SEO and digital marketing conversations are full of acronyms that get thrown around without explanation. Here are the ones that come up most, in plain English.
CPC — Cost Per Click
What an advertiser pays each time someone clicks their ad. In organic SEO contexts, CPC data is sometimes used as a rough proxy for how commercially valuable a keyword is, since advertisers are willing to pay more for keywords that convert.
CTR — Click-Through Rate
The percentage of people who see your listing (an impression) and actually click it. A well-written title and description can noticeably improve CTR even without changing your ranking position at all.
Crawl budget
Roughly, how many pages a search engine's crawler is willing to visit on your site within a given timeframe. It mostly matters for very large sites — a small site rarely needs to worry about it, but it's why a correctly configured robots.txt matters more as a site grows.
SERP — Search Engine Results Page
The actual page of results a search produces — increasingly made up of more than just ten blue links, including featured snippets, "People also ask," images and ads.
Domain authority / rating
A third-party metric (not an official Google signal) that estimates how likely a domain is to rank well, based on backlink data. Useful as a rough comparative signal between sites, but it's a proxy metric from a specific tool vendor, not something Google itself publishes or uses directly.
Search intent
What a searcher is actually trying to accomplish — informational, navigational, commercial or transactional. Matching your content's format to the real intent behind a keyword (a guide vs. a product page vs. a comparison) matters more than keyword density ever will.
The bottom line
None of these terms are complicated once defined — the jargon mostly just obscures fairly intuitive ideas about how search results and advertising actually work.
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