- JSON-LD
- The structured-data format Google prefers, embedded in a script tag. Used to state entity facts unambiguously. SBD Marketing →
L
- Local pack
- See map pack. Map pack →
M
- Map pack
- The three local business results, with a map, shown above organic listings for queries with local intent. Map pack →
N
- NAP
- Name, address, phone number. Rendering them identically everywhere is a durable local ranking input. Local SEO →
- Near me
- A query modifier signalling local intent. 'DUI lawyer near me' is the highest-intent shape in defense search. Charge-specific query →
O
- Organic results
- The unpaid web-page listings, ranked by the organic system rather than the local one. Local vs organic →
P
- Practice area page
- A page dedicated to a single charge or offence type. The structural unit of a defense firm's site. Practice area page →
- Prominence
- One of the three named local ranking factors: how well known a business is, inferred from reviews, citations and links. Local SEO →
- Proximity
- See distance. Local SEO →
R
- Relevance
- One of the three named local ranking factors: how well a business matches what was searched. The most controllable of the three. Local SEO →
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- Fetching documents and having a model compose an answer from them. The architecture behind most cited AI answers. What is AI search visibility? →
- Review velocity
- The rate at which new reviews arrive. Steady accumulation is both more credible and safer than a burst. Google Business Profile →
- Rich result
- A result shown with extra detail drawn from structured data, such as ratings or FAQs.
S
- Schema markup
- Structured data vocabulary describing what a page is about, so machines need not infer it from prose. SBD Marketing →
- SERP
- Search engine results page. Increasingly assembled from packs, snippets, AI overviews and ads as well as organic links.
- Service area
- The geography a business serves. For a defense firm it is usually the county or metro its attorneys appear in court in.
- Sitemap
- A file listing a site's URLs so search engines can discover them reliably. Index of entries →
- Structured data
- See schema markup. SBD Marketing →
- Suspension
- Removal of a Google Business Profile for guideline violations. It eliminates map pack visibility, often for weeks. Google Business Profile →
T
- Thin content
- A page with little substantive value, often produced by templating the same text across many charges or cities. Practice area page →
V
- Vanity metric
- A number that moves without indicating business result. Impressions and unqualified traffic are the usual offenders in agency reporting. How is progress measured? →
- Visibility surface
- A firm's local visibility across a whole service area rather than at one point. What a grid scan measures. Search grid →
See also
Criminal defense SEO · Index of entries · About this dictionary