Short answer
Most UK audits cost £1,000 to £5,000, and the gap is mostly report versus repair. Mine is £399 ($529) for the report, or £699 ($929) with the fixes done. Don’t buy one if you already know what’s wrong or have no budget left to fix it.
An SEO audit is the most commonly mis-sold product in this industry — not because audits are bad, but because they’re sold to people who need something else, at a price set by how thorough the document looks.
Here’s what they cost, what should be in one, and the three situations where buying one is a mistake regardless of quality.
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a check of a website against what search engines need to find, store and rank its pages: indexing, crawlability, speed, structured data, internal links and whether the pages target real searches. The output should be a prioritised list of what’s wrong and what to fix first.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
A manual SEO audit in the UK typically costs £1,000 to £5,000 on my observed ranges, with agencies at the top and freelancers lower. The gap is mostly report versus repair: whether the audit ends with a document or with the problems fixed.
Market range as I observe it in August 2026 from quotes clients bring me and published agency rates. My own price is on the pricing page.
The spread looks irrational until you see what’s inside it. At the top end you are often paying for length: a fifty-page document, professionally formatted, covering everything a crawler can detect. At the bottom you’re paying for someone to run a tool and export it.
Neither is what I’d call the useful thing. The useful thing is someone who knows which three of the forty findings actually explain your problem, and can tell you the order.
In short: The last two rows are most of the value and most of the price difference. A finding nobody implements has changed nothing about your website.
Figure
The price gap is mostly report versus repair
How much does an SEO audit cost in the US?
Many US businesses pay far less than a UK agency quote: in WebFX’s survey of 250 US businesses, 43% paid $101 to $750 for an SEO audit. That low end is mostly the automated-report tier. My full audit is $799, or $1,199 with the fixes done.
The WebFX figures look like they contradict the £1,000 to £5,000 range above, and the difference is in what gets counted. WebFX asked businesses what they paid, so its numbers include tool exports and cheap packaged reports.
My range comes from quotes for audits a person carries out by hand.
The arithmetic shows why the cheap end can’t be the same product. At the most common SEO hourly rate of $75 to $100 in Ahrefs’ pricing survey, a $300 audit buys three or four hours: enough to run a crawler and export the results, not enough to trace a traffic drop to its cause.
The WebFX spread runs from under $50 (1.72% of businesses) to $12,001 to $15,000 (2.59%), so both ends of the market exist in the US too. Tool vendors sell the bottom of it, freelancers and consultants the middle, and agencies the top.
What’s included in an SEO audit?
An SEO audit should include index coverage, crawlability and redirects, Core Web Vitals on real pages, structured data, the mobile experience, internal linking and a check that pages target real searches. It should end with a prioritised order (first, second, third) rather than a list of everything wrong.
Index coverage first, because a page Google hasn’t stored can’t be fixed by anything else on the list. Then crawlability and redirects, including the chains that quietly waste authority.
Then page speed and Core Web Vitals measured on real service and product pages — the homepage is usually the fastest page on any site and the least representative of what customers load.
Then structured data, the mobile experience as it actually behaves on a phone on mobile data, and internal linking, which is the most neglected item on every audit I inherit.
And then the part that technical audits routinely skip: do these pages target things people search for? A perfectly optimised page built around a phrase nobody types is a perfectly optimised page nobody will find.
That’s a content problem discovered by a technical process, and leaving it out because it isn’t strictly technical is how businesses end up with a clean bill of health and no traffic.
What types of SEO audit are there, and how do they change the price?
The main types of SEO audit are technical, content, local, ecommerce and migration audits, and each is priced by how much there is to check. A technical SEO audit usually costs less than a full audit because it leaves out content and search demand, while ecommerce and migration audits cost more because of the number of URLs involved.
In short: A full audit combines the technical and content checks. Local, ecommerce and migration audits are the same method pointed at a specific risk.
A quote that doesn’t say which type it covers is hard to compare with anything. I’d ask whether the content and search-demand check is in it, because a technical audit alone can pass a site that has nothing worth ranking.
