Editorial policy

We're an SEO agency writing about SEO. That's a conflict of interest, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing to distrust about us. So this page states the standards we hold our own content to, specifically enough that you can catch us breaking them.

Who writes this

Content on this site is written by Affan Raza, SEO Specialist at Searchmetric, from live client work rather than from a content brief bought off a marketplace. There is no anonymous "Admin" byline and no ghostwritten agency-voice filler. If someone else contributes a piece, their name goes on it.

The reason we name a person rather than the company: an organisation can't hold expertise, only people can. If you want to check whether the person telling you how SEO works actually does SEO, the byline has to lead somewhere.

Where our claims come from

Every factual claim on this site falls into one of four buckets, and we try to make it obvious which one you're reading:

• Our own client data. Ranking and traffic figures come from Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts we have access to. Where we cite a client result, the client is named and the keyword is live — you can search it yourself. We don't publish "a leading brand in the education sector" results.
• Our own original research. Our AI-visibility studies (Mumbai, Kochi, Delhi) run a fixed set of queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews and record what was actually cited. The method and query list are published with the findings so anyone can repeat the test and disagree with us.
• Third-party tools. Search volume, keyword difficulty and competitor data come from Semrush and Ahrefs. These are estimates, not measurements, and we say so wherever we quote them. Volumes move; a figure on this site is true as of the date on the page.
• Primary documentation. For anything about how Google works, we cite Google Search Central, the spam policies, or an official blog post — not a secondhand summary of one. Where the industry disagrees about what a Google statement means, we say that instead of picking the reading that flatters us.

How we use AI

We use AI tools in our own workflow — research, data analysis, drafting, and running the AI-visibility studies. We don't publish AI output as-is, and we don't mass-generate pages.

The line we hold: a human decides what the piece argues, verifies every factual claim in it, and is accountable for it by name. Google's position is that AI assistance is fine and scaled content produced primarily to game rankings is not, and we agree with that distinction independently of who's enforcing it. If we ever publish something substantially machine-written, it will say so on the page.

We also don't machine-translate content into a language we can't review. Mixed Malayalam–English and Hindi–English keyword research we do as standard; publishing Malayalam or Hindi content requires a native speaker on the piece.

Reviews and testimonials

Every testimonial on this site is from a real, named client of ours who agreed to it. We do not buy reviews, write reviews for clients to post, or incentivise positive reviews.

You'll also notice we don't publish a star rating in our structured data. That's deliberate: Google doesn't support self-serving review markup on an organisation's own page, so an agency showing itself 4.9 stars in search results is either using markup that will be ignored or markup that risks a manual penalty. We'd rather show you client names you can contact.

What we won't publish

• Ranking guarantees. Nobody can honestly promise a position or a date. Where we give timelines they're ranges from our own past work, labelled as such.
• Fake local presence. We're Mumbai-based. Where we serve a city remotely — Kochi, Delhi NCR — the page says so, because claiming an office you don't have is both a lie and a Google Business Profile violation.
• Thin pages built for a keyword. We publish a location or service page only when we have something to say that's true specifically of that place or service. Pages that would read identically with the city name swapped out are doorway pages, and we've deleted our own when we found them.
• Invented case studies. If we can't name the client and show the live keyword, it doesn't go on the site.
• Competitor attacks. We'll compare approaches and describe what a market looks like. We won't publish negative claims about a named local competitor.

Updates and corrections

SEO advice ages badly. Pages carrying factual or price claims get reviewed on a schedule, and where a page has genuinely been revised we set a real updatedDate that appears in the page's structured data.

We don't touch that date to fake freshness. Bumping a modified date on content nobody edited is a signal we'd flag on a client audit, so we don't do it on our own site.

If we get something wrong and it's material, we correct it on the page and note what changed rather than quietly editing it away.

Tell us we're wrong

If something here is inaccurate, out of date, or you think a claim isn't supported — email info@searchmetric.in or WhatsApp +91 99059 77605. Point at the page and the sentence. We'll fix it or explain why we think it's right.