Is It Out of Scope? — SEO & marketing
Is migrating to a new hosting provider out of scope for a SEO / marketing project?
The migration itself is development work outside an SEO retainer, but the SEO risk it creates (redirects, crawlability, ranking drops) is exactly the kind of thing an SEO team should be advising on before it happens, not doing.
Hosting migrations are one of the more common ways a site loses organic traffic overnight — a botched cutover can mean broken redirects, changed URL structures, slower load times, or pages temporarily returning errors while search engines are trying to crawl them. So it's a reasonable moment for a client to lean on their SEO team, but what they're often actually asking for is two different things bundled together: strategic guidance on protecting rankings through the move, and hands-on technical execution of the migration itself.
Is it out of scope?
The advisory part — a pre-migration checklist, reviewing the redirect map, checking crawlability post-launch — is legitimate SEO work and often worth doing proactively rather than waiting to be asked. Actually performing the migration (server setup, DNS, file and database transfer) is development work outside an SEO retainer, even though the two are closely related in this specific situation.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Exclusions clause→ — Development and hosting work is excluded from an SEO retainer even where the SEO consequences of getting it wrong are significant.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
Happy to help protect rankings through this migration — I'll review the redirect map before it goes live and check crawlability and indexing once it's on the new host. The migration itself (server setup, DNS, file transfer) is development work outside our retainer; let me know who's handling that side so we can coordinate timing.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow separates the two asks rather than treating the whole email as one request: language about redirects, rankings, or crawl checks reads as inside the SEO retainer's advisory scope, while language about performing the actual migration gets flagged outside_scope, with the explanation naming which part is the issue so the account manager isn't left guessing which half of the email triggered the Alert.