My fixed-price SEO audit covers the technical checks, Core Web Vitals on real pages and whether the pages target real searches.
How long does an SEO audit take?
An SEO audit of a normal small business site takes a few days of work, usually spread over one to two weeks. Ecommerce catalogues and migrations take longer because there are more URLs to crawl and more templates to check.
The crawl itself is quick. The time goes on reading what it found against Search Console, checking speed on the pages customers actually use, and working out which few findings explain the problem.
I’d say anyone offering an audit in an hour is running a tool. Anyone taking six weeks is writing a document for its own sake.
Add a little time at the end if fixes are included: the useful check comes once Google has recrawled the changed pages, which is how you know the fixes took.
How often should you do an SEO audit?
Most sites need a full SEO audit when something changes, not on a calendar: before and after a redesign or migration, after a traffic drop with no known cause, and once if the site has never been checked. Between those, a monthly look at Search Console catches most problems for nothing.
A yearly audit on a healthy site that’s already maintained mostly re-discovers that things are fine. The triggers that justify one are events:
When a full audit is worth it
0/ 4
That is the whole list. Anything still unticked is your next job.
The monthly check is the free part: open the Pages report and the Performance report in Search Console, and look for pages dropping out of the index or clicks falling on pages that used to earn them. On a retainer, that monitoring is continuous, which is why the audit is included in one.
Do I need an SEO audit? Three times not to buy one
When you already know what’s wrong. If traffic fell the week you relaunched, you don’t need £2,000 spent confirming that the relaunch did it. You need the redirects fixed. Diagnosis you already have isn’t worth buying twice.
When there’s no budget left to act. An audit is a diagnosis, and a diagnosis with no treatment is an expensive way to feel informed. If the money stretches to either the report or the work, I’d buy the work.
When the real problem is that no page exists. Plenty of businesses have a technically sound site that simply has nothing to rank — no page for the service, no answer to the question customers ask. An audit will report a healthy site and you’ll be no better off. What you needed was keyword research and some pages.
Free tool · Do I need an SEO audit?
Three questions before you spend anything
Answer the three questions
Each one is a situation where an audit is the wrong thing to buy.
Before paying anyone, connect Google Search Console and read the Pages report. It’s free and it catches the alarming problems.
What mine is
It starts with a free basic audit: a short, plain-English read on what is generally wrong. The full audit is £399 ($529), fixed, and the number doesn’t move after I’ve looked.
It covers a full technical audit — crawl, index coverage, redirects, structured data — Core Web Vitals measured on real pages, and a prioritised fix list with how to fix each item.
For £699 ($929) I implement the fixes myself rather than handing you a list of instructions for a developer you’d have to brief and pay separately. On a monthly retainer, the full audit is included.
There’s a follow-up check once Google has recrawled, so you know the fixes took, and you keep the audit file whether or not we work together again.
If it turns out an audit isn’t what you need, I’ll say so — that’s the most common outcome of the first conversation, and it’s why the free look comes before the invoice rather than after it. More on what SEO costs in general, and the full detail on technical work.
Common questions
How much does an SEO audit cost in the UK?
The wider market runs roughly £1,000 to £5,000, with agency audits at the top of that and freelancers lower. My own full audit is £399 ($529) for the report with how to fix each item, or £699 ($929) with the fixes done for you, and it's included free with a monthly retainer. The spread is mostly explained by whether the audit ends with a report or with the problems actually gone.
Is a free SEO audit worth anything?
As a sales tool, occasionally. A free audit is almost always an automated crawl report with a call booked at the end, and automated crawlers are good at finding trivia and bad at finding causes. The one useful thing about them is that a genuinely alarming finding — mass noindex, a robots.txt block — will show up even in a bad report.
Is an audit the same as SEO?
No, and conflating the two is the most expensive mistake in this area. An audit tells you what's wrong. It changes nothing on its own. A report bought without the budget or intention to act on it is the purest waste of money in this industry.
Want it done on your site?
Send me the address. The free audit is a short, plain-English read on what to fix first.
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