SEO audit cost by site size
Site size is the first thing a provider asks about, though the number that drives the work is page templates, not pages. A store with 40 000 products built on five templates takes less time to audit than a 600 page site where every section was built by hand. The ranges below are typical US prices for a one-time manual audit by an experienced specialist or agency.
| Site | Typical one-time price | Typical hours | What drives the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small business or local site, up to about 100 pages | 500 to 2 500 USD | 5 to 15 | Few templates, local signals and Business Profile, basic content review |
| SaaS or B2B site, 100 to 2 000 pages | 2 500 to 7 500 USD | 20 to 45 | Marketing site plus docs or blog, JavaScript rendering, competitor keyword gap |
| E-commerce store, 2 000 to 50 000 URLs | 3 000 to 10 000 USD | 25 to 60 | Faceted navigation, duplicate variants, category structure, feed and schema checks |
| Enterprise or multi-site, 50 000 URLs and more | 7 500 to 30 000 USD and more | 60 to 200 | Log file analysis, several languages or brands, migrations, stakeholder workshops |
Divide any quote by its hours. Senior SEO work in the US commonly bills at 100 to 250 USD per hour, so a 6 000 USD audit should represent roughly 25 to 60 hours of a person reading your site. If the provider cannot say how many hours the audit takes, the price is not based on effort.
SEO audit pricing by audit type
"SEO audit" can mean one narrow check or a full review of everything that affects organic revenue. Quotes become comparable only once you know which of these is on the table.
| Audit type | What it covers | Typical price |
|---|---|---|
| Automated site crawl | A tool report of broken links, missing tags and speed warnings, no analysis | 0 to 300 USD |
| Technical SEO audit | Crawling, rendering, indexation, redirects, Core Web Vitals, structured data, internal linking | 1 500 to 5 000 USD, more for large or JavaScript-heavy sites |
| Content audit | Every indexable page scored for traffic, intent and overlap, with keep, improve, merge or remove decisions | 1 500 to 6 000 USD |
| Backlink audit | Link profile quality, anchor text, lost links, toxic patterns and a gap against competitors | 500 to 3 000 USD |
| Local SEO audit | Business Profile, citations, reviews, location pages and map pack competitors, per location | 300 to 1 500 USD |
| E-commerce SEO audit | Category and product templates, facets, variants, pagination, product schema, internal search pages | 3 000 to 10 000 USD |
| Full SEO audit | All of the above plus keyword gap, competitor review and a prioritized roadmap | 3 000 to 15 000 USD, enterprise higher |
For a company that has never had an audit, the full version is usually the right purchase, because technical problems, thin content and weak links tend to show up together. For a site that just went through a redesign or platform move, a technical audit alone is enough. Our technical SEO checklist shows what that narrower review looks at.
What a freelancer, an agency and a tool charge for an SEO audit
| Provider | Typical price | You get | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-serve SEO tool | 0 to 150 USD per month in software | A crawl with a health score and a list of warnings | No judgment about which warnings matter for revenue |
| Marketplace gig | 50 to 300 USD | A tool export in a branded PDF | Often automated, with the same advice for every site |
| Freelance consultant | 1 000 to 5 000 USD | A senior person who reads the site and writes the findings | Advice only, and availability for questions afterward varies |
| SEO agency, one-time project | 2 500 to 15 000 USD | A team audit with a presentation and a roadmap | Often priced as an entry to a retainer, sometimes credited if you sign |
| Monthly SEO plan with audit included | No separate audit fee | The audit, a monthly fix list and the fixes implemented | Check the monthly limit on implemented fixes |
Two extra costs rarely appear in the quote. The first is your own team's time: someone has to grant access, answer questions and sit through the readout. The second is implementation. Agencies commonly bill developer and SEO time for fixes separately, so the audit fee is the smaller part of what it costs to get the result.
What a paid SEO audit report should contain
Price tells you little without the deliverable. Before you approve a quote, ask for a sample report from a past client with the names removed and check it against this list.
