What Is Not Included

A provider who accepts every request either has no boundaries or has not told you where they are. Ivan Sp states every scope exclusion before an engagement starts. Undefined scope is the most common reason a search engagement goes wrong, and listing the boundaries in public costs a few sales and prevents far more bad ones.

Excluded From Every Package

Five things sit outside all three fixed-price packages:

Ongoing monitoring or retainer work. Packages are one-time engagements, and ongoing work is quoted separately.
Paid advertising setup or management. Search advertising and organic search are separate disciplines, and this work covers organic only.
Website redesign or platform migration. Work happens within the existing site structure.
Content beyond the stated quantities. Additional pages or posts beyond each tier’s listed counts are quoted separately.
Implementation of items marked as recommendations. Where a deliverable is described as a written list, it arrives as a document for you or your developer to apply.

Page Speed and Core Web Vitals

One distinction causes confusion often enough to state precisely. The Standard package includes a Core Web Vitals review, meaning the scores Google already reports get read and explained.

Page speed engineering is a different service and sits outside every package. Fixing Core Web Vitals usually requires hosting changes, template rebuilds, or platform-level work, and it needs separate tooling and a developer with server access. Where speed is the limiting factor, that gets said in the findings report along with what kind of specialist the fix needs.

Services Not Offered

Four service lines are genuinely outside this practice: email marketing, paid social media management, organic social media management, and video or podcast production. No amount of adjacency makes these things this consultancy does well, and referring them out is more useful than accepting them.

Guarantees Not Made

Three promises are never made. No ranking position gets promised, because no consultant controls Google’s results. No citation inside an AI answer gets promised either, because answer engines change selection behaviour without notice and publish no criteria. No specific traffic figure is promised in advance, because outcomes depend on competition, budget, and the state of the site at the start.

Every result published on this site is measured rather than projected, and all figures are verifiable inside Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console.

Work That Gets Refused

Purchased links are never used. Mass submission to irrelevant directories is never performed. Review manipulation, including coordinated engagement on a business profile, is never arranged, because it violates platform policy and risks the listing itself.

Content that fabricates credentials, experience, or testing is never written. Where a page would be stronger with a credential the business does not hold, the gap gets flagged rather than filled. Full pricing and scope for what is included sits on the SEO packages and pricing page.

The Exclusions in Full

No ranking promise: Nobody controls search rankings, and any promised position is a claim about somebody else’s system.
No traffic figure promised in advance: Traffic follows demand, competition, and the site’s own history.
No AI citation promise: Citation is the engine’s decision, and structure only raises the odds.
No purchased links: Every documented result here was earned without them.
Page speed engineering: Excluded. Speed work needs hosting changes, template rebuilds, and server access.
Core Web Vitals review: Included. Reading and explaining the scores Google already reports is a different job.
Website redesign and CMS migration: Excluded from every package.
Paid advertising management: Excluded from every package.

Ask Any Provider These Four Questions

Ivan Sp suggests four questions worth asking anyone you shortlist.

Ask what they will not do, and listen for whether they have an answer ready.
Ask whether anything is promised in advance, and treat a yes as a warning.
Ask whether page speed engineering is included, and what that specifically means.
Ask for one case study figure and where you could verify it yourself.

A provider with no ready answer to the first question has not thought about scope. A yes to the second is a claim about a system they do not control.

Where the Standard Service Page Breaks Down

What did your last provider turn out not to include?

The usual advice: List everything you can do, since a longer service list makes a practice look more capable.
What holds up in practice: A list with no boundary is a list nobody believes. Naming the exclusions is what makes the included list credible. Doing so also prevents the conversation where scope turns out to have been assumed.

Picture a service page listing thirty capabilities with no exclusions stated anywhere. Every item is something the provider has genuinely done at least once.

A client assumes page speed engineering is included, since performance appears on the list. The disagreement surfaces in month two, when it is expensive for everyone.

I publish the exclusions on their own page. Every scope conversation then starts from a shared understanding rather than an assumption.

Undisclosed scope boundaries are discovered mid-engagement, which is the most expensive possible moment for both sides.

