Is It Out of Scope? — SEO & marketing
Is adding an extra landing page variant for A/B testing out of scope for a SEO / marketing project?
Building the variant is outside an SEO retainer, but the retainer should absolutely weigh in beforehand on how to run the test without hurting rankings — duplicate content and indexing pitfalls are real risks an SEO team is well placed to flag.
A/B testing a landing page creates a genuine SEO risk if it's done carelessly: two similar pages competing for the same rankings, a test variant accidentally getting indexed and diluting the original's authority, or search engines getting confused about which version is canonical. That makes SEO input on how the test is structured genuinely valuable — but that's different from the SEO team designing or building the variant itself.
Is it out of scope?
Advising on test setup — using proper canonical tags, keeping the variant unindexed if it shouldn't rank on its own, choosing a testing method that doesn't create duplicate content issues — is reasonable and worth doing proactively. Designing or building the actual variant page is development/design work outside the retainer.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Exclusions clause→ — Build work is excluded from the retainer even where the SEO implications of getting the test setup wrong are significant enough to justify advisory involvement.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
Happy to weigh in on how to run this test without hurting rankings — canonical tags, whether the variant should be indexed at all, and how to avoid duplicate-content issues. Building the actual variant page is outside our retainer; loop me in before it goes live so we can catch any SEO risk in the setup.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow separates advisory language (canonical, indexing, duplicate content) from build-request language when classifying — the former reads as inside the retainer's advisory scope, the latter gets flagged outside_scope, with the explanation making clear this is a case worth staying involved in even though the build itself isn't billable SEO work.