How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost: A Client’s Guide to SEO Budget

How much does an SEO audit cost?

There is no exact answer to this question because the price varies based on factors like the size of your website, how many websites you want to be audited, the complexity of your website, if you are opting for a complete audit or a partial one, and many such factors.

In general, the range can be anywhere from just $500 for a simple website to as much as $30,000 if you own a large site with a lot of traffic and high authority. Besides, a reputed SEO agency will naturally charge higher than one that has set their foot not so long ago.

Here we discussed all that there is to know about the pricing of an SEO audit. By the time you are done going through the article, you will be better informed and hopefully find a good deal to solve all of your SEO issues for better rankings.

What Is an SEO Audit and What Does It Include?

An SEO audit is so important for any solid online marketing plan. It helps you assess how well your marketing efforts are working as a whole. Although it may sound simple, a good SEO audit is actually quite complex. It involves analyzing your website and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies from different angles while pinpointing the weak areas and strengthening them to maximize the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.

A sound SEO audit will look at things like:

• How many visitors your website gets
• Where those visitors come from
• What pages they visit
• What keywords they use to find your website
• Whether your website is easy to use and navigate
• Whether your website is optimized for search engines

The goal of an SEO audit is to help you understand how your website is performing now and identify areas where you can improve your strategy. You can then use this feedback to create a plan that will help improve your rankings and attract more visitors.

What Are the Different Types of SEO Audits?

A partial SEO audit will do no good because an SEO strategy includes several components, such as technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and more. If you focus on only one side of the strategy and ignore the rest, you will see little or no positive results at the end of the day.

When planning to perform a complete SEO audit, you should be familiar with the four different types of SEO audits for the most informed evaluation.

1. Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO is the part of SEO that deals with the technical aspects of a website, such as its code, structure, and performance. During a technical SEO audit, experts review factors like website speed, mobile-friendliness, URL structure, and sitemap presence. They also check for any broken links, duplicate content, or HTML errors that could hinder Google bots from properly understanding and ranking your site.

What’s more, the audit involves assessing the website’s accessibility and how well it follows best practices like implementing canonical tags, optimizing metadata, and using appropriate header tags. The goal is to make sure your domain meets the technical requirements set by Google.

We always recommend that you do a technical SEO audit first in order to have a deep understanding of your site’s health.

So, how much to pay for a technical SEO audit? The SEO site audit cost will depend on the size, scope, and complexity of your site. You may have to pay anywhere from $300 all the way up to $15,000.

2. Local SEO Audit

With a local SEO audit, you evaluate how well your local SEO endeavors are performing. When conducting a Local SEO Audit, several key factors are considered such as the accuracy of your business listings, the completeness of your Google My Business profile, the quantity and quality of online reviews across platforms like Google and social media, the presence and accuracy of your local citations, on-page optimization, your local link building profile, and competitor analysis.

This is necessary because you will be able to identify and fix any issues that may be affecting your ranking in local search results. For example, you may have missing or incorrect NAP (name, address, phone number) information, poor-quality content, or broken links that need to be corrected immediately.

Depending on your business’s size, scope, and local search performance, the SEO audit price price range will vary a lot. Expect to pay at least $500 if you are a small business owner and a few thousand for large entities.

3. Content SEO Audit

Content is king, and will alway be. You need to evaluate your existing content from time to time in order to determine how it can be improved for SEO. The goal is to identify pages that are performing well, pages that need improvement, and pages that should be removed.

A content SEO audit usually includes the following steps:

• Inventory your content: This involves identifying all of the content on your website, including pages, blog posts, images, videos, and other media
• Analyze your content performance: here you look at metrics like page views, bounce rate, and average time on page to see how your content is performing
• Evaluate your content SEO: factors such as keyword use, title tags, and meta descriptions come into play to see how well your content is optimized for Google
• Identify opportunities for improvement: you look for ways to improve your content performance, SEO, and overall quality
• Create an action plan: here you outline the steps that you will take to improve your content

Auditing different types of content takes time, which means you will be charged more for a content SEO audit. The cost of the audit will range from $500 to $5,000.

4. Backlink SEO Audit

This is about evaluating the quality and relevance of the backlinks pointing to your site. You get a complete analysis of the strength of your backlink profile. You get to see if there are any harmful or low-quality links, the quality and relevance of every link, the distribution and proper use of anchor texts. This also provides you the opportunity to uncover potential opportunities for acquiring new, high-quality backlinks.

This type of SEO audit is mainly done with tools and does not take so long when compared to  a technical or a content SEO audit. You can expect to pay as low as $500 and as much as $10,000 based on the different factors mentioned above.

What to Expect From a Paid SEO Audit?

Many business owners wonder if they should spend money on a comprehensive SEO audit. If you are one of them, we recommend that you consider that as an investment rather than an expense. This is because once you get a full audit report from an experienced SEO agency, you will be surprised by how many issues your online presence have and how many opportunities that you are missing out on.

Here is a list of what to expect from your investment:

• Technical issue analysis: This includes errors with crawlability and indexation, mobile optimization, page speed, internal and external links, security, and more
• On-page optimization: using relevant keywords throughout the content, writing clear and concise sentences, and optimizing the title tag, meta description, and other HTML tags to include relevant keywords, and more
• Backlink profile analysis: link relevancy and authority, broken links, disavowing spammy links, competitor link analysis, and more
• Keyword research: identifying target keywords, analyzing keyword competition, evaluating current keyword usage, keyword mapping, and more
• Social media analysis: analyzing social presence and brand reputation management
• A complete roadmap to fix all the errors and issues identified with the necessary tools and measures

It may take a few days to a few weeks for an SEO agency to perform the complete audit. They will explain it all to you. As a result, you will have a clear understanding of all the hindrances in your online presence and what you can do about it with your time, money, and effort.

