How Much Does An SEO Audit Cost in 2023?

SEO audits can be an invaluable process in building a website, whether it is meant for a major online business or just a personal blog site where you are selling hand-made products.

When it comes to SEO, a professional SEO audit can make a dramatic difference in your marketing going forward. However, like many bespoke services, the average SEO audit cost can vary wildly based on a massive range of factors.

When you are under strict budget limits and can only afford to spend so much on SEO checks, finding reasonable SEO audit costs often means compromising on exactly which services you need.

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is, in simple terms, an evaluation of your site’s Search Engine Optimization work. This allows a site owner to get a better understanding of how well their site is ranking for the right search terms and how effectively they are capturing natural traffic from various search platforms.

There can be a lot of specific services within SEO audits, all geared towards different parts of SEO management. This means that a typical SEO audit can involve quite a wide range of different checks and tests to get a full understanding of your site’s SEO quality and effectiveness.

Depending on the exact SEO services you need, SEO audits might cover elements like:

Link Audit

A link audit reviews your website’s overall link profile, measuring links by both quality and quantity. This is meant to point out any areas where bad links might be holding you back or spaces where you have not been using links to their fullest potential.

Content Audit

A content audit focuses on the content of your website, from blog pages and company about pages to individual product listings. This is focused not only on the accuracy and quality of content but also on the optimization of metadata like title tags and the improvement of individual images.

Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit looks at the technical side of your site from an SEO perspective, such as identifying duplicate content or links to error pages. This can also cover things like slow-loading pages or poorly-designed menus that are weakening particular SEO campaigns.

Competitive Audit

A competitive audit compares you against your competitors, highlighting areas of success and situations where you have weakened your position against a competitor.

This is meant to clarify areas where major improvement might be necessary or explain which areas your competitors have managed to overtake you in.

Social Audit

A social audit looks over your social media presence, getting an idea of how many people engage with your social accounts. This also looks into social-related elements on your website, such as integrated social media feeds or built-in share buttons for specific pages.

Comprehensive SEO Audit Report

In some cases, an SEO audit is simply meant to cover as much as possible and deliver a clear report on the state of your SEO.

These are not geared towards any particular part of search engine optimization and are more of a way to understand as much as possible about your own SEO.

Other Audit Aspects

One of the important things to understand about SEO services like audits is their flexibility. A comprehensive SEO audit report can go over many different elements, from your overall SEO strategy to simpler things like broken internal and external links.

An SEO audit can be a targeted check of a specific part of your website’s SEO or a full breakdown of your entire website.

The options you choose depend on your SEO strategies and what you want to know about them so that you can try to improve them further.

Which of These is a Full SEO Audit?

There is no such thing as a typical SEO audit: any audit can be made up from these elements and focuses, whether that means focusing on a single aspect (like a dedicated content audit) or branching out to break down as many different SEO topics and factors as possible.

What to Know About SEO Audit Costs

Before you jump into learning about the expected SEO audit cost ranges, it is important to know more about audits as a whole.

How are SEO Audits Priced?

SEO audit pricing depends on the company offering each audit. For example, comprehensive SEO audit pricing might be based on the time taken by one company, while another may have a flat rate for that SEO audit report.

You can often ask about SEO audit pricing before you start working with a company or look at their SEO audit pricing details on their website.

Make sure that you understand all of the finer details about their SEO audit pricing system before you commit to working with them, just to be safe.

Is Buying SEO Audit Tools Cheaper?

Buying the SEO audit tools you would need to approach an SEO audit yourself is generally far more expensive.

For example, a detailed technical audit could require five pieces of technical audit software costing close to £2000 (split between monthly and yearly licenses for different tools).

While having access to an SEO tool never hurts, most SEO companies can afford all of these tools by offering their services to clients.

A good SEO audit process involves a lot of expensive tools, so going with an SEO agency is always cheaper if you need an SEO audit.

Are Free SEO Audits Worth It?

A free SEO audit report is usually more of a marketing tool for an SEO agency, with the free audit showing you that you have room for improvement.

Free SEO audits are usually a partial audit and/or are very basic since SEO agencies do not want their free SEO audit to invalidate their paid services.

However, a free SEO audit can still help. Getting a free SEO audit, no matter how minor can still tell you that there are areas of improvement.

They also often serve as a way for the company to give you a quote based on the kind of SEO audit they think you need.

Are SEO Audit Costs Included in Other SEO Services?

You can usually check with each agency to see if their audits are included in their other services.

For example, some agencies might offer a basic SEO audit as part of their larger monthly services but keep an in-depth audit as a separate charge, while others will roll them into one service or keep them entirely distinct.

This can mean that the exact price of an SEO audit may change if you are already using that agency’s services since the SEO audit cost might get absorbed into the price you are paying for other services already.

How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?

The expected SEO audit cost for different kinds of audits can be wildly different. Beyond that, many audits are treated as entirely unique services that are tailored to the client’s situation, meaning that the SEO audit costs may change even further depending on what the customer needs.

For example, the price bracket for a large-scope technical SEO audit can fall between over £4000 to well beyond £75,000, depending on the scale of the target company and the amount of work required.

