The honest answer is anywhere from free to five figures, which is no answer at all, so let me do better. In the UK market, a proper manual audit of a small to medium business site typically lands somewhere between £500 and £1,500. A comprehensive audit of a larger or more complicated site, with content and link analysis alongside the technical work, tends to sit in the £1,500 to £3,000 band. Large ecommerce platforms and enterprise sites go well beyond that, £3,000 to £6,500 and up, because the work genuinely scales with the site.
Below that, there's a whole layer of £100 to £300 "audits" that are automated tool exports with a logo on the cover. Some agencies give these away free as a sales tool, which tells you roughly what they're worth as a standalone product.
I sell SEO audits myself, so I have an interest here, and you should read this post knowing that. What I can offer in exchange is a view from the delivery side of what actually drives the price, which is the part most pricing guides skip.
What drives the cost of an audit
Three things move the number more than anything else.
Site size and complexity. A 30 page brochure site and a 30,000 URL ecommerce store are different jobs. The bigger site needs crawl budget analysis, log file work, template by template review rather than page by page, and far more time interpreting what the crawler finds. Faceted navigation, international targeting, and JavaScript frameworks each add real hours, not padding.
Scope. A purely technical audit is the narrowest version. Add content quality, keyword targeting, competitor benchmarking, and backlink profile analysis and the hours roughly double. Increasingly there's also the question of AI visibility, checking how a site actually surfaces across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI features, which I now treat as standard scope and have written about in my guide to generative engine optimisation. Some providers bill it as a separate line.
Who's doing the work. A senior specialist who has seen a hundred sites reads a crawl differently to a junior following a checklist. You're paying for interpretation and prioritisation, not for the crawl itself, which any tool can run.
Typical UK market bands
These are market level figures, not my prices, drawn from published UK pricing guides as of mid 2026. Treat them as orientation rather than gospel; scope varies enormously between providers quoting the same number.
| Band | Typical price | What you're getting |
|---|---|---|
| Automated report | Free to £300 | A tool export, often used as a sales hook. Little to no human interpretation |
| SME manual audit | £500 to £1,500 | A specialist manually reviewing a small to mid-size site, technical focus, prioritised recommendations |
| Comprehensive audit | £1,500 to £3,000 | Full technical, content, and link analysis with competitor context |
| Large site / enterprise | £3,000 to £6,500+ | Log file analysis, template level review, international and ecommerce complexity |
What a cheap audit leaves out
The gap between a £200 audit and a £1,500 one is not effort, it's judgement. The automated report will happily list every missing meta description on your site with equal urgency, which is precisely the problem. I've covered what a technical SEO audit actually covers separately, and the short version is that the layers where audits earn their fee, rendering, indexation strategy, and site architecture, are exactly the layers automated tools check worst.
The other thing cheap audits leave out is the prioritised action plan. A finding without a priority and a recommended fix is trivia. If the deliverable doesn't tell you what to fix first and why, in language your developer can act on, you've bought a list of symptoms rather than a diagnosis.
How to judge whether a quote is fair
Ask what's manual and what's automated, and how the findings will be prioritised. Ask to see a redacted sample of a past audit, since the deliverable tells you more than the pitch. Ask whether the auditor will talk your developer through the fixes afterwards, because a proper audit includes some aftercare. And check the scope against something concrete, the technical SEO checklist I publish is effectively a contents page for what a technical audit should cover, so you can hold a quote up against it.
A fair quote will also scale sensibly with your site. Be wary of a flat price that doesn't change whether you have 50 pages or 50,000, because one of those two customers is subsidising the other, and it's probably you.
As for what I charge, my own audit pricing depends on site size and scope in exactly the ways described above, so rather than publish a number that would be wrong for half the people reading it, the best route is to request my packages and I'll come back with a figure for your actual site.
SEO audit cost FAQs
Can I just use a free SEO audit tool instead?
Free tools are useful for monitoring and will surface obvious mechanical issues, and I use several of them inside paid audits. What they can't do is tell you which of their two hundred flagged issues actually matters for your site, or spot the architecture and rendering problems that don't show up as line items. For a small site with a small budget, a free crawl is better than nothing, but it isn't an audit.
How often should I get an SEO audit?
For most businesses, a full audit every 12 to 18 months is plenty, with a lighter check after any major change, a redesign, a migration, or a platform move. Auditing more often than you can implement the findings is a waste; the previous audit's recommendations should be largely actioned before the next one.
Does an SEO audit include fixing the issues?
Usually not, and the quote should make this explicit. Most audits deliver findings and a prioritised plan, with implementation billed separately or handled by your own developer. Some providers bundle a set number of implementation hours. Neither model is wrong, but confusing the two is the most common source of disappointment with audit pricing.
Why do audit prices vary so much between providers?
Because the word covers everything from a five minute tool export to weeks of specialist analysis. Scope, site size, and the seniority of the person doing the work each multiply the hours involved. Two quotes that differ by a factor of five are usually describing genuinely different products, which is why comparing what's included matters more than comparing the headline number.
Want an audit priced for your actual site?
Tell me what you're working on and what you're trying to achieve, and I'll give you an honest view of whether I can help and what it would take.
Get in touch