V 22 / 26
Web Encyclopedia

Understanding the web,
in plain English.

Viewport, Search Visibility — the V-words of how your website appears on screens and in search.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
01

Viewport

The viewport is the visible area of a web page within a user's browser window or device screen. On a desktop, the viewport is roughly the full browser window. On a smartphone, it is the small screen of the device. Responsive design ensures your website looks and functions correctly within any viewport size.

Real-world example

The viewport is the frame through which you look at a painting. A large frame (desktop) reveals the entire composition at once. A small frame (smartphone) shows only a portion at a time — the painting must be designed to work in both cases.

Why it matters for you

The tag — a single line of HTML — is essential for correct mobile rendering. Without it, your site displays at desktop width on mobile, making it tiny and unusable. Every professionally built site includes this tag.

Make my site mobile-ready
02

Search Visibility

Search visibility is a metric — often expressed as a percentage — that reflects how often your website appears in search results for a defined set of keywords, weighted by their search volume. A visibility of 0% means you appear for none of your target keywords; 100% means you appear in position 1 for all of them. Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Sistrix calculate this metric.

Real-world example

Search visibility is like your share of passing trade on the high street. If you appear for 30% of the searches your target customers make, you're visible to 30% of your potential market. Growing this percentage grows your organic business.

Why it matters for you

Tracking search visibility over time reveals whether your SEO efforts are working in aggregate — not just for individual keywords. A rising visibility trend, even before individual rankings improve, often signals that positive changes are compounding.

Improve my search visibility
03

WebP

WebP is a modern image format developed by Google that delivers superior compression compared to JPEG and PNG. WebP images are typically 25–35% smaller than equivalent JPEGs at the same visual quality, and support transparency like PNG. All major browsers have supported WebP since 2020.

Real-world example

A homepage with 10 uncompressed JPEG images totalling 3 MB can often be reduced to under 1 MB by converting to WebP — cutting load time roughly in half on mobile connections with no visible quality difference.

Why it matters for you

Image size is consistently the largest contributor to slow page loads. Converting your existing images to WebP is one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort performance improvements available — and directly improves Core Web Vitals.

Optimise my images
04

Mobile Speed

Mobile speed refers to how quickly a website loads and becomes interactive on a smartphone. Since Google switched to mobile-first indexing in 2019, mobile speed is a direct SEO ranking factor — not merely a UX consideration. Over 60% of global web traffic now originates from mobile devices.

Real-world example

A site that loads in 1.5 seconds on desktop but takes 8 seconds on a 4G mobile connection is effectively penalising itself in Google — and losing the majority of its visitors before they see a single word of content.

Why it matters for you

The two highest-impact mobile speed improvements are image optimisation (convert to WebP, use lazy loading) and eliminating render-blocking resources (defer non-critical CSS and JavaScript). Both are achievable without a full rebuild.

Speed up my mobile site
05

Virality

Virality in a digital context refers to content that spreads rapidly from person to person through sharing — on social media, messaging apps, email, and forums — far beyond its original audience, often exponentially. Viral content typically triggers a strong emotional response (surprise, humour, outrage, inspiration) or provides exceptional practical value. While true virality is difficult to engineer deliberately, understanding what makes content share-worthy improves your baseline content performance.

Real-world example

A French bakery posts a time-lapse video of a croissant being made from scratch — 47 steps, 3 days. On Instagram, it receives 200,000 views and 4,800 shares in 72 hours without paid promotion, driving 340 new followers and 60 direct message enquiries about their croissant-making class. The video cost nothing to produce beyond 20 minutes of filming and editing.

Why it matters for you

While you can't manufacture virality, you can create conditions that make it more likely: content that teaches something genuinely surprising, shows impressive craft, tells an authentic story, or connects emotionally. The occasional piece of organic viral content can deliver months of brand awareness at zero cost.

Build my social media strategy
06

Video Marketing

Video marketing is the strategic use of video content to promote a brand, explain a product or service, build trust with an audience, and drive conversions. Video is the most consumed content format online: users watch over 1 billion hours of YouTube per day, and pages with video generate 53× more Google search traffic than text-only pages. Formats include product demos, explainer videos, client testimonials, behind-the-scenes content, tutorials, and live streams.

Real-world example

A window installation company films a 90-second testimonial video with a satisfied homeowner: "We had our windows replaced last October — the whole house is warmer and the noise from the road has almost disappeared." Published on their homepage and YouTube channel, the video increases homepage dwell time from 38 seconds to 2 minutes 14 seconds, and enquiry form submissions rise 28%.

Why it matters for you

Video builds trust faster than any other content format — showing real people, real results, and real personality in a way that text cannot replicate. For service businesses where trust is the primary purchase barrier, a single well-produced testimonial video often outperforms months of written content.

Build my digital presence
07

Pageview (Page view)

A pageview is recorded each time a visitor's browser loads a page on your website. If the same visitor loads the same page three times, that counts as three pageviews. Pageviews are the most basic web analytics metric and indicate overall content consumption volume. They differ from sessions (total visits) and unique visitors (individual people). Pages per session — how many pages a visitor views in one visit — indicates engagement depth and content quality.

Real-world example

A legal advice blog with 18,000 monthly pageviews across 3,500 unique visitors has an average of 5.1 pages per session — suggesting visitors find the content valuable enough to explore multiple articles. A competitor with 18,000 pageviews but 12,000 unique visitors (1.5 pages per session) indicates a site where visitors typically read one article and leave — lower engagement quality.

Why it matters for you

Tracking pageviews helps you identify your most popular content, understand content consumption patterns, and detect changes in visitor behaviour. Trends in pages per session — whether visitors explore your site or bounce after one page — are valuable indicators of content relevance and navigation effectiveness.

Analyse my website performance

Votre site est-il vraiment visible en ligne ?

Obtenez un diagnostic SEO complet offert — résultats en 24 h, sans engagement.

Je veux mon audit gratuit