Is It Out of Scope? — SEO & marketing
Is creating a pitch deck template out of scope for a SEO / marketing project?
Yes, as a deliverable — though if the deck is meant to report on SEO results, providing the underlying performance data and talking points for the SEO sections is a reasonable, narrower ask that's closer to the retainer's actual scope.
This request comes in a couple of different flavors. Sometimes it's genuinely unrelated — a general sales or investor deck the client wants branded, routed to the SEO team by default. Other times it's specifically about reporting SEO performance internally — a deck the client's team will use to show stakeholders how organic search is doing — which sits much closer to work the retainer might already be doing.
Is it out of scope?
Designing and building a general-purpose deck template is out of scope — that's presentation design, not SEO work. If the deck is specifically meant to report SEO performance, providing the underlying data, key metrics, and narrative points for those sections is reasonable and arguably already part of ongoing reporting; building the deck itself as a polished, branded template is still a separate design deliverable.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Exclusions clause→ — The retainer covers organic search strategy and reporting on it — producing a polished, branded presentation template is a separate design deliverable outside that.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
Building a full deck template is outside our retainer — that's a presentation design deliverable. If this is for reporting on SEO results specifically, I'm glad to provide the data, key metrics, and narrative points for those slides as part of our regular reporting; putting it into a polished, branded deck template would need to be scoped separately.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow distinguishes a request to build a deck (outside_scope) from a request for the performance data and talking points that would go into one (often inside scope under existing reporting terms) — the explanation names which reading applies so the account manager can offer the substantive help without taking on unscoped design work.