Editorial standards
How these articles are sourced.
Every article on this site carries a Sources section. This page explains what is behind it, so you can judge the writing rather than take it on trust.
Evidence grading
Not every source is worth the same.
The research file behind these articles grades every claim before it is used, and the grade travels with the claim. Five grades:
- Primary. A statute, a regulation, an agency order, a court opinion, a peer-reviewed paper, or first-party documentation from the platform operator itself. Google on Google, the FTC on advertising law.
- Vendor-published. Research from a company that sells a product in the category. Often methodologically sound, and always labelled, because the publisher has an interest in the answer.
- Practitioner test. An individual or agency experiment, usually small. Useful as a signal, not as proof.
- Contested. Sources disagree, or the number is time-dependent and drifts. Said out loud rather than picked from.
- Debunked. Cited only to refute it.
Entries age. Anything unverified for six months is re-checked before it is reused. That is why an article will sometimes say a number is no longer reliable rather than quietly repeating it.
What you will not find
Rules that apply to every article.
- No statistic without a source you can open and check yourself.
- No invented client examples. Where a business is named, the engagement is real and the write-up is on the case studies page.
- No guarantees, no ranking promises, and no timeframe promises.
- Pull quotes are lifted from the article itself, set larger. They are never a quotation from a named person unless they are marked as one.
- A "When you do not need this" section on most articles, because the honest answer is often that you do not need the thing being described.
Who writes them
One person, named on every article.
All of them are written by Eric Lee, who founded SEOD in 2016 after sixteen years running restaurant, retail and nonprofit operations. Corrections and disagreements go to eric@seod.com and get answered by a person.