A scope disagreement in month two costs money, time, and the working relationship. Reading this page now is how you avoid one.

Four Things Commonly Assumed to Be Included

Which of these would you have assumed was included?

I name four assumptions that cause most scope disagreements.

Commonly assumed	What actually holds
Page speed is part of technical SEO.	Reading the scores Google reports is included. Engineering the speed needs hosting changes, template rebuilds, and server access.
A guarantee is a sign of confidence.	Nobody controls a search ranking. A promised position is a claim about a system the provider does not operate.
Link building is part of authority work.	Auditing and cleaning a link profile is included. A general acquisition programme has no evidenced process here and is refused.
Content writing comes with strategy.	Strategy decides which pages should exist. Writing them is quoted separately, since the two are different volumes of work.
An audit includes implementing the fixes.	Diagnosis and implementation are separate. Which one you need depends on whether you have a developer.

Every exclusion on this page is one somebody has assumed was included. Reading it before you hire is cheaper than discovering it afterwards.

A Worked Example: Where the Boundary Sits

Consider five requests and where each falls. The assessment below is illustrative, written to show how the boundary is drawn. No client engagement is described here.

Request	Included	Why
Explain our Core Web Vitals scores	Yes	Reading and interpreting a report Google already produces
Make our pages load faster	No	Needs hosting changes, template rebuilds, and server access
Audit our backlink profile	Yes	A diagnosis with a documented method behind it
Build us fifty backlinks	No	No evidenced acquisition process exists here
Guarantee page one for our main term	No	Nobody controls search rankings

I draw the line at whether a documented method exists. Rows two and four are honest refusals rather than capability gaps.

A service list with no exclusions is a menu with no prices. Everything looks available until somebody orders.

The first two rows look similar and are entirely different jobs. Confusing them is the most common scope disagreement in technical work.

How Scope Gets Agreed

I write the exclusions into every scope before any work begins.

State the problem as the business experiences it, rather than as a service request.
Run the diagnosis before agreeing what will be built.
Name the specific deliverable, rather than a service category.
Write the exclusion list into the scope document explicitly.
Name what the client supplies, including access and any decision that will be needed.
State what would change the estimate, so a variation is not a surprise.
Confirm no guarantee has been made, verbally or in writing.
Agree how the work will be verified before it starts.
Refuse any request outside the documented method, and say why.
Refer work that falls outside this practice rather than accepting it.

How This Engagement Is Scoped

What Is Included Instead

Diagnosis: Technical, content, and measurement audits with a documented method behind each.
Implementation: Where the platform allows it, and where the change is inside the agreed scope.
Verification: Confirmation that a fix took effect, rather than confirmation that it shipped.
Reporting: Written explanations rather than dashboards, including in months with no improvement.
Referral: An honest referral where a request falls outside this practice.
Written scope: Every engagement, including the exclusion list.
What that costs: Quoted after a scoping call for consulting work, and published for fixed-price packages.

Tools and Primary Sources

The references below are the sources behind the refusals above. Each opens in a new tab.

Google guidance on SEO providers sets out what Google itself says about ranking promises and provider claims.
Google link spam policy defines the link practices refused here.
Core Web Vitals documentation describes the metrics that are read and explained rather than engineered.
Search Console Core Web Vitals report is the report this practice reads and interprets for clients.

Common Questions

Why publish exclusions rather than discuss them on a call?

Undefined scope caused the two worst engagements in this practice’s history, and both failures were expectation problems rather than execution problems. Publishing the boundaries prevents the same conversation happening after money changes hands.

Can excluded work be added to an engagement?

Some of it. Ongoing monitoring, extra content, and implementation of recommendations can all be quoted separately. Services not offered get referred out instead.

What happens if page speed turns out to be the main problem?

The findings report says so, explains what the evidence shows, and describes the kind of specialist needed. Selling content work into a speed problem would waste your budget.

Why publish a page about what you refuse to do?

Scope disagreements are discovered mid-engagement, which is the most expensive moment for both sides. Publishing the boundary means every conversation starts from the same understanding.

Next Step

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