An SEO audit is one of the few SEO purchases with a defined start and end, which makes it the easiest thing in the industry to price — and the most inconsistently priced thing on the market. The same site can be quoted £500 and £12,000 in the same week.
Both quotes can be honest. They are for different work.
The tiers
| Tier | Price | Time | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automated report | £0–£300 / €0–€350 | Minutes | Crawler output, lightly formatted |
| Freelance audit | £600–£2,000 / €700–€2,300 | 1–3 days | One specialist, one pass, written findings |
| Specialist agency audit | £3,000–£8,000 / €3,500–€9,000 | 1–3 weeks | Multiple disciplines, log files, competitive context |
| Enterprise / migration audit | £8,000–£25,000+ / €9,000–€29,000+ | 3–8 weeks | Large or multi-market sites, dev workshops, phased delivery |
Market estimates for Western Europe in 2026, gathered from published rates and quotes we have seen. Treat them as a sanity check on a quote, not a benchmark to hold anyone to.
The jump between tiers two and three is where most buyers get confused, so it is worth being precise about what the extra money buys.
What you are actually paying for: hours
An audit is almost entirely labour. Working backwards from a day rate of roughly £600–£1,000 for an experienced technical SEO explains nearly every quote you will see.
| Task | Small site (<500 pages) | Large site (50k+ pages) |
|---|---|---|
| Setup, access, scoping call | 1–2 hrs | 4–6 hrs |
| Crawl + crawl analysis | 2–3 hrs | 8–16 hrs |
| Search Console / analytics analysis | 2–4 hrs | 8–12 hrs |
| Log file analysis | rarely needed | 8–16 hrs |
| On-page and content review | 3–5 hrs | 16–30 hrs |
| Internal linking and architecture | 2–3 hrs | 8–16 hrs |
| Off-site review | 1–2 hrs | 3–6 hrs |
| Writing it up | 4–6 hrs | 15–25 hrs |
| Presentation and Q&A | 1 hr | 3–5 hrs |
| Total | 16–26 hrs | 73–132 hrs |
Two things stand out.
Writing is a quarter of the job. The analysis is not the deliverable; the document is. An auditor who bills 20 hours of analysis and 2 hours of writing is handing you raw findings and leaving the synthesis to you — which is precisely the failure covered in our audit report samples.
Site size drives the price more than anything else. Not industry, not competitiveness. A 200-page brochure site in a brutal vertical is a two-day audit. A 60,000-page marketplace in a quiet niche is a three-week one.
Why the cheap ones are cheap
Sub-£300 audits are not scams. They are crawler exports, and crawler exports are genuinely useful — they will find your broken links, redirect chains, missing titles and duplicate content faster and more completely than a human.
What they cannot do is the part you are paying a human for:
- Decide what matters. A crawler reports 4,000 issues with no ranking between them. Two of those matter.
- Find the cause. Tools report that pages are deindexed. They do not tell you a template change on 11 June introduced a canonical.
- Estimate effort. Which is the column that determines whether anything gets fixed.
- Say what not to do. The most valuable sentence in an audit is often “stop spending on this.”
If you have a crawler licence and someone in-house who can interpret it, buy the tool and skip the audit. If you do not, the £600–£2,000 tier is where an audit starts being an audit.
What should move the price
Legitimately:
- Page count and template count
- Whether log file analysis is in scope
- Number of markets, languages or domains
- JavaScript rendering — a client-rendered app is materially more work
- Whether a migration is involved
- Whether findings need presenting to a dev team rather than emailed
Not legitimately:
- Your industry, unless it genuinely changes the work
- Your revenue. Value-based pricing has its place; on a fixed-scope diagnostic it means being charged more for identical labour
- Urgency, beyond a defensible rush premium
- The number of keywords you want to rank for. An audit is not keyword work
Five questions before you commit
- How many hours are in this, and at what rate? A supplier who cannot answer has not scoped it.
- Do I receive the raw data? Crawl exports and URL lists. A no here means the audit is a sales document for a retainer.
- Does the price include a walkthrough? A PDF with no conversation loses most of its value; a one-hour call recovers it.
- Who writes it? Sold by a senior, delivered by a junior, is the standard failure. Ask for the name.
- What happens if you find nothing serious? The honest answer — “you get a short document saying the technical foundation is fine, and we tell you where the actual constraint is” — is a good sign. A supplier who cannot imagine finding nothing will find something regardless.
Audit versus retainer
A common mistake is buying an audit when the actual need is ongoing work, or the reverse.
Buy an audit when something specific and recent went wrong, when you are about to migrate, when you are inheriting a site, or when you need an independent opinion on work someone else did. If nothing has broken and the question is whether the technical foundation can carry the rankings you are aiming at, that is a technical SEO audit — priced against the hours table above rather than against your traffic loss.
Do not buy an audit when you already know what is wrong and lack the capacity to fix it. A second document confirming it will not help. That is a delivery problem, and SEO pricing benchmarks covers what ongoing capacity costs across freelance, fractional and agency models — the pricing comparison sets the same options side by side.
Watch for audits priced suspiciously low by suppliers whose business model is the retainer that follows. A £250 audit that concludes you need a £4,000/month retainer was never a diagnostic. That pattern and its relatives are in signs of a bad SEO agency.
If the trigger was a traffic drop
Then you want a scoped diagnostic rather than a general audit — the question is narrow, the evidence is time-bound, and a full site review is mostly wasted effort. Our traffic drop audit is built for that specific case and delivers in the format described here, raw data included. If you have not yet ruled out the obvious causes, why organic traffic drops walks the diagnostic tree for free.