On the other hand, a simple link audit might only cost a few hundred dollars or pounds overall, especially for a smaller independent business.

This means that price quotes are usually necessary. Different companies will offer their own price brackets and ranges, and it is important to understand the proposed cost of an SEO audit from each professional team you have approached.

What Impacts SEO Audit Cost Ranges?

SEO audit services are highly variable and are often bespoke for each company or client. This means that they can involve a range of SEO services and audit checks, with their prices changing to match.

Some of the factors that can significantly change the overall cost include:

SEO Audit Complexity

A professional SEO audit can take on many different forms. For example, a technical SEO audit could be a quick overview of your on-page optimization or a full-scale SEO report of your site’s technical features and design elements.

Since many larger SEO performance audits are made up of several smaller audits (such as a technical audit alongside a comprehensive analysis of your link profile and chosen keywords), there can be a lot of variation involved.

Many SEO services are offered as a customized assessment tailored to the client’s needs.

Obviously, more complexity and a greater scale mean a higher cost overall. This can be especially true for bespoke audits that have to go beyond what the service would usually cover.

SEO Audit Depth

The amount that an SEO audit costs can also be influenced by how much depth they require. A smaller business might only need a brief overview of its SEO efforts to find its flaws and stay competitive, but a larger company could require a comprehensive audit from an entire experienced team.

The more depth an audit requires, the more time and effort needs to be spent on it. This usually means greater costs overall since the team has to spend a lot more time putting all of the details together.

A larger or more complicated website usually means more depth, especially if you have multiple sites connected to the same brand or business.

SEO Audit Scale

Naturally, a greater scope means more time spent on the audit and, therefore, higher costs. While this is technically similar to depth, it can also be quite different depending on the situation: for example, the more competitors you want a competitive audit against, the more time it will take to prepare.

Regardless of the SEO agencies that you work with, a larger-scale project means more time spent using various SEO audit tools to pull out the data required.

This can also require extra steps to keep all of the data properly logged and usable, especially if the audit covers multiple aspects of your SEO performance.

Tool Variety

SEO agencies usually need to pay for their tools (not counting free ones like Google Search Console).

This means that more tools being involved usually means a higher cost, which can make certain services a lot more expensive if the agency decides to charge extra on that basis.

Of course, not all of them will. If an agency can already afford all of its tools anyway, it might not raise the price based on more tools being involved and instead, only focus on how complicated or difficult the audit will actually be overall.

Other Factors

There can be a lot of elements that change how costly your SEO audits are, some of which are very easy to overlook.

Understanding these can really help if you are trying to minimize the costs while still getting complete SEO audits done for your business.

Base Prices

Certain SEO professionals and teams charge more for their services on average. This could be due to their location and higher cost of living, their greater skills, or just because they have decided to charge more than some other options on the market.

Experience

It is quite common for a more experienced agency to charge extra overall, especially if they are an established agency with a solid reputation behind them.

A typical SEO package might cost more from then compared to less well-known options due to the guarantee of quality that comes with them.

Bespoke Tweaks

While an SEO audit is always technically a bespoke process, getting some highly custom work done will often increase the costs. For example, getting a complete evaluation of multiple connected websites will obviously cost more.

Reporting

There are different ways to use a finished SEO audit, which can include getting the team to produce a clear report for you.

If you just want raw data, you will probably pay slightly lower audit costs than if you are asking for an actionable report that simplifies their findings into something more digestible.

Industry

The industry that you are in can really matter, especially since some industries are a lot more competitive than others. The more competition you need to identify and get data on for comparison purposes, the higher you can expect the SEO audit price to climb.

Speed and Deadlines

In some cases, you might be able to pay more for a faster audit. Expedited SEO audits cost a lot more since you are effectively paying extra to put yourself as a priority in the company’s eyes – but sometimes the added expedited SEO audit price is still worth it when you are under a tight deadline.

Is an SEO Audit Worth It?

Just like the question “How much does an SEO audit cost?” this is another question that does not have a defined answer. A good audit can make a huge difference to your SEO strategy and overall search engine success, but the answer depends on a lot of factors.

This is mostly because an audit can mean a lot of different things: identifying technical issues like website speed and duplicate content, improving digital marketing across other search engines, identifying a good target audience, picking out highly competitive keywords, breaking down your Google analytics or just improving on-page SEO content.

Since there is no consistent audit cost in 2023, it all comes down to your own personal needs and budget preferences.

Some people will be willing to pay a higher implementation cost that covers more pages and SEO ranges, while others will not, but that does not make the option any less “worth it” in the right circumstances.

Remember that the cost of an audit can include things like auditing tools and SEO tools, implementation services, experience with software like Google Search Console, and a host of other benefits. You are not just paying for the SEO tools but the entire process and all of the benefits that it brings.

The best way to find an ideal audit cost in 2023 is to explore your options, find SEO audit services that would meet your needs, and get price quotes or estimates from as many as possible.

The more options you have to compare, the easier it becomes to pick out the best one for your situation and budget.