Publishing standards
Editorial policy
Marketing agencies are not usually asked to show their work. We publish this page anyway, because we ask you to act on what we write — change a page, move a budget, rebuild a site — and you deserve to know who wrote it, what they checked, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Why publish this at all
Advice you can price is advice you can check
Most of what is written about SEO, paid search and web performance is written to rank, not to be right. It is assembled from other articles that were assembled from other articles, and by the time a claim reaches you it has been through four rewrites and no verification. Some of it was true two platform updates ago. Some of it was never true.
That matters more in our field than in most, because the platforms move underneath the advice. A statement about how Performance Max allocates budget, or how Google treats a canonical, can be accurate in March and misleading by September without a single word changing. An article with no date, no author and no review cycle gives you no way to tell the difference.
So this page sets out the standards we hold our own writing to: who is allowed to write it, what counts as a source, how we use AI and where we stop, what we do when we publish something wrong, and how often we go back and check. If you find a piece of ours that breaks these rules, we would like to know — the last section tells you how to say so.
The short version
- Everything is written by practitioners from the delivery team, not by an outsourced content mill.
- Every article is reviewed by the specialist accountable for that discipline before it publishes.
- Primary sources first — official platform documentation and published standards over secondhand summaries.
- AI helps with research, outlines and first drafts. Nothing publishes without a human reviewer from the team accountable for it.
- We do not sell links, accept paid guest posts, or take money to recommend a tool.
- Factual errors are corrected promptly, and material corrections are noted on the page.
Found something wrong? Email [email protected] — we reply within one business day.
Authorship
Who writes for us
The same people who build client sites, run their campaigns and read their analytics every month. We do not commission articles from freelancers who have never had to explain a bad month to a client, and we do not publish under invented bylines.
Account & Strategy Lead
Owns the outcome
Your single point of contact from the first call onward. Runs discovery, writes the scope, sets the KPIs and presents every monthly report. Nothing gets handed off to an unnamed junior after the contract is signed.
Lead Web Engineer
Build & performance
Responsible for semantic markup, Core Web Vitals, accessibility conformance and the technical QA checklist that every template passes before launch.
SEO Strategist
Organic growth
Handles technical audits, search-intent research, information architecture, structured data and the editorial calendar. Reviews every article for factual accuracy before publication.
Paid Media Manager
Google Ads & paid social
Builds and manages campaigns inside accounts you own, sets bidding strategy against agreed CPA targets, and keeps search-term and negative keyword hygiene under active review.
UX & Conversion Designer
Design & CRO
Maps customer journeys, designs the page hierarchy and calls to action, and runs post-launch experiments on the pages that carry the most commercial weight.
Support & Hosting Engineer
Uptime & care plans
Runs the managed hosting stack: monitoring, patching, backups with tested restores, and the response SLA on every Website Care plan.
Practitioner first, writer second
An article about search-term hygiene is drafted by the person who does the weekly search-term review. An article about Core Web Vitals is drafted by the engineer who has to hit the performance budget before a template ships. That constraint costs us publishing volume and it is the point: it keeps the writing tied to work that actually happened rather than to what ranks.
Articles are credited to the VCweb Editorial Team, which is the group described above. Where a piece depends heavily on one discipline, the specialist who reviewed it is identified on the page.
What we will not write about
If nobody on the team has done the thing, we do not publish an article about it. There is no shortage of topics we could rank for and have no business explaining — enterprise platform migrations, categories we have never worked in, tools we have only read about. Staying inside our actual experience is a limit on the blog, not a limitation of it.
See the editorial team on the about page · Common questions about how we work
Workflow
How a piece gets made
Seven stages, the same every time. Nothing skips review because a deadline is tight — the publication date moves instead.
Commissioning from real questions
Topics come from the questions clients actually ask: on discovery calls, in monthly reporting reviews, in the email that arrives at 9pm asking why traffic dropped. If three people have asked the same thing in a quarter, it becomes a brief. Keyword research informs how we title and structure the piece; it does not decide what the piece argues.
Research
The writer gathers primary sources before drafting — platform documentation, published standards, and where relevant our own account data with client details removed. Anything that cannot be traced to a source we can name does not survive into the draft.
