Is It Out of Scope? — SEO & marketing
Is additional link building out of scope for an SEO retainer?
Usually yes past the agreed volume. Retainers typically define a target number of links or hours of outreach per month — a request for meaningfully more is an out-of-scope volume increase, not the same deliverable.
The retainer specifies a link-building target — say, a handful of quality placements per month, or a defined number of outreach hours. The client, seeing early results, asks for "more links, faster" without any change to the fee.
Is it out of scope?
Usually yes. Link building is inherently rate-limited by outreach capacity and the number of legitimate placement opportunities, so meaningfully increasing the volume is closer to running two campaigns than doing the same one harder — it's an out-of-scope increase, not free extra effort.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Out-of-scope clause→ — Defines the retainer's link-building volume or hours — a request for meaningfully more sits outside that defined quota.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
The retainer's scoped at [X] link placements a month — ramping that up means more outreach hours and typically higher costs per placement to keep quality up, so it'd need to be a separate add-on rather than absorbed into the current fee. Happy to put together options at a couple of different volumes.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow compares requested link-building volume against the contract's extracted monthly target, flagging requests for a meaningful increase as outside_scope with a suggested charge scaled to the retainer's existing per-link or per-hour rate.