How much does an SEO audit cost?

Short answer

Expect anything from free to five figures, and the price tells you less than the deliverable does. For a small or mid-sized site, a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars buys a real diagnosis. Mine is a fixed $500. Pay more for scale and complexity, never for page count in the PDF.

The honest answer is that SEO audit pricing is all over the place, because the word “audit” covers everything from an automated report that takes four minutes to generate to several weeks of work on a catalogue with hundreds of thousands of URLs. So the price on its own is close to meaningless. What matters is what you get for it.

What the market charges

There is no good public data on audit prices specifically. The closest is the Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers, published in 2023 and updated in 2024. For project-based work the most common price band was $2,501 to $5,000, and 60.6% charged $1,001 or more per project. The most common hourly rate was $75 to $100. Worth knowing that Ahrefs sells SEO tools to the same people it surveyed, which does not make the numbers wrong but is worth keeping in mind.

In practice, the quotes you will see fall into roughly four groups:

Free. An automated report, usually offered as a lead magnet. It tells you what a crawler found. It cannot tell you what matters.
A few hundred dollars. Either a lightly annotated tool export, or a focused diagnosis from someone experienced who works fast because they have seen the pattern before. You have to read the sample to know which.
One to five thousand dollars. The typical agency audit. Often thorough, sometimes padded.
Five figures. Large ecommerce sites, complex migrations, sites with log files and JavaScript rendering issues. At that scale the price is usually justified.

What actually drives the price

Size, mostly, but not linearly. A 50-page service business and a 500-page one usually take similar effort, because the problems repeat by template. A store with faceted navigation and 200,000 indexed URLs is a different job, because the problems are structural and the wrong recommendation is expensive to deploy.

Then complexity. JavaScript rendering, several languages, several locations, or a history of bought links all add real hours.

Then what you need at the end. A diagnosis for your own team is cheaper than a specification your developers can work from template by template, which is cheaper again than someone implementing it.

What I charge, and why it is fixed

My SEO audit is a fixed $500, turned around in seven working days. It covers technical and indexation, content and intent, the link profile, and the live search results against your actual competitors. You get a ranked fix list, specifications a developer can act on, a list of what I would ignore, and a call to walk through it.

It is fixed because I would rather you knew the number before the first call than three weeks later in a proposal. It is $500 rather than $5,000 because, after fifteen years, most sites fail for a small number of reasons and I can usually find them quickly. Very large catalogues are the exception, and for those the audit is the starting point and the engagement is priced after it.

There is no retainer attached. Plenty of clients take the audit and implement it themselves or hand it to the agency they already have.

How to judge whether a quote is worth it

Ask for a redacted sample and read the first page. If it opens with a score or an issue count, you are buying a report. If it opens with a sentence explaining what is wrong, you are buying a diagnosis.

Ask whether the audit looks at your competitors on your queries. If it only looks at your site, it can tell you the site is clean but not why you are losing.

Ask whether you can implement it without them. If the answer is hedged, the audit is a sales document.

And be wary of anyone who promises outcomes. Google’s own guidance on hiring help is blunt: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” An audit can tell you what is in the way. It cannot promise what happens once it is moved.

When the cheapest option is the right one

If your site is small, new, and you mostly want reassurance that nothing is broken, a free tool and an afternoon of your own time is enough. Spend the money on content instead.

If traffic has dropped, rankings have stalled after real investment, or you are about to commit serious budget, that is when a paid diagnosis earns its fee. One wrong priority usually costs more than the audit.

A note on what you are really paying for

The expensive part of an audit is never the crawl. Tools do that for almost nothing. What costs money is the hour spent deciding that the 1,500 “missing H1” warnings do not matter and the one canonical rule on the category template does. That judgement is what separates a $500 audit that changes the site from a $3,000 one that sits in a shared drive. Price it on that basis and the quotes start to make sense.

If you want to know what is actually stopping your site, the $500 SEO audit is where I start. Fixed price, seven working days, and if there’s nothing worth fixing I’ll say so.