Criminal Defense SEO Glossary A–Z

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.

How to use this glossary

Every term has a permanent anchor, for example #map-pack, so a definition can be linked to directly. Definitions here are deliberately short. The longer treatment lives in the entry each one points to.

A B C D E F G I J L M N O P R S T V

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. See 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. See 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. See Editorial policy.

B

Backlink: A link from another website. Links from relevant, credible sources contribute to prominence; bulk low-quality links do not. See Local search ranking factors.
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. See Criminal defense keywords.
Citation (local SEO): A mention of a business's name, address and phone number on another site. Consistency across citations supports local ranking. See Law firm local SEO.
Citation (AI): A source an AI system links or names when composing an answer. Distinct from a local-SEO citation. See 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. See 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. See How Google ranks law firms.

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. See Local search ranking factors.

E

E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google quality concepts that carry extra weight for legal topics. See How Google ranks law firms.
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. See Official entity record.
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. See 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. See Search grid methodology.

I

Indexing: Storing a fetched page so it can be returned in results. A page that is crawled but not indexed cannot rank. See How Google ranks law firms.
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. See Criminal defense keywords.

J

JSON-LD: The structured-data format Google prefers, embedded in a script tag. Used to state entity facts unambiguously. See Official entity record.

L

Local pack: See map pack. See Map pack rankings.

M

Map pack: The three local business results, with a map, shown above organic listings for queries with local intent. See Map pack rankings.

N

NAP: Name, address, phone number. Rendering them identically everywhere is a durable local ranking input. See Law firm local SEO.
Near me: A query modifier signalling local intent. 'DUI lawyer near me' is the highest-intent shape in defense search. See Criminal defense keywords.

O

Organic results: The unpaid web-page listings, ranked by the organic system rather than the local one. See Local SEO vs organic SEO.

P

Practice area page: A page dedicated to a single charge or offence type. The structural unit of a defense firm's site. See Practice area pages.
Prominence: One of the three named local ranking factors: how well known a business is, inferred from reviews, citations and links. See Local search ranking factors.
Proximity: See distance. See Local search ranking factors.

R

Relevance: One of the three named local ranking factors: how well a business matches what was searched. The most controllable of the three. See Local search ranking factors.
Retrieval-augmented generation: Fetching documents and having a model compose an answer from them. The architecture behind most cited AI answers. See How AI assistants choose firms.
Review velocity: The rate at which new reviews arrive. Steady accumulation is both more credible and safer than a burst. See 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. See Official entity record.
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. See Site index.
Structured data: See schema markup. See Official entity record.
Suspension: Removal of a Google Business Profile for guideline violations. It eliminates map pack visibility, often for weeks. See Google Business Profile.

T

Thin content: A page with little substantive value, often produced by templating the same text across many charges or cities. See Practice area pages.

V

Vanity metric: A number that moves without indicating business result. Impressions and unqualified traffic are the usual offenders in agency reporting. See SEO measurement standards.
Visibility surface: A firm's local visibility across a whole service area rather than at one point. What a grid scan measures. See Search grid methodology.

Using this glossary

Terms are listed alphabetically and each entry gives a definition first, then whatever qualification the term needs. Where a term has a fuller treatment elsewhere on this reference, the entry links to it, so the glossary works as an index as much as a word list.

Several of these terms are used loosely in agency marketing, and the definitions here are the narrow ones. That is deliberate. A firm evaluating a proposal is better served by knowing that “local SEO” names a specific ranking system with its own inputs than by a definition broad enough to cover whatever the proposal happens to include.

Where two terms are used interchangeably in the market and mean different things, the entries say so. Where two terms genuinely name the same practice, the entries say that instead of inventing a distinction, which is the case with answer engine optimisation and its competing labels.

Terms that change by jurisdiction

A handful of the entries here name offences, and those names vary by state in ways that matter for search. The same conduct is DUI in California, OVI in Ohio, DWI in Texas and New York, and OUI in Maine and Massachusetts.

The consequence for a defense firm is that the term its clients search is set by its state and not by convention. A page written about DUI in a DWI state is answering a query nobody local types, and a national template using one term everywhere is invisible across half its markets. The entries here use the general term where the discussion is general, and name the local variants where the distinction bears on the work.

See also: Knowledge library · Site index · Criminal defense SEO