SEO Audit Pricing – How Much Does SEO Audit Cost?

An SEO audit is a complex and in-depth process. It deals with rather technical issues, x-raying many, often complicated and intricate elements to check all the vitals of a website (e.g. Core Web Vitals).

Like a doctor needs special and diversified equipment to check if a patient is all-healthy and the body is well-functioning, an SEO specialist also needs several analytical tools to go deeper and see things that can’t be seen by the naked eye. Only in this way is it possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a website, creating a complete overview of a site’s condition.

It’s worth realizing that having all the essential cutting-edge analytical tools is just half the battle. They may turn out to be largely useless unless their reports are combined with the knowledge of SEO and first-hand experience of an SEO specialist.

All in all, for an SEO audit to be successful, meaning identify all errors and give you clear guidelines on how to improve your website for higher ranks, it needs extensive SEO knowledge, analytical tools, and methodology.

SEO Audits cost from $680 to $14000 depending upon the type of SEO service you receive.

You can also find offers of completely free SEO audits on the Internet. This naturally raises the question of why you would pay, especially amounts going into the thousands of dollars for something you can get for free. The answer is quality.

As you can easily guess, an audit is unequal to an audit. It’s one thing to scan a site and gather data on visibility, phrases, meta tags, errors, and so on. And this is something that can be done with the right script, which will generate a completely free SEO audit in half a minute.

I don’t want to negate such tools, I use them myself more than once. On the other hand, I would never call a report generated in this way a professional SEO audit. This is because it lacks:

Hands down, a professional SEO audit provides you with the complete information you need to draw up a grand plan to outrun your online rivals. It also helps you identify the opportunities for example pointing out the issues that lower the average time the users spend on your website.

This brings us to the first factor influencing an SEO audit cost, which is the SEO specialist – their experience and hourly rate, to be more specific. Such a professional is trained to read the reports generated by the analytical tools in order to draw correct and reasonable conclusions. Later, they devise actionable plans for their clients to help the website improve its ranks.

So, if we have a price list for an SEO audit, according to which such a service will cost – for example – $1,000, it is easy to estimate on this basis how much time an SEO specialist will spend on such an SEO audit. As long as the audited site has only a few pages, it is possible to prepare the audit in 2-3 hours. However, the more extensive the site, the more time the audit should take. Hence, the low price of an SEO audit for even small stores or medium-sized sites is most often a harbinger of low quality service.

The second factor influencing SEO audit pricing is the cost of analytical tools used for this process. The thing is, there is no single ultimate SEO-audit-engine that would go through all website’s metrics and performance indicators to generate one complete SEO audit.

Experienced SEO specialists have at their disposal at least a few analytical tools that allow them to obtain vital and accurate information on their clients’ website’s condition. Among the most commonly used tools for SEO audit there are:

Simply because some tools lack the functionality that others have. Also, an experienced SEO specialist uses at least two analytical tools to check the same type of metrics.

What for? It sometimes happens that two tools find different results despite working on the exact same data. Other times one tool processes fewer items of information, thus showing different reports on certain website performance metrics.

That’s why you need an experienced SEO specialist who knows the ins and outs of the most common analytical tools.

Naturally, the more tools an SEO specialist uses to analyze a website, the higher the investment. How high? Here is a quick overview of the basic analytical tools and the cost of their licenses:

The third factor influencing the search engine optimization audit price is the amount of work an SEO agency has to do. Again, the heavier the workload, the higher the quote.

Basically, there are three elements that comprise the SEO website audit workload. That’s why, before agreeing on getting duplicate content on the website analyzed by an SEO specialist, you need to:

Do you want the SEO audit to give you the report only on chosen elements (e.g. content or technical SEO), or do you want it to be a complete evaluation social audit of your website?

Generally speaking, there are four main areas that you can get checked by a specialist:

This one is a no-brainer. The larger your website is, meaning

the longer it takes for an SEO specialist to evaluate your site.

Truth be told, taking the data from the analytical tools and throwing it into a report isn’t that much time-consuming or complicated but it obviously doesn’t give much insight for a regular website owner. Neither does it give clear directions for improving inbound marketing.

That’s why you may ask the SEO specialist to give you either just brief or more elaborated comments on things like:

Naturally, the more insightful the analysis and technical audit is the higher cost of SEO audit and report.

All things considered, on average, the SEO audit pricing range is somewhere between $680 to $14000. Yet, with so many variables, the cost of such a SEO services may be lower or higher.

A popular yet misconception is that an SEO audit is the de facto SEO strategy. In practice, they are two separate things. Whether we consider a technical SEO audit or any variations of it, it will focus on the current state of the site and identify areas for improvement. SEO strategy, on the other hand, is a much more complex issue. This is because it stems (or at least should) from a company’s overall strategy. It will equally determine both what to do and what not to do.

For example, an SEO audit may show that we have misconstrued tags on our blog pages. However, if it has been assumed in the SEO strategy that we operate mainly under the promotion of products in the store, we will simply not devote resources to optimizing blog posts, since we do not expect a return from it anyway. Such considerations – crucial to an effective SEO strategy – have no place in a technical SEO audit and from SEO perspective are not redundant.

Typically a professional SEO audit can last from two months to six months. Professional SEO will interpret information on a site and help you develop the necessary actions. The duration varies depending on the size of your website.

