The SEO industry has no official governing body and is therefore not subject to formal regulation. No membership of any association or institute is required and no formal or recognised qualifications are required in order for SEO practitioners to offer services. Standards of service can therefore vary widely.

In the absence of any formal standards to ensure consistency of service throughout the industry, we have adopted our own SEO Code of Conduct which we hope will provide our prospective customers, confirmation or reassurance about the ethics we apply to the services we offer.

Please also see our list of 19 simple questions to ask an SEO specialist which we compiled to help you circumnavigate some of the most common SEO pitfalls and correct some common misperceptions.

Our Ethical SEO Code of Conduct

1. Quality of advice

We will always aim to provide the highest quality of advice and service.

2. Protecting your interests

We will not knowingly do or advise you to do anything which will harm your business interests.

3. Whitehat SEO

We will not knowingly do or advise you to do anything which is generally considered to be blackhat SEO.

4. Risks

We will endeavour to inform you of any material risks associated with our advice.

5. Brand protection

We will not post any material online which could have a detrimental impact on your brand or damage your reputation.

6. Confidentiality

We will keep confidential and protect any privileged information about your business, acquired as a result of our engagement by you.

7. The law

We will not breach or cause you to be in breach of any law including brand, patent and copyright infringements.

8. Misleading advice

We will not mislead you by creating a false impression about the results we have achieved for you. We will not claim or present the work of others as our own.

9. Protecting your customers

We will not do anything which might damage any of your business relationships including clients, prospective clients, suppliers, staff, advisors etc.

10. Misrepresentation

We will not misrepresent our work for any purpose.

11. Exaggerated claims

We will not make unrealistic promises about what can be achieved or what has been achieved.

12. Spam

We will not do anything that would generally be considered as spam.

13. Ineffective advice

We will not knowingly perform any work that we believe to be ineffective for the purposes of being able to charge you.

14. Maintaining endeavours

We will continue our endeavours to serve the best interests of our clients including doing everything possible to maintain top search engine rankings achieved.