Outline and draft
A structural outline is agreed before prose is written, so the argument holds together before anyone worries about sentences. The draft is written by the practitioner who owns the topic, in plain language, with the trade-offs left in rather than smoothed out.
Specialist review
Every draft goes to the specialist accountable for that discipline — the SEO strategist for organic search, the paid media manager for advertising, the lead engineer for build and performance. They check the claims, not the commas. A review that finds a factual problem sends the piece back rather than softening the wording around it.
Editing
Then the piece is edited for structure, clarity and honesty: unsupported superlatives removed, hedges added where the evidence is thin, examples made concrete, and any claim that depends on a platform's current behaviour explicitly dated.
Publication
Published with a visible publication date, a standing note that the piece was reviewed before publication, and internal links to the service and pricing pages a reader would reasonably want next. We do not backdate articles or quietly refresh a date to look current.
Scheduled re-review
The piece goes onto a review schedule at publication. It comes back around at least once a year, and sooner if the platform it describes changes materially. The re-review is a real read, not a date bump.
Evidence
Sourcing standards
Primary sources first, every time. For search that means Google Search Central documentation and Google's own published guidance rather than a summary of it. For advertising it means the Google Ads help documentation for the feature in question. For markup, performance and accessibility it means the W3C specifications, the WCAG 2.2 success criteria and the relevant web platform standards — the documents the browsers are actually implementing.
Secondary sources have a place. Well-run industry studies, conference talks by people who work on the products, and independent testing are all useful, and we cite them as what they are. What we will not do is treat another agency's blog post as evidence for a claim about how a platform behaves.
When sources conflict
They frequently do, particularly when official documentation and observed behaviour disagree. Our rule is to say so in the article rather than pick the tidier answer. We state what the documentation says, state what we observe in the accounts we manage, and make clear which is which. Where we cannot resolve it, the honest sentence is that it is unresolved.
Why we date platform claims
Anything that describes how a platform currently works gets an explicit date attached to it. Ad products, ranking systems and measurement defaults change without notice and often without documentation. A dated claim tells you exactly how much to trust it a year later; an undated one invites you to trust it forever.
Our source hierarchy
- Official platform documentation — Google Search Central, Google Ads help, analytics and platform release notes.
- Published standards — W3C specifications, WCAG 2.2 success criteria, web platform documentation.
- First-party data — patterns across accounts we manage, always anonymised and never presented as a universal rule.
- Independent research — studies with a stated methodology and sample, cited with their limitations.
- Not a source — unattributed industry folklore, vendor marketing collateral, or another blog repeating a claim we cannot trace.
Accessibility claims are held to the same standard as everything else — our accessibility statement sets out what we test against and how to report a barrier.
No guarantees, in writing or on the blog. We do not publish claims that a technique will produce a specific ranking or a specific return, because nobody can honestly make that promise. Where an article describes an outcome, it describes the conditions under which we saw it and what would have to be true for it to transfer.
Disclosure
How we use AI
Everybody in this industry uses AI now. Far fewer will tell you where, so here is exactly what it does and does not do in our workflow.
Our AI disclosure
We use AI tools for research support, for summarising long documentation, for structuring outlines and for producing first drafts of sections. That is genuinely useful work and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Every published piece is then edited, fact-checked and approved by a human reviewer from the team from the team described above — the specialist accountable for that discipline. They verify each factual claim against a primary source, rewrite anything that reads as generic, and remove anything they cannot stand behind.
We do not publish unreviewed generated text. No article, service page or client-facing document on this site goes live on the strength of a model output alone. If nobody on the team will stand behind a paragraph, the paragraph does not ship. Review is recorded internally against the team member responsible; articles carry a team byline rather than an individual reviewer's name.
Why the review is the whole job
Generated text is confident in a way that is very hard to distinguish from being correct. It will state a deprecated ad setting as current, describe a ranking behaviour that was retired, or invent a plausible-sounding statistic with the same steady tone it uses for things that are true. The failure mode is not gibberish. It is fluent, specific and wrong — which is precisely the kind of error a casual read will not catch.
