Terms of Service

What these terms cover

These terms apply to every piece of written material commissioned from SeoExpert. They come into force when a commission is confirmed in writing, and the version that applies to your work is the one published on the day that confirmation was sent.

Where anything said in a written confirmation differs from what is written here, the confirmation is what governs that commission. Nothing said in conversation changes the terms themselves unless it is afterwards confirmed in writing.

That is a rule about the terms, and not about information. What you are told about the service or about this business can bind it whether or not it was written down, and the passage headed Your rights under the general law says so and names the section it comes from. Nothing in this passage narrows that.

What is sold

Three packages, and nothing else. Their full contents, their limits and their turnarounds are on the packages page, and the figures below are the figures there.

• Service Page Copy - £240 per project. One page that explains a single service in the words a buyer would use. It holds one service page of up to 1,000 words, an interview of up to 30 minutes and one round of revisions. Turnaround: 5 working days.
• Customer Case Study - £380 per project. One customer story, written from an interview and checked back with them. It holds one case study of up to 1,500 words, an interview of up to 60 minutes and two rounds of revisions. Turnaround: 7-10 working days.
• Monthly Content Allocation - £1150 per month. Three pieces a month, drawn from whichever of the three kinds you need. It holds three pieces a month of up to 1,200 words each, interviews of up to 90 minutes in total across them and one round of revisions of each piece. Turnaround: monthly.

The material written under those packages is of three kinds - service pages, articles and case studies - and what each kind is and how it is built is set out on the materials page. There is no one-off article in the price list: articles are written inside the Monthly Content Allocation.

Buying a package means commissioning a piece of work to a brief. It is not a download, and nothing on this site is supplied the moment it is paid for.

How a commission is agreed

You send a brief, by email or through the request form. The subject, the reader, the length and the interview are then talked through, and I send you a written confirmation naming the package, the figure, what is included, what is not, and the date the finished piece is due.

There is no contract until you accept that confirmation in writing. An invoice follows your acceptance. A brief on its own commits you to nothing and is not an order.

Work outside an agreed brief - a longer piece, a second interview, a subject that turns out to be two subjects - is quoted separately and confirmed the same way before it is begun.

Prices, and what is payable

All prices are in pounds sterling and are the figures printed on this site. The figure in your written confirmation is the figure invoiced: nothing is added to it afterwards, and anything that would change it is put to you in writing and agreed before the work goes on.

This site makes no statement about tax. It shows no registration number, it does not say that a price includes tax, and it does not say that tax does not apply. The figure quoted is the sum payable on the invoice.

Invoices are payable by bank transfer within the period the invoice states. The turnaround does not begin until payment has cleared, the interview has taken place and the material you have to confirm has come back.

What you provide

Two things are yours, and the work cannot be done without them. The first is the person to be interviewed: somebody at your business who does the work being written about, made available for the interview time the package allows. The second is confirmation of fact: every claim, figure and name the piece intends to use goes back to you, and you confirm it, correct it or strike it out.

Anything you do not confirm is left out of the piece. It is not estimated, softened or replaced with a rounder number.

Where a customer of yours is to be written about, obtaining their agreement is yours to arrange, and the draft is shown to them before publication. Where you ask for a piece to be published rather than handed over, granting the access to do it is yours too, and it is used for your work only and handed back when the work is done.

You are responsible for the accuracy of what you confirm, and for the material you supply being yours to supply. If a delay is caused by something outstanding on your side, the date moves by the length of the delay and you are told which item it is waiting on.

What is delivered, and what a revision is

The finished piece is delivered as a document, or published on your own site where access has been given. What is delivered, in what form and when is set out on Delivery & Service Terms.

Each package allows a set number of rounds of revision, and a revision is a change measured against the agreed brief: a fact corrected, a section that does not do what the brief said it would, wording that misstates your business. A change of subject, a change of reader, or a section that was not in the agreed outline is a new brief, and it is quoted before it is written rather than absorbed quietly.

Rounds are rounds: a set of changes sent together counts as one, and a second set sent after that counts as the next one.

Rights in the finished piece

Copyright in a finished piece passes to you once it has been paid for in full. From that point you may publish it, edit it, translate it, move it and reuse it without asking, and you do not need to credit this business anywhere.

An assignment of copyright only takes effect if it is in writing and signed by the person giving it up, which a page on a website is not. So the written confirmation of your commission carries the assignment, and a separate signed assignment is sent on request at any time afterwards. Until one or the other exists you have, at the least, an unrestricted licence to use the piece for anything, which is what this passage promises.

