TL;DR: An SEO audit diagnoses why your site isn’t getting the search traffic it deserves. A good one covers crawl and indexation, on-page and content, and links – and gives you a clear list of fixes with some idea of how hard they are to pull off. It can cost anywhere from a few hundred bucks to $5,000 or more, but the price doesn’t always tell you what you’re getting. Judge the report on how useful it is, not how thick it is.

I’ve been handed my fair share of SEO audits that other companies produced and let me tell you, they all tend to look the same. Eighty pages of recommendations, some sort of ‘health score’ on the cover and hundreds of warnings that nobody ever acted on. Buying an SEO audit is a weird thing – the word ‘audit’ covers a basic automated scan and some senior analyst’s time, but from the outside they can look almost identical. And they’re not always that expensive either.

This post is for those who are looking to buy an SEO audit from someone else. If you want to do it yourself, our technical SEO audit checklist runs through all the checks we run. But if you want to hand it off to someone else, this is what you should get, what it tends to cost, and how to tell a useful report from one that’s just a bunch of charts.

One thing before I get going – we sell audits. Our technical audit packages can run from $900 to $1,500 depending on the size of the site. We also do a big Revenue-First Diagnostic for $1,990. So I have a bit of a vested interest in how you think about this. I’ll do my best to give you the straight lowdown on our offer versus the market, including the bits that we don’t cover.

What is an SEO Audit, and What Isn’t?

An SEO audit is a diagnosis. Someone goes through how search engines are crawling and indexing your site, and how it all relates to what you’re trying to rank for – and tells you what’s holding things back.

It’s not the fix. A lot of people get this wrong. The report can tell you that your site has hundreds of duplicate pages with no canonical tag, but it’s still up to you to decide which one to keep and get your developer to sort it out. If you don’t have a team to do that, the audit is just a big to-do list with nobody assigned to it.

Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO basically says the same thing. It says an audit should give you a realistic idea of how much things could improve and how much work it would take to get there. That rules out two of the most common problems with SEO audits: reports that promise the world, or ones that just list a bunch of problems without saying how hard they are to fix.

What Should be in the Report?

Scope varies, but a full SEO audit usually covers four main areas. If a quote leaves one out, that’s not automatically bad – just make sure you know what you’re not getting.

Crawl and Indexation

Can Google reach your pages, and is it indexing the ones you care about? This includes things like robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, redirects and status codes – and on bigger sites, it should also look at how Google is crawling across the site. If your site uses JavaScript, look for a comparison of what Google sees versus what’s in the raw HTML. This is the section I’d weight most heavily because problems here make everything else downstream pretty much irrelevant.

On-Page and Content

This is about titles, headings, internal linking, thin or duplicate pages, and whether each page actually matches the searches it’s trying to rank for. A good audit ties this back to keywords. A weak one just tells you a few hundred titles are the wrong length without saying if any of those pages even matter.

Links

Your backlink profile compared to the sites outranking you. Not some scary report about toxic links. Just a clear read on whether it’s a matter of authority or if there’s something else going on.

One thing to note: our technical audit covers speed, indexation, crawlability and on-page elements. Backlink analysis is a separate service. That’s just a scoping choice and it’s the kind of thing you should check on any quote – ours included.

A Prioritised Fix List

This is what makes the other sections useful. Every finding should come with a priority, a rough idea of how much effort it will take, and ideally who needs to do it: a developer, a content person, whoever manages the CMS. Without that, you end up with 300 issues that all have equal weight, and teams just fix the easy ones first rather than the ones that actually matter.

I’m not going to go through each individual check. If you want to do it yourself, the checklist post goes through them one by one.

How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost

The price varies wildly – from a few hundred dollars to $5,000 or more. But the cost doesn’t always tell you what you’re getting. So judge the report on how useful it is, not how thick it is.

The honest truth is that price follows scope and scope is all over the shop.

The one independent data point that caught my eye was an Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers. The most common per-project fee ended up being $2,501 to $5,000, charged by around a fifth of respondents. Roughly half of the respondents were charging $2,000 or less. There are a couple of caveats though. The survey asked about SEO projects in general not audits specifically, and the numbers are self-reported so take them for what they’re worth – a rough idea of the market rather than an actual audit price list.

Most of the other pricing guides I came across while researching this were put together by companies that do audits. That includes this one. Keep that in mind when you see a price band, even ours.

To give you a reference point our technical audit falls below that most common band. We charge $900 for sites up to 50 pages, $1,200 for up to 500 pages, and $1,500 for sites above that, with delivery typically taking between three to ten business days depending on the size of the site.