What to Expect From a Free SEO Audit?

Many SEO agencies offer a free SEO audit to prospective clients that is mainly done with basic SEO tools. This is a way to hook a client by informing them of the different types of issues present in their website that are hindering their growth, and offering solutions with their expertise.

Here are some specific things you can expect to see in a free SEO audit:

1. Technical SEO issues:

• Broken links
• Duplicate content
• 404 errors
• Slow loading speed
• Mobile-friendliness issues

2. On-page SEO issues:

• Lack of keyword research
• Poor keyword usage
• Misleading or irrelevant title tags and meta descriptions

3. Off-page SEO issues:

• Low number of backlinks
• Low-quality backlinks
• Spammy backlinks

The free audit won’t be as comprehensive as a paid audit for sure, but it can still be a helpful way to identify some of the areas where your website could be improved.

Are SEO Audit Tools Any Good?

No matter if basic or complete, an SEO audit agency will use different SEO audit tools e.g. SEMrush, SEOptimer, Ahrefs, Sitechecker, and Moz Pro. But these tools provide reports that are literally useless unless an SEO expert interprets them and turns them into an actionable plan that will work for your SEO campaign.

So, the answer is yes, these tools are very useful and necessary for any type of SEO audit. But in reality the expertise of the agency or the person that performs the task is more important than these tools. You will find many cheap SEO auditors on gigs like Fiverr that will charge a bare minimum, but expect to get little or no value from their SEO audit services.

Should you try cheap or automated SEO audits? Of course not if you want real results.

Factors That Affect the Cost of an SEO Audit

By now you know that it is not possible to give an exact answer to the question – how much does an seo audit cost? The following factors mostly determine the price.

Website size

The more page or content a website has, the more time it will require to audit the platform. This is obvious because there will be more issues to identify and list down with more pages. Besides, not every page will have the same type of error.

Website complexity

If your website has complicated coding or content issues that usually take a significant amount of time to point out, the cost will rise to a great degree because of the extra time and effort that the audit agency has to put in. This will be obvious especially if you get an audit service that is paid hourly.

Scope of audit

As said above, it is always recommended to opt for a complete audit so that you find out all the issues that are preventing your website from ranking well. Still, some business owners may think that the technical issues of their websites, for instance, are preventing them from leveraging the benefits of their online presence. So, they may decide to perform a technical SEO audit only, which means they will have to pay significantly lower than a full SEO audit.

Agency expertise

A reputed agency will charge higher than a newcomer in the industry simply because they have years of experience. Experience is always valuable because a seasoned SEO audit agency has perfected their approach over the years to make the process smooth yet effective.

As a result, although you may have to pay more for their services, the value you will get will make up for the extra cost over the long haul. We recommend that you do not cheap out on this because the success of your online venture depends on this audit to a great extent.

Delivery time

In general, an SEO audit can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to complete. For example, a basic technical SEO audit of a small website can be completed in 2-3 days, while a comprehensive SEO audit of a large website with a complex content management system (CMS) may take 2-3 weeks.

However, if you want quick delivery, the pricing may go upward. Since SEO auditing is an intricate work that requires the auditor to carefully look into every page for different types of errors, you better let them do their job at their own pace. This way, the possibility of overlooked errors will be minimized.

Why Should You Not Try Cheap or Automated SEO Audits?

We have also discussed this before. There is no dearth of SEO experts on popular freelance platforms that will offer to do the audit for as low as $50. Now think about it. You have already invested a lot of money on web and content development as well as your SEO campaign. Now you need an SEO audit because you are not seeing the desired results.

An audit means looking for issues that lie in your web platform and social presence. It needs to be done very carefully with all the updated tools and techniques because a simple overlooked error could turn into something big eventually. You do not want to take that risk now.

Besides, an automated SEO audit will provide you some reports that themselves are of no use if not explained by an SEO expert. And an explanation is not enough. There should be an actionable plan detailing all the things that need to be done to solve those issues.

As a result, you should always assign this job to a reliable SEO agency even if you have to pay more.

FAQs

1. How long does an SEO audit take?

Ans. This may take anywhere from a few hours to a few days and even weeks based on the number of pages or websites you want to audit. The agency will inform you of the estimated time once you share the details.

2. When to perform an SEO audit?

Ans. You need a complete SEO audit when you’re not seeing the results you want from your SEO efforts. The audit will help you identify the areas where you need to improve. You may also do it if you’re making major changes to your website, such as a redesign or a content overhaul, an SEO audit can help you make sure that the changes don’t have a negative impact on your SEO.

mothasim

SEO & Growth Manager

A distinguished SEO and Business Development Consultant with a proven track record of helping businesses achieve outstanding results in the digital landscape. Throughout his career, Mothasim has worked with a diverse range of businesses, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

His strategies are characterized by his meticulous attention to detail, data-driven decision-making, and a deep understanding of search engine algorithms. In his personal life, Mothasim enjoys hiking, photography, and volunteering in his community. He believes in giving back and is actively involved in mentoring aspiring SEO professionals. LinkedIn .