Is It Out of Scope? — SEO & marketing
Is producing a second round of brand guidelines out of scope for a SEO / marketing project?
Yes. Brand guidelines are a design/brand strategy deliverable outside an SEO retainer's scope, even where tone-of-voice guidance overlaps loosely with content strategy work the retainer might otherwise touch.
Brand guidelines sometimes include a voice-and-tone section that overlaps loosely with content strategy work an SEO retainer might touch — which can make the request feel closer to in-scope than it is. But producing the actual guidelines document, including the visual identity portions, is a different deliverable and discipline from organic search work.
Is it out of scope?
Yes. Even the voice-and-tone overlap doesn't make producing the full guidelines document in-scope — at most, existing SEO content guidance could inform a tone section someone else is writing, but authoring the document itself is design/brand work outside the retainer.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Exclusions clause→ — The retainer covers organic search strategy and content guidance within that — producing a standalone brand guidelines deliverable falls outside it.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
Producing brand guidelines is outside what our retainer covers — it's a design/brand deliverable rather than an SEO one. If it'd help, I can share the content and tone patterns that have worked well for organic search as input for whoever's writing the guidelines, but the document itself would need to be scoped elsewhere.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow flags requests to produce or revise brand guidelines outside_scope on SEO contracts, while the explanation notes where a narrower, genuinely SEO-adjacent piece (content tone input) could reasonably be offered as a courtesy — helping the account manager offer something useful without overcommitting to the full deliverable.