Search and the web
Making a site findable by search engines for the questions its buyers actually ask — a structural property of the site far more than a list of tasks performed on it.
Also called Search engine optimisation · Поисковая оптимизация
Three things decide it, in this order. Whether the page can be reached and rendered at all; whether it answers a question somebody is asking, better than the pages currently answering it; and whether anything outside the site indicates that it is worth trusting. Everything else in the discipline is a detail of one of those three.
It compounds and it lags. Structural decisions taken at build time — the URL hierarchy, what is one page versus many, what is rendered server-side — set the ceiling on everything a later engagement can do, which is why retrofitting search onto a finished site costs multiples of designing it in.
A keyword with ten thousand searches a month and no buying intent produces traffic that converts at nothing and drags the average down. One with two hundred searches from people about to purchase pays for itself. Rank the target list by intent first and by volume second.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.