- A crawl of the whole site, or a stated sample for very large sites, with the crawl date.
- Indexation and rendering findings, based on Search Console data and the raw HTML, not only on a crawler.
- Core Web Vitals by template, from field data where the site has enough traffic.
- A content review of the pages that earn or should earn revenue, with the search each one should rank for.
- A keyword gap against competitors you name, showing searches they win and you do not.
- A backlink profile review, including links lost in the last year.
- AI search readiness, meaning crawler access rules, structured data and whether answers are easy to quote.
- A prioritized fix list, where each item has a severity, an effort estimate, an owner and the expected effect.
- A readout call or written Q and A, so your developers can ask how to implement each item.
The fix list is the part you pay for. A report with 4 000 warnings and no order of work is a crawl export. A report that says "these 15 issues, in this order, on these URLs" is an audit. An audit also reviews a single point in time, so pair it with ongoing uptime monitoring, since server errors that start a week after the crawl will not be in the report.
Red flags in an SEO audit quote
- No sample report. A provider who has done audits can show one.
- A price with no hours or scope. You cannot compare two quotes without knowing the checks and the time behind each.
- Delivery in 24 hours. That is a tool running, not a person reading your site.
- A page count as the only deliverable. Length is not value. Ask how many prioritized fixes the last report contained.
- A guaranteed ranking after the fixes. Nobody controls rankings, and Google says so in its own guidance on hiring an SEO.
- Findings locked behind a retainer. If you paid for the audit, the full report is yours whether or not you buy anything else.
When you compare providers for the work after the audit, the list of questions to ask an SEO agency covers contracts, ownership and reporting.
One-time SEO audit or an audit inside a monthly plan
An audit on its own changes nothing. The value arrives when the fixes ship, so the fair comparison is the cost of the audit plus implementation, against a monthly plan that includes both. The example uses a mid-sized site and the first three months.
| One-time audit, then fixes billed separately | Monthly plan with audit included | |
|---|---|---|
| Audit fee | 5 000 USD | 0 USD, part of the plan |
| Implementation of fixes | About 30 hours at 150 USD, 4 500 USD | Included, up to 25 fixes a month on a 3 500 USD plan |
| New pages, refreshes and links in the same period | Not included | 18 new pages, 12 refreshes and 18 editorial links over three months |
| Cost for three months | About 9 500 USD | 10 500 USD |
| Re-crawl after fixes | Usually a paid follow-up | Unlimited re-crawls |
The one-time route costs less if you have developers with free time and an SEO lead who can direct them. Then an outside audit gives a second opinion and your team does the rest. It costs more than it looks if the report waits in a backlog, which is what happens to most of them.
A monthly plan makes sense when you have nobody to implement. You skip the audit invoice, the fixes start in the first month and the same budget also produces pages and links. Because good plans have no minimum term, the risk is one month of fees. See how month to month SEO services work and what an SEO retainer costs at each price tier.
How the audit works at AgencySEO
We do not sell the audit as a project. There are two ways to get one.
- The free audit. Enter your domain at the top of this page. Without an account it crawls 15 pages and shows a health score, the top technical issues and keyword gaps. With an account you get one full audit of up to 200 pages. It is a one-time preview.
- The audit inside a plan. Every plan includes the full technical audit at kickoff, a monthly fix list, implemented fixes within the plan allowance and unlimited re-crawls of the sites the plan covers.
| Plan | Monthly | Implemented technical fixes per month | Sites audited |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 1 500 USD | Up to 10 | 1 |
| Growth | 3 500 USD | Up to 25 | Up to 2 |
| Scale | 7 500 USD | Up to 50 | Up to 5 |
| Enterprise | 12 000 USD | Up to 100 | Up to 10 sites or subfolders |
All plans are month-to-month with no setup fee, and annual prepay saves 20 percent. The SEO audit services page describes the method and the SEO pricing page lists every limit. If you are still deciding whether you need an audit at all, run the free one first and look at how many of the top issues sit on pages that should bring revenue.