How we work
Editorial standards
What this site will and will not publish, how figures are sourced, and how to hold us to it.
Last updated: 7 September 2026
Most of what an SEO company publishes about itself cannot be checked. Logos with no engagement behind them, testimonials nobody wrote, statistics with no source, awards that were bought. It is so common that a visitor has no real way to tell a careful firm from a confident one.
These are the rules this website is written under. They are published because a standard you can read is worth more than an assurance you cannot, and because it makes us checkable — if anything on this site breaks one of these rules, that is a failure you can point at.
What is not on this website, deliberately
Each of the following is standard practice in this industry and none of it appears here.
| Not published | Why |
|---|---|
| Client logo walls | A logo demonstrates that a transaction happened, not that anything worked. Where we can describe real work, we describe it in full instead. |
| Testimonials and star ratings | We publish none rather than publish any we cannot attribute to a named, contactable client who approved the wording. |
| Awards and certification badges | Most badges in this industry are paid placements or self-issued. A badge you can buy is not evidence. |
| Round-number statistics | No "we have grown traffic by 300% for over 200 clients". If a figure appears on this site, its source is stated next to it. |
| Guaranteed rankings | Nobody outside Google controls the index. A guarantee here would be a claim we could not honour. |
| Stock photography presented as our team or our clients | Photographs of people on this site are of real people connected to the work shown. Where we do not have a real photograph, there is no photograph. |
How figures are sourced
Every number published about work we have done comes from a platform the client also has access to — almost always Google Search Console — and is stated with the period it covers and the property it came from.
- Client figures are approved before publication. Nothing about a client appears without their agreement.
- The source is named. "Search Console, over roughly four months" rather than an unattributed percentage.
- Ranges stay ranges. Where the honest answer is "around 40–50 visitors a day", we do not round it into a cleaner-sounding single number.
- No projections presented as results. A forecast is labelled as a forecast.
Our case studies follow this without exception, including where the figures are modest. A small verified result is more useful to you than a large unverifiable one.
How the guides are written
The articles on this site are written to be acted on, which imposes a few constraints.
- 01
Claims are checkable or they are hedged
Where something is established behaviour, it is stated plainly. Where it is a judgement or an observed pattern rather than documented fact, the language says so. "Usually", "in our experience" and "we have seen" are used precisely, not as filler.
- 02
Google documentation is followed over folklore
A great deal of widely repeated SEO advice traces back to nothing. Where official guidance exists we follow it; where it does not, we say the question is unsettled rather than inventing a confident answer.
- 03
Nothing is published to a schedule
There is no publishing quota here. Articles appear when there is something worth saying, which is why this blog is smaller than most agency blogs and why nothing on it is padding.
- 04
Advice against our own interest is included
Several articles here explain when not to hire an agency, when a freelancer is the better choice, and how to verify our claims independently. That is intentional.
All content is published by, and is the responsibility of, SearchLift SEO Consulting. Where research or drafting tools are used in production, the output is reviewed and fact-checked before publication, and responsibility for accuracy does not transfer to a tool.
Updates and corrections
Search changes, and an article that was accurate two years ago may quietly stop being accurate. Two things follow from that.
- Articles carry visible dates. Both the publication date and, where an article has been revised, the date it was last updated appear at the top of the page.
- Substantive corrections are made in place. If something here is wrong, it gets fixed rather than quietly deleted, and material corrections are noted.
What we tell clients
The same standard applies to the work itself, not only to this website.
- Accounts stay in your name. Search Console, Analytics and your Business Profile belong to you, with us added as a user.
- You see the raw data, not only our interpretation of it.
- Bad months get reported as bad months. Every campaign has them.
- Where we are not the right fit, we say so and, where we can, point you somewhere better.
If you are evaluating us alongside other firms, the questions in our guide to hiring an SEO agency are the ones we would want asked of us too.