Until it has been paid for, the piece remains mine and is not licensed for publication. Drafts are for your review, not for use.

Two things stay on my side and are not transferred: the interview recordings and working notes, which are dealt with on the Privacy Policy, and the ordinary knowledge and method used to do the work. Whatever you supplied - your material, your data, your customer's words - was yours before and stays yours.

A finished piece may be referred to in conversation about my own work only where you have agreed to that in writing. Nothing is published about your commission without that agreement.

What is not undertaken

No position in search results is undertaken, for any word, at any time, under any package. Nor is a volume of visitors, a number of enquiries, a rate of conversion or a share of a market. Search engines rank pages by rules they do not publish and change without notice, and a promise about them would be a guess written into a contract.

What is undertaken is the piece itself: written to the brief agreed in advance, built on material you confirmed, edited, revised the number of times the package allows, and delivered on the agreed date.

Nothing here is legal, financial, medical, engineering or other professional advice about your subject, and it is not held out as such. The expertise in a piece is your expert's; the writing is mine.

What will not be written

Some things are refused however they are asked for, and refusing them is not a breach of these terms. They are: claims you cannot evidence; invented reviews, testimonials or endorsements, and anything else set out as a banned practice in Schedule 20 to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024; false urgency and false scarcity; material that copies somebody else's work; material intended to mislead a reader about who is behind it; and anything unlawful.

If something you have asked for falls into this list, you are told so in writing and offered a version that does not. If there is no such version, the commission is ended and anything paid for work not yet done is returned.

Your rights under the general law

Where you are a consumer - an individual buying for purposes outside your trade, business, craft or profession - the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you rights that nothing on this site can reduce. Among them: a service must be performed with reasonable care and skill (section 49); information given about the service or the trader is binding where you rely on it (section 50); and where no time has been fixed the service must be performed within a reasonable time (section 52).

If a service falls short of that, the Act gives you the right to ask for the work to be done again (section 55) and, where doing it again is impossible or cannot be done within a reasonable time, the right to a reduction in price (section 56). Those remedies do not take away any other right you may have in law.

The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 also give a consumer a right to cancel a distance contract within fourteen days. How that works, what it costs if work has begun and how to use it are on Refund & Cancellation.

Most of the businesses commissioning work here will be companies, and a company is not a consumer, so those statutory rights do not belong to it as a matter of law. Rather than leave business customers with nothing, the same cancellation period, the same refund arrangements and the same right to have work done again are offered to every customer as a term of this contract. Where you are a consumer you have them by law as well, and this paragraph takes nothing away from that.

Responsibility, and what is never excluded

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits responsibility for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be excluded or restricted by law. Where you are a consumer, nothing here excludes or restricts the rights described in the passage above.

Subject to that, responsibility for a commission does not exceed the fee paid for it. Loss of profit, loss of business, loss of goodwill, loss of anticipated savings and loss arising from the way a search engine treats a page are not accepted, because none of them is within anybody's control here.

Responsibility is not accepted for the consequences of material you confirmed as accurate turning out not to be, nor for what happens to a piece after you have changed it.

Ending the arrangement

A single commission may be cancelled on the terms set out on Refund & Cancellation.

The Monthly Content Allocation runs month by month. Either of us may end it by writing before the next month begins, and no notice period longer than that applies. Pieces already written or in progress in the current month are payable; the following month is not. An unused piece or unused interview time does not carry into another month.

A commission may also be ended by me where the material needed to write it has not arrived after a written reminder and a reasonable further period, or where what has been asked for falls into the passage above about what will not be written. In either case, anything paid for work not yet done is returned.

If something goes wrong

Write to contact@seoexpert.space, or to the postal address at the head of this page, saying what is wrong and what you would like done about it. A complaint is acknowledged within two working days and answered in writing.

A complaint about written work will normally be settled by doing the work again, which is what the revision rounds are for. Where that is not the answer, the routes open to you are on Refund & Cancellation.

Changes, and the law that applies

These terms may be revised. A revision applies to commissions confirmed after it is published, never to one already under way; your commission is governed by the version in force on the day it was confirmed. The date of the current revision is at the head of this page.

This business is established in Scotland, and these terms and any dispute arising out of them are governed by the law of Scotland, with the Scottish courts having jurisdiction. If you live in another part of the United Kingdom you may instead bring proceedings in the courts of the part where you live, and nothing here takes away the protection given to you by the law of that part.