Glossary
Local SEO services, translated: an 18-term glossary
If a quote for local SEO services reads like alphabet soup, keep this page open beside it. Each term gets one line on what it is and one on what it should cost you.
Read the quote, circle every acronym, and look it up below. Anything you cannot map to a task with a clear deliverable deserves a question before you sign.
The terms, in alphabetical order
| Term | Plain meaning | What to ask a vendor |
|---|---|---|
| Anchor text | The clickable words of a link | Which words will you use for my links? |
| Citation | A mention of your name, address and phone on another site | How many, and on which sites? |
| Core listings | The handful of directories that feed data to others | Which ones do you submit to? |
| Dofollow | A link with no rel attribute that tells Google to ignore it | Is the link in the article body? |
| Domain Rating (DR) | Ahrefs' 0 to 100 estimate of a site's link strength | Is that the donor's DR or yours? |
| GBP | Google Business Profile, called Google My Business until November 2021 | Who owns the login? |
| Grid rank | Your map position at many points around a business, from tools like Local Falcon | How often do you rerun it? |
| Local pack | The three map listings above the organic results | Which searches do you track? |
| NAP | Name, address, phone: must match everywhere | Do you fix mismatches too? |
| Nofollow, sponsored, ugc | Link attributes Google introduced in September 2019 | Is the link marked, and how? |
| Organic results | The ten blue links under the map | Is this about pages or the profile? |
| Prominence | How well known and trusted Google thinks you are | What raises it besides links? |
| Proximity | Distance from the searcher to you | Does the quote pretend to change this? |
| Relevance | How well your listing matches the search | Which categories do you choose? |
| SAB | Service-area business: you travel to customers | Do you hide my address? |
| Service-area page | A page on your site for a town you serve | How many, and are they unique? |
| Soft 404 and thin page | A page with too little real content to rank | Will each page have unique text? |
| Voice and AI answers | Summaries from tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews | What do you do differently for these? |
The three words that matter most
Relevance, distance and prominence are the trio Google itself names for local ranking. Everything else in the table is a way of poking one of them.
Backlinks mostly feed prominence. They do it via the website, so a link to your service page lifts the page that supports the listing, not the listing itself.
That is why a quote promising 'map pack rankings from backlinks' should make you wary. It mixes two jobs that need different fixes.
Two words salespeople stretch
'Authority' is the first. It can mean DR from Ahrefs, Domain Authority from Moz or Trust Flow from Majestic, and the three disagree on the same site.
'Managed' is the second. Ask what is done each month and what you receive, in writing. A deliverable is a list of changes, not a feeling.
If a quote leans on 'citations', read the citations page before signing. If it leans on 'links', check the decision tree for what comes first.
One more habit to watch: reports that count 'keywords ranking' without saying where. Ranking 50th for something nobody types is not a result, and a good vendor shows positions for searches your customers actually use, ideally from a grid tool rather than a single desk check in 2026.