Is It Out of Scope? — SEO & marketing
Is adding subtitles in another language out of scope for a SEO / marketing project?
Producing the translation is outside the retainer, but noting that captions can genuinely help with accessibility and video indexing is a reasonable piece of SEO advice worth giving alongside the decline.
Captions and subtitles genuinely have some SEO value — they make video content more accessible and give search engines more text to index — so it's not an unreasonable instinct for a client to ask their SEO team about this. But producing the actual translated subtitle file is a distinct piece of work from advising that they'd help.
Is it out of scope?
Producing the translation and caption file is out of scope. Flagging that captions in general (and translated captions specifically, for an international audience) can help with accessibility and indexability is legitimate SEO advice, worth giving even while declining to do the translation work itself.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Exclusions clause→ — Translation and production work is excluded from the retainer even where the resulting asset has genuine SEO value.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
Translated captions can genuinely help here — both for accessibility and for giving search engines more indexable text — so it's worth doing. Producing the translation and caption file itself is outside our retainer; I'd recommend a professional translator, and once it exists I'm happy to advise on how it's implemented for the best SEO benefit.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow flags the translation/production request outside_scope while preserving the advisory value in its explanation — noting that the underlying reason for the request (accessibility, indexability) is legitimate SEO guidance even though executing the request itself isn't billable retainer work.