Privacy policy

Who we are

SEO Expert Tips is a website that teaches search engine optimisation. It is run by Ona (“we”). To reach us about anything on this page, use the contact page.

You can read every lesson, the glossary and the comparisons, and use the tools, without giving us any personal details.

What we collect

We collect only what you give us, and only when you choose to:

• When you subscribe or ask for a guide: your email address and, if you enter it, your first name.
• When you write to us: your name, your email address and your message.
• When you ask us to keep an audit result: the address of the page you checked and its results.

We do not buy data about you, and we do not build a profile of you from other sources.

Email sign-ups

With your email address we store the form you signed up on, the guide you asked for, the time you agreed to receive email, and any campaign tags in the link you followed (for example, that you came from Instagram). We use this to send you the guide and occasional SEO lessons, and to see which pages are useful.

When you subscribe to the newsletter we first send one email asking you to confirm the address. The link in it works for 7 days. Until you confirm, you get no lessons; opening a guide’s download link confirms the address too.

We keep a record of each email we send (which email, to which address, and whether it was accepted for delivery) for 90 days, so that we can find delivery problems.

Every email has an unsubscribe link. One click stops all email from us. Guide download links are personal and stop working after 7 days.

We keep your details until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them. After you unsubscribe we keep only your address and the fact that you unsubscribed, so we do not email you again by mistake.

The SEO audit

The address you check is used to fetch that page and run the audit. The full address is not stored. We keep the site’s domain (for example, example.com), the score, and totals such as how many checks passed and which checks failed most often. None of that is linked to you.

If you choose “share these results” or “email me this report”, we store the page address and its results so the link can show them. They are deleted after 30 days.

When you ask for the report by email, we also send you one reminder two weeks later, inviting you to run the audit again. It is sent once, only to an address you have confirmed, and not at all if you have unsubscribed.

To stop the tool being misused, the number of audits from one network address is limited. That address is held in memory for a short time and is not written to a database.

The full audit is limited to a few runs a day for each visitor. To count them we store a one-way code made from your network address and browser. It changes every day, cannot be turned back into an address, and is deleted the next day.

If you ask for early access after using the day’s full audits, we keep your email address and the domain of the site you were checking, so we know which sites people want more audits of. Not the page address.

The full audit asks Google’s PageSpeed Insights to measure the page’s speed, so the address you check is sent to Google for that test.

Owlcast alerts

If you ask for Owlcast alerts we store your email address and send you an email when Google confirms a ranking update and when it finishes, once you have confirmed the address. Every alert has an unsubscribe link.

The mascot

Scout, the owl, appears in a few places on the site. To learn which of those places are useful, we count how often he is shown, seen, clicked and dismissed.

This counting uses no cookies. A visitor is counted with a one-way code made from the network address and the browser type; the network address itself is never stored, and the code cannot be turned back into it. We also record the country, region and city that our network provider reports for the request.

If your browser sends “Do Not Track” or “Global Privacy Control”, nothing is counted at all.

Counting visits

We count page views and clicks on buttons ourselves, to see which pages are read and which are not. For each one we keep the page, the site you came from (its name only, not the full address), any campaign tags in the link, whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer, and the country, region and city that our network provider reports.

This uses no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. A visitor is counted with a one-way code made from the date, the network address and the browser type. The network address itself is never stored, the code cannot be turned back into it, and it changes every day, so we cannot follow anyone from one day to the next.

If your browser sends “Do Not Track” or “Global Privacy Control”, nothing is counted at all.

Cookies and analytics

The site does not set cookies for visitors. Two small things are remembered in your own browser and never sent to us: your choice in the cookie banner, and that you closed one of Scout’s speech bubbles.

We do not use an outside analytics service at the moment. If we add one, it will load only after you accept analytics in a cookie banner, and this page will say which service it is.

The full list is in the cookie policy.

Who we share data with

We do not sell or rent your data. It is handled by a small number of services that we need to run the site, and only for that purpose:

• Our email delivery service, which sends the emails you asked for.
• Our hosting and network providers, which store the database and deliver the pages.

Each of them works under a contract that limits what it may do with the data.

Your rights

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it or delete it, and object to how we use it. You can unsubscribe from any email with the link at the bottom of it. If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you also have the right to complain to your data protection authority.

To use any of these rights, write to us through the contact page. We answer within 30 days.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and say what changed.