What an SEO audit costs and how often to run one
Free to five figures for the same-sounding deliverable. Five variables explain the spread, plus how often to re-run one and when to do it yourself.
SEO audit pricing ranges from nothing to five figures for what sounds like the same deliverable. The spread is real, and it comes down to two questions: how much was checked, and who fixes it.
What you are actually paying for
An audit has three separable parts, and quotes rarely say which they include.
The crawl is cheap. Software walks the site and records what it finds. This is the part free tools do.
The interpretation is where cost starts. Someone decides which of 400 findings matter for your business, in what order, and which are false alarms. Software cannot do this well, because it does not know that the 200 pages failing a check are a deprecated section you are about to delete.
The remediation plan is the expensive part. Not a list of problems, but specific instructions someone can act on, scoped to your platform and your team.
A £500 audit that produces a crawl export is not overpriced. It is a different product from a £5,000 audit that produces a prioritised plan, and comparing them on price alone is comparing the wrong attribute.
Rough bands, with the caveats
| Type | Typical range | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free automated | £0 | A crawl, a score, generic recommendations |
| Paid tool subscription | £80 to £400 per month | Ongoing crawls, dashboards, no interpretation |
| Freelance audit | £500 to £2,500 | A crawl plus a human reading it, one pass |
| Agency audit | £2,500 to £10,000 | Full technical and content review, prioritised plan |
| Enterprise audit | £10,000 upward | Multi-site, multi-locale, stakeholder workshops |
Treat these as orientation, not quotes. Rates vary by market, and a specialist charging at the top of a band is often cheaper per useful finding than a generalist at the bottom.
What moves the number
Five variables account for most of the spread in audit pricing. Site size, how unusual the platform is, whether scope covers content and competitive work or technical only, what the deliverable actually is, and whether remediation is included. That last one is the difference between a report and a result.
The question to ask any quote
“What happens to the findings?”
A report that ends at a list transfers the work to you. If you have an engineer who will action it, that may be exactly what you want and you should not pay for more. If you do not, you are buying a document that will sit in a shared drive, and the audit was never the constraint.
Ask a second one too: “What did you check, and what could you not?” An auditor who cannot tell you the second half either checked everything, which is unlikely, or is not tracking it, which tells you how much the score is worth.
How often to run one
Frequency depends on how fast the site changes, not on the calendar.
- Full audit: annually for a stable site, twice a year if you publish weekly or run a catalogue.
- Technical spot-check: after every migration, redesign or template change. These are where sudden damage comes from, and the damage is usually invisible for weeks.
- Indexability check: monthly. Ten minutes in Search Console. Coverage report, sudden drops, new errors.
- Content health: quarterly. Overlap accumulates as you publish, so this is a function of output rather than time.
A useful trigger to add: audit whenever organic traffic moves more than 20% in a month without an obvious cause. That is a symptom, and symptoms are cheaper to investigate early.
When to do it yourself
Doing it yourself makes sense when three things are true: the site is small enough to hold in your head, someone on the team can implement fixes, and you mainly need to know what is wrong rather than be persuaded.
A capable person with a free crawler and a checklist will find most of what a mid-range paid audit finds. What they will miss is the prioritisation, which is the part experience actually buys.
The honest split: pay for an audit when you need judgement or you need to convince someone. Do it yourself when you need a list and you were going to do the work anyway. The SEO audit checklist is the list.
What not to buy
An audit with no coverage figure. If the report gives a score without saying what proportion of the site it examined, the number is unbounded. A 94 from a crawl that reached a third of your pages is not better than a 71 from a complete one.
An audit that counts what it could not check as a pass. This is the category default and it is how tools report flattering numbers for sites with real problems.
A retainer that repeats the same audit quarterly without re-measuring whether the last round of fixes moved anything.
The free Crawld scorecard runs the full 129-check rubric and reports coverage alongside the score, so you can see the denominator before you decide whether to pay anyone. The scoring method is published in full, and pricing for the paid tiers is here.