Local SEO & Review Management Glossary

In local SEO, a citation is any online mention of a business's Name, Address, and Phone number — collectively NAP — whether or not it includes a link, on a directory, review site, or third-party publication.

E-E-A-T is the four-factor framework Google's Search Quality Raters use to evaluate the trustworthiness of content, particularly for YMYL ("Your Money or Your Life") topics that affect health, financial, or safety decisions.

The Local Pack is the cluster of three local business results that appears at the top of Google's search results page for queries with local intent, accompanied by a map and a "View all" link.

NAP consistency is the exact-match alignment of a business's Name, Address, and Phone number across every place those details appear online — including the business website, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, citation directories, and review sites.

A negative review is any customer review rated below the platform's neutral midpoint — typically 1-2 stars on Google, Yelp, or Facebook — that requires structured response handling to avoid further damage to the business's rating, ranking, and conversion rate.

Reputation management is the operational discipline of monitoring, responding to, and influencing online perception of a business across review platforms, social media, and search results, with the goal of improving conversion-relevant metrics like rating, response rate, and brand mention sentiment.

Review acquisition is the systematic process of asking customers for honest reviews through platform-compliant channels, with the goal of producing steady review velocity rather than one-off review bursts.

Review gating is the practice of privately asking customers how satisfied they were before directing only the happy ones to leave a public review, and is explicitly prohibited by Google's review policy as well as Yelp and Facebook's.

A review prompt is the specific language used to ask a customer for a review — verbally, in SMS, on a receipt, or in an email — and the wording materially affects both conversion rate and policy compliance with platforms like Google.

Review removal is the process of flagging a policy-violating review for evaluation by the review platform (Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.), with the goal of having the review removed from public view under the platform's content guidelines.

Review response rate is the percentage of customer reviews a business has publicly replied to, measured across all platforms or by individual platform, and is one of the strongest documented engagement signals affecting Local SEO.

Review velocity is the rate at which a business accumulates new reviews over time, measured in reviews per week or month, and is widely understood to be a Local Pack ranking signal independent of total review count.

The review volume threshold is the minimum number of reviews — typically 25 to 50 — a business needs before Google's Local Pack algorithm treats the business's rating as a meaningful signal, after which review velocity matters more than additional volume.

A star rating is the numerical score assigned to a business by a customer review, typically on a 1-to-5 scale, and the average of these ratings — usually displayed to one decimal place — is among the most influential signals affecting purchase decisions for local businesses.

The HEARD framework is a five-step approach to responding to negative customer feedback — Hear, Empathize, Apologize, Resolve, Diagnose — adapted from luxury hospitality (notably the Ritz-Carlton) and applied to written review responses.

The service recovery paradox is the well-documented finding that customers who experience a service failure and are then handled well end up more loyal than customers who never experienced any failure at all.

A Google Business Profile is the free business listing on Google that appears in Google Search, Google Maps, and the Local Pack, and serves as the central control surface for a local business's presence on Google.

A review platform is any website or app where customers can publicly rate and review businesses, and on which businesses can claim a profile, respond to reviews, and influence visibility through engagement signals.

Google's AI Overviews are generative summaries that appear at the top of Google search results for many queries, synthesizing information from multiple ranked sources into a single conversational answer with linked citations.

llms.txt is a proposed standard file — placed at the root of a website — that lists the site's most important pages in a structured Markdown format, designed to help large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) discover and cite the site accurately.

Sentiment analysis is the natural-language processing technique used to classify a customer review as positive, negative, neutral, or mixed, and to identify specific emotional or topical signals within the text — used by review platforms, reputation management tools, and AI-powered review responders.

DefinedTerm is the Schema.org type used to mark up entries in glossaries, technical lexicons, and reference works, signaling to search engines that the page contains an authoritative definition of a specific concept.

Review Schema is the Schema.org markup for individual customer reviews and aggregate ratings, which when properly implemented can produce star-rating rich snippets in Google search results and feed AI search engines with verifiable customer sentiment data.

Schema.org markup is a standardized vocabulary of structured data tags — typically embedded as JSON-LD blocks in a page's HTML — that tells search engines and AI assistants what type of entity the page represents and what its key attributes are.