Glossary
The technical vocabulary of HVAC search, written for somebody who has to make a decision about it rather than pass a quiz on it.
43 terms have their own page here. Each one carries a definition, why it matters on a contractor site specifically, how you would measure it, and a worked example with real numbers in it. A term that could not carry all four is an entry at the bottom of this page with no page of its own, and the reason it was demoted is printed beside it.
That rule is why this glossary is shorter than the list it was drawn from. Sixty-seven terms were assessed; 43 survived. A glossary of short definition pages is a worse thing to publish than a shorter one that holds up.
Local SEO
- Citation A mention of your name, address and phone somewhere else, and which ones still matter.
- Google Business Profile attribute The structured checkboxes on a profile, and why they are not the same field as services.
- Google Business Profile category The single most weighted field on the profile, and how to test a change safely.
- Local pack The three map results, and the place most HVAC money is decided.
- NAP consistency Name, address and phone matching everywhere, and why one suite number costs more than it looks like it should.
- Prominence How well known Google thinks the business is, and the local factor most work actually targets.
- Proximity How far the searcher is from you, and the one local factor nobody can change.
- Relevance How well your profile and pages match what was actually searched.
- Review velocity The rate reviews arrive, which reads differently from the total.
- Service area business Hiding the address on a profile, and what it costs.
Technical SEO
- Canonicalisation Telling Google which of several near-identical pages is the one that counts.
- Click depth How many clicks from the homepage a page sits at.
- Crawl budget How much crawling Google will spend on your site, and the point at which a location matrix starts to test it.
- Cumulative Layout Shift How much the page moves under the reader while it loads.
- FAQPage markup Structured data for questions and answers, and why recommending it for rich results is out of date.
- Index bloat Pages in Google’s index that were never worth indexing, and what they crowd out.
- Interaction to Next Paint How long the page takes to visibly respond when someone taps something.
- Internal linking How pages on your own site point at each other, and what that distributes.
- JavaScript SEO What happens when the content only exists after a script runs.
- Largest Contentful Paint How long the biggest thing on screen takes to appear.
- LocalBusiness schema Structured data describing the business as an entity, and the HVAC-specific type most sites miss.
- Orphan page A page nothing on the site links to.
- Redirect chain A redirect that points at another redirect.
- Soft 404 A page that says nothing is here while telling the browser everything is fine.
- Time to First Byte How long the server takes to start answering.
Content
- Cannibalisation Several of your own pages competing for one query.
- Content decay A page that used to rank and now does not, without anything having happened to it.
- Doorway page Pages made to catch a place name and funnel people somewhere else, and Google has a policy about them.
- Entity salience Whether a page reads as being about the service or about the company, put on a scale.
- Location page What separates one that earns its URL from one that does not.
- Search intent What the person actually wanted, read off the results rather than guessed from the words.
- Semantic variant The other ways people say the same thing, harvested from Google rather than invented.
- Thin content A page with little of its own, measured against the pages that rank rather than by word count.
- Topical authority Covering a subject properly, measured as structure rather than claimed as a score.
Link building
- Anchor text distribution The spread of words people use when linking to you.
- Disavow Telling Google to ignore links to you, and why most sites never need to.
- Link intersect Sites that link to several of your competitors and not to you.
- Referring domain A distinct site linking to you, and why the count matters less than the mix.
- Toxic link A vendor score, not a Google signal.
Tracking and attribution
- Dynamic number insertion Swapping the phone number per visitor, and the real conflict it creates with NAP consistency.
- GA4 event The events an HVAC site has to fire before organic work is readable at all.
- Offline conversion import Getting booked-job revenue out of the field CRM and back into the analytics.
- UTM parameter Tags on a link that say where a visit came from, including the one on your own profile.
Terms with no page of their own
These were assessed and demoted. Each is defined in a line here and points at the page where it is actually demonstrated. Publishing the reason is the point: a glossary that quietly drops terms is indistinguishable from one that never considered them.
| Term | Why it has no page | Covered on |
|---|---|---|
| robots.txt | No distinct HVAC worked example of its own; the real failure modes live under crawl budget. | Crawl budget |
| XML sitemap | Its useful HVAC angle, segmenting by service and location to read indexation per segment, is covered where it is demonstrated. | Index bloat |
| Faceted navigation | Structurally rare on contractor sites. | Crawl budget |
| Pagination | Blog archives only; no HVAC-specific measurement to show. | Index bloat |
| Render-blocking resources | Would duplicate the LCP page, where it is the worked example. | Largest Contentful Paint |
| Hydration | Near-absent from this market, which is largely WordPress. | JavaScript SEO |
| Prerendering | Same. | JavaScript SEO |
| Structured data | Umbrella term; the specific schema pages carry it. | LocalBusiness schema |
| Breadcrumb markup | Thin on its own for HVAC. | LocalBusiness schema |
| Service schema | Folded into the LocalBusiness page rather than split into a near-duplicate. | LocalBusiness schema |
| Noindex | Appears as the mechanism in two worked examples rather than as a subject of its own. | Index bloat |
| Log file analysis | Covered as the measurement method where it actually decides something. | Crawl budget |
| Internal PageRank | A model rather than a measurement; the actionable version is internal linking. | Internal linking |
| Query fan-out | Its current usage is answer-engine work, which is out of theme for this site. | Search intent |
| Pillar page | Would duplicate topical authority. | Topical authority |
| Supporting content | Same. | Topical authority |
| SERP feature | Too broad to measure as one thing. | Local pack |
| Nofollow | Thin alone; paired with the sponsored attribute here. | Referring domain |
| Sponsored attribute | Same. | Referring domain |
| Hreflang | Rarely applies to a US service-area business. | Canonicalisation |
| Conversion path | Vague as a term; the concrete work lives in the two pages that do it. | Offline conversion import |
| Call tracking number | The SEO substance is the number swap itself. | Dynamic number insertion |
| Server-side tagging | Infrastructure rather than a discipline concept. | GA4 event |
| Consent mode | Same, though it is why one agency on this site is unrankable on attribution. | GA4 event |