Statement of work
The list the retainer buys. If it is not on the list, you are not getting it.
What it means
The document naming what will be produced, how much of it, and how often. Four service pages a month. Two location pages a quarter. A named number of citations. A monthly report containing specific metrics.
It sits underneath the master service agreement, which is why changing scope usually does not need a new contract. It is also the document most owners never ask for, because the proposal deck feels like it did the same job. The deck is marketing and the statement of work is the thing you can hold somebody to.
Why it matters in HVAC
The thing worth pinning down in heating and cooling is the page count against your service area. A shop covering eleven towns with four service lines needs something like forty pages before anybody writes a blog post, and whether those are in scope or billed as extras is a several-thousand-dollar question.
Seasonal content is the other one. Furnace content written in October is worth more than the same content written in January, and a statement of work with no calendar attached will reliably produce it late.
How to check it
Ask for it as a separate document before signing, and read it for numbers rather than verbs. "Ongoing content creation" is not a quantity. "Four pages of 800 words or more per month, to a calendar agreed quarterly" is.
Scope written as a number instead of a verb
Plumbing & HVAC SEO publishes what its base programme covers in the open: one industry, one location and Google Business Profile, one primary city plus ten surrounding cities. Everything outside that is listed separately with its own price, including Google Ads management at $1,500 a month up to $10,000 of spend and fifteen percent above that.
That is a statement of work written where a prospect can read it. It also makes the upsell path obvious, which is a fair trade for knowing what the base actually contains.
The version that causes arguments is a proposal listing "local SEO, content marketing, link building and reporting" with no quantities attached. Nine months in, when you ask why only three location pages exist, nobody is wrong, because nothing was ever a number.