What really moves the price

Site size is a big one. A 40-page brochure site and a 40,000-page store are very different jobs, and the bigger one usually needs a lot of human work that can’t be automated, like going through server logs to see which pages Googlebot is actually spending time on.

Then there’s depth. An audit that just samples a few templates is going to cost a lot less than one that looks at every page type and checks each finding manually. Next up is implementation support – developer-ready tickets, a walkthrough call, a re-crawl to confirm the fixes worked – and who actually does the work. Someone with loads of experience who’s seen hundreds of sites will spot patterns faster, and charge a premium for it.

What probably happens at the very cheap end

You’ve got to be careful with audits priced in the tens of dollars. I don’t know what’s in each and every one of them, but at that price there usually just isn’t enough room to put much more than just running a crawler and exporting the results with a logo slapped on top. You can run a similar crawl yourself with free tools and Google Search Console. What you pay someone for is their judgment about which findings actually matter – and that takes time.

How to judge the report once you’ve got it

This is the part most buyers skip, and it’s the part that really decides whether the money was well spent.

Start with the first page. A good report should tell you what’s most wrong, in plain language, before it gets to the charts. If you have to read 30 pages to find out what to do first, the auditor has just handed their job back to you.

Then have a look at the evidence. Every serious finding should show you where it came from: the URLs, the crawl data, the Search Console report, the status codes. “Your page speed needs work” is just an opinion. Something like “your product template fails LCP on mobile field data, and here are the three assets causing it” is a finding.

Google’s guidance adds a good check to run as well. Check if the recommendations cite official Google documentation, and compare them against it before you make any big changes. If an audit tells you to do something that goes against Google’s own guidelines, ask why. Sometimes there’s a good reason.

Be wary of the health score. Tool scores are handy for keeping an eye on whether things are getting fixed, but they don’t tell you if your site is actually making money. A client of ours took a 97,569-page site we audited to a 100 score in Ahrefs with their own developers handling the fixes. I’m proud of that work, but if I rewrote the case study today I’d lead with a different number: the sitemap listed 97,569 pages but only about 65,700 were actually indexed. That gap is the finding that’s most likely to connect to traffic and revenue. The score is more of a side effect of fixing things.

Last, look for honesty about uncertainty. A good auditor should tell you when they don’t know why something is happening, and what they’d test to find out. And walk away from any report that promises rankings. Google is pretty blunt on this one – no one can guarantee a #1 position.

Questions to ask before you part with your cash

Ask to see a sample report. Not a glossy marketing version, a real one with the client’s details taken out. If a provider won’t show you what you’re getting, that says something. We put an example on our audit page for what it’s worth.

Ask what’s out of scope. Backlinks, content, local, international, server logs – any of these can reasonably be left out as long as you know that before you pay.

Ask what access they need. Google specifically says that you should give an auditor read access to Search Console at this stage, but not write access. If someone needs admin rights to your CMS just to diagnose problems, ask why.

Ask what happens after the audit is delivered. Is there a step-by-step walkthrough or some kind of support to get you through any implementation issues? If you have questions about the audit, will they answer them? Do they double-check the site after any fixes have been implemented? There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a report nobody explains – it tends to end up sitting on a shared drive gathering dust.

And ask them how they plan to connect any findings to your business. Which pages are actually driving in leads or sales, and are the problems they’ve identified on those pages or on pages that nobody visits? To be honest, this is the reason we built our diagnostic tool to look at SEO as one of ten revenue systems rather than on its own. But even for a straight SEO audit, the auditor should have a basic understanding of which pages matter to you before they start looking for ranking issues.

When you don’t need to pay somebody to do one for you

Loads of sites don’t need to bother with hiring someone. Google itself says that if you run a small local business, you can probably do a good chunk of the work yourself, starting with its SEO starter guide.

If your site has a few dozen pages and Search Console isn’t showing up any indexing problems, and nothing has changed recently, I’d start there. Paid audits generally only earn their fee in a handful of situations: before or after a site migration or redesign, after a traffic drop you can’t explain, on large or complicated sites, or when you’re about to invest properly in SEO and you want a baseline report first. Google makes a similar point about timing. The best moment to bring someone in to help is before a redesign or launch, not after the fact.

The short version

What you’re paying for is not just the list of problems – any old tool will give you that for free or almost for free. You’re paying for someone to tell you which three or four problems are actually costing you money, what order to fix them in, and give you a rough idea of how much work each one is.

Judge every report and every quote against that. That’s what we included in our audit reports, anyway.

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