Is It Out of Scope? — SEO & marketing
Is adding accessibility (WCAG) compliance out of scope for a SEO / marketing project?
Yes, as implementation work — though accessibility and technical SEO overlap enough that flagging accessibility issues an SEO audit happens to surface is reasonable advisory input, distinct from actually remediating them.
Accessibility and technical SEO share some surface area — semantic heading structure, meaningful alt text, and clean markup tend to help both. So it's not unusual for an SEO audit to surface accessibility issues alongside crawlability ones, and for the client to ask the SEO team to "just fix those too" since they're already in there. But finding and flagging an issue during an audit is different work from designing and building the fix.
Is it out of scope?
Noting accessibility issues that surfaced during an SEO audit, and explaining the overlap with technical SEO, is reasonable to include as part of the audit deliverable. Actually remediating those issues — implementing ARIA attributes, fixing contrast, restructuring markup — is design and development work outside an SEO retainer, even where the same issue shows up in both contexts.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Exclusions clause→ — Implementation and remediation work is excluded from an SEO retainer even for issues the retainer's own audit work surfaces.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
The audit flagged a few accessibility issues alongside the SEO ones — worth fixing both, since they overlap with things search engines also care about (heading structure, alt text). I can document what I found in detail, but implementing the fixes is design/dev work outside our retainer; happy to hand this off to whoever's doing that work, or refer someone if needed.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow treats "flag it" and "fix it" as different requests even within the same email — language describing or documenting an issue reads as inside the audit scope, while language asking the SEO team to implement the fix reads outside_scope, with the explanation making that distinction explicit so it doesn't get lost in an otherwise reasonable-sounding request.