Where we do not use it
We do not generate client results, case studies, testimonials or example numbers. We do not use AI to write anything presented as a first-hand account of work we did. And we do not use it to produce volume for its own sake — publishing twenty thin articles a month would help nobody, least of all the reader trying to decide whether to trust us.
Independence
Independence and disclosure
The commercial pressure on an agency blog is obvious: recommend what pays, link to whoever asks, publish whatever brings traffic. Here is what we do instead.
We recommend what we use
Tools and platforms named in our articles are ones we run on client work. If we have only trialled something, we say that. If we stopped using it, we say why. A recommendation from us is a statement about our own stack, not a placement.
We disclose commercial relationships
Where we have a commercial or corporate relationship with a product we mention — a partnership, a referral arrangement, a reseller agreement, a sister company — it is disclosed. Standing relationships that apply across many articles are listed in the disclosure below rather than repeated in every post; anything specific to a single article is disclosed in that article.
Editorial is not for sale
We do not sell links, we do not accept paid guest posts, and we do not run sponsored articles dressed as editorial. Requests to buy a placement are declined without a counter-offer. There is no price at which a paragraph appears on this site because somebody paid for it.
Standing disclosure. Articles on this blog regularly reference and link to WebAtla (webatla.com) for domain, TLD and registry data. That is a related property rather than an arm's-length third party, so treat those mentions as promotional rather than as an independent survey of the market. Other tools and platforms we name — Google Search Console, Google Ads, Analytics, hosting providers — are ones we use on client work, and we receive nothing for naming them. If that ever changes, this notice changes with it.
The same principle governs our client work. We do not take a percentage of media spend on Google Ads management, because that rewards us for spending more of your money, and we will tell you when a programme is the wrong purchase — including when the honest answer is that an SEO programme should wait until something more basic is fixed. The blog is held to the standard the invoices are.
Accountability
Corrections
We publish things that turn out to be wrong. Everyone who writes about moving platforms does. What distinguishes a trustworthy publisher is not an absence of errors but what happens after one is found.
How to report an error
Email [email protected] with the page and what you believe is wrong. A source helps but is not required — "this contradicts what I see in my account" is a perfectly good report, and we will go and check it. You do not need to be a client, and we do not need you to be polite about it.
What we do next
We acknowledge every report within one business day. We then verify the claim against a primary source ourselves rather than taking either side on trust. Clear factual errors are corrected promptly — typically within one to three business days of confirming them, and faster where the error could cause someone to lose money or break something.
What gets noted on the page
Typos and broken links are simply fixed. Any material correction — a changed fact, a reversed recommendation, a removed claim — is noted on the article itself with the date and what changed, so a reader who acted on the earlier version can see that it moved. We do not delete a wrong article and pretend it never ran.
Review cycle
Every article that describes how a platform behaves is re-reviewed at least annually, and sooner when the platform changes materially — a major search update, a campaign type being retired or replaced, a measurement default changing, or a new version of a standard we cite.
A re-review has three possible outcomes, and we treat all three as legitimate:
- Confirmed — still accurate, review date updated, publication date unchanged.
- Updated — revised in place with the change described, and a correction note if the substance of the advice moved.
- Retired — where advice is no longer safe to follow and cannot be salvaged, the page says so plainly rather than quietly disappearing.
Evergreen pieces that do not depend on platform behaviour still get a periodic read, but the annual commitment is aimed at the pages most likely to rot.
Where this policy applies. Everything published on our blog and the service, pricing and process pages on this site. How we handle personal data submitted through forms is a separate matter, covered in our privacy policy.
Editorial contact
Question a claim, or ask us to cover something
Corrections, source requests, disclosure questions and topic suggestions all reach the same people — the practitioners who wrote the piece, not a press inbox.
Postal address
214 Commerce St, Suite 300
Dallas, TX 75201, United States
VCweb Digital Agency has been in business since 2016. Read the articles this policy governs, meet the people who write and review them, or get in touch about a project.
The same standard applies to the work
If you want to see how this translates into an engagement, start with the free written audit — sourced from your own analytics, search visibility and ad account, with every recommendation traceable to something we can show you.
- A written audit of your site, SEO and ad account
- A prioritised list of fixes, ranked by impact
- Transparent pricing before any commitment
- No obligation and no sales pressure
Replies within one business day, Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM Central Time.