How much does an SEO audit cost?
A straight answer on pricing, and what actually drives it.
“How much for an SEO audit?” is a fair question with an annoying answer: it depends. But it depends on a small number of knowable things, and this page lays them out so you can budget with confidence. In short, a focused, hand-run audit of a small site starts around £595, a full multi-area audit of a larger site runs into the low thousands, and an automated tool report is effectively free but worth roughly what you pay for it. Below is what moves the number, and how to make sure you are paying for judgement rather than page count.
What drives the cost
Rough price bands
What you should be paying for
The cost of an SEO audit should buy you prioritised judgement, not a longer document. A 200-page report is a liability, not a deliverable. When you compare quotes, anchor on what you receive, a ranked, do-this-first roadmap, an executive summary and a developer-ready appendix, rather than the number of issues found, because issue count is trivially inflated and tells you nothing about value.
Cheap, mid and premium audits compared
A free or near-free audit is an automated crawl: useful as a first symptom scan, useless for deciding what to do. A basic paid audit (a few hundred pounds) gets you a human looking at one area, typically technical. A full audit (low-to-mid thousands) covers technical, content and authority and ends in a single prioritised plan.
For most small and mid-sized businesses, the full audit pays for itself fastest, because the prioritisation is where the return lives.
How to budget for your site
As a rule of thumb, budget more for larger sites, JavaScript-heavy builds, multi-location or multi-market setups, and anything in a regulated sector where the stakes are higher. If you are price-shopping, our fixed-fee packages remove the guesswork: every audit is quoted up front with no retainers and no lock-in, so the SEO audit cost you are quoted is the cost you pay.
We don’t sell the SEO work we recommend, so the findings are genuinely unbiased.
Every issue ranked by impact and effort, so you get the three things to do first, not 200.
Specialists run your audit by hand, with 100+ years of combined experience.
What is the average cost of an SEO audit?
There is no single average because scope varies enormously, but a useful guide is: automated tool reports are free, a focused human technical audit starts around £595, and a full multi-area audit of a typical business site runs from roughly £1,200 to £4,550. Enterprise scopes are quoted individually.
How much should I budget for a local SEO audit?
A local SEO audit covering your Google Business Profile, citations, reviews and local landing pages is usually at the lower end of the range. See our local SEO audit services page for what is included.
Why are some SEO audits free?
Free audits are automated tool scans or a sales pitch in disguise. They have a place as a first pass, but they cannot prioritise, which is the part that creates value. Our free SEO audit is a short human snapshot rather than a tool dump.
Do you charge a fixed fee or a retainer?
Fixed fee, always. Every audit is quoted up front with no retainers and no lock-in, so you know the full SEO audit cost before you commit.
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