How long an SEO audit will take depends on its scope. The analysis of the site itself and a report indicating what needs to be improved is a matter of a few days to a few weeks at most. A separate issue is how long it takes to implement the audit’s recommendations. Here there are many more variables. The implementation itself doesn’t even have to be included in the price of the audit – we are often approached by clients who are willing and have the resources to go it alone, needing only an paid SEO audit to provide a technical roadmap for their site.

Including the scope of work in the implementation of an SEO audit at the stage of the sales process would also be highly risky for an SEO agencies or freelancers, as it is not known what will need to be done and at what scale before the SEO audit is prepared. Hence, in most cases, the SEO audit pricing will essentially cover the site survey itself, and will not take into account the improvement work. This, on the other hand, limits the amount of time needed for an SEO audit.

With so many pricing how much spending you need to manage while running an online business, you may be tempted to use the offer of free SEO audit. After all, why wouldn’t you – it costs nothing, right?

We hate to break it to you but those seemingly free SEO audits may actually cost you not only time but also money.

How is that?

Many analytical tools and websites offer free SEO audits. The paid SEO audit reports they provide a user with are generated automatically by scripts that go through and analyze only the most basic factors and website performance metrics. This is one thing.

The other thing is that while running an SEO audit for their clients, those free SEO tools don’t include one of the vital SEO elements of competitive audit – the keywords the website owner strives to rank for.

Moreover, the data free SEO tools – being just an SEO checker- are able to acquire for evaluating a website is simply insufficient. For example, they don’t have access to one of the most essential web services like Google Search Console. That’s why they can’t check indexing status, spot crawling errors, or report on the latest search queries. Besides, free SEO tools base their reports only on one, maximally several pages within one domain.

On top of that, those automatically generated reports provided by free SEO tools offer zero comments and recommendations on improving the SEO of the audited website. An SEO specialist, however, encloses such invaluable – often revealing – insights in the SEO report.

Last but definitely not least, free SEO tools don’t provide task prioritization. After all, how could they do that since they fail to give any tips on improving the current state of a website? As you may have guessed, an SEO specialist highlights the urgent web issues that have to be addressed in the first instance.

You may be wondering now where the money-saving part is, or rather, why free SEO audits can actually cost you more than a professional SEO audit. 

As mentioned above, those tools don’t have the access to the whole range of data that a comprehensive SEO audit report must include. Consequently, free SEO tools reports may be misleading, meaning the red error indicators that blink on your screen may trick you into introducing changes to the elements that in reality don’t require any intervention

This way you spend your time on “fixing” your site, ignoring other SEO elements that after being given a tweak could actually bring more converting customers to your website.

In the worst-case link audit scenario, you may do serious harm to your website. Despite acting in good faith, you may cause visibility and rank drop, eventually losing potential customers. This is exactly why using free SEO audit tools may cost you way more than you could imagine.

If you have made the decision to order a SEO audit, you now need to find a provider who will perform such a service. Basically, you have two options: either you opt for an SEO agency or a freelance SEO specialist. As a rule, the freelancer will be cheaper, as he doesn’t have to compensate the cost of an office, marketing and sales department, etc. with the price of the SEO services. Unless it is an established SEO experts with years of experience who can afford a high hourly rate.

On the other hand, an SEO agencies generally have more resources at its disposal: it provides an opportunity to accumulate the knowledge of the specialists working there, so they will have an advantage in experience over a freelancer. An agency will also generally have a wider portfolio of SEO audit tools, which make the work faster and more efficient.

Another advantage of an SEO agencies when performing an SEO audit will be the ability to implement. Agencies usually have their own developers, link builders or copywriters – most SEO freelancers won’t take care of these areas, so it would be on the client to find people with the right skills.

Often, therefore, an SEO audit will be a prelude to a comprehensive SEO services, covering all aspects of efforts to optimize a site for search engine algorithms. At the same time, the relatively high price of an SEO audit is justified by its substantive level, but also by its arrangement in terms of business priorities and possibility of implementation services. As a result, such an SEO audit worth its price.

When you see that your organic traffic is low, if you struggle with making sales or when you simply have a feeling that your website may perform better in SERP, you need hard data to base your actions. Making some random and ill-thought-out changes to the website may produce disappointing, if not disastrous results.

That’s why, before doing anything, you need a comprehensive SEO audit report. Only with such a document prepared by an SEO specialist are you able to take the right steps to successfully improve your brand presence in search engine results.

Naturally, every website is different, and therefore every SEO audit is different. The price for this SEO services varies accordingly to the elements you want to get examined – and there are at least several of them: technical SEO, content, or link profile, to name just three. Keep in mind that the more complex the examination, the higher the budget may be involved.

It’s also worth realizing that SEO pricing depends also on whether you want the SEO agency to fix the issues on your website revealed by the SEO audit. Perhaps you are perfectly fine with receiving just the SEO audit results and comments provided by the professional.

Others, however, would prefer the agency to carry on and execute all the recommendations they included in the SEO audit report. We know that, and therefore this is how we do SEO audits here, at Delante. Our SEO content audit we offer is always customized because only in this way can we meet the needs of the clients, without going over the set budget.

Even though you definitely need to spend some amount of money on an SEO audit, the investment pays off pretty quickly. Within a few days, you receive a set of clear guidelines on how to make your website more Google-friendly

Forget the free SEO audits as the results drawn on the insufficient data can’t be taken as a reliable source of information. Actually, such services are made with one goal in mind – to obtain the email address of potential clients.

Do you have any questions about SEO audit pricing? Let us know!