Quotes for the same phrase routinely differ by a factor of ten, and the reason is that four unlike things share the name. One is a tool report with a logo on it. One is a written diagnosis by a person who read your site. One adds a prioritised plan with effort estimates. One includes the implementation. Until you say which you are buying, comparing prices tells you nothing except which supplier assumed the least work.
The four things sold under one name
A crawler export lists every technical issue a tool can detect and is nearly free to produce. A diagnosis is a person reading your site, your analytics and your competitors and writing down what is actually holding you back, which is days of skilled work. A plan adds sequencing, effort and expected impact. Implementation is a project. These are legitimate products at very different prices; the dishonest version is selling the first while describing the second.
Scope is what actually moves the price
A two-hundred-page brochure site and a hundred-thousand-page catalogue are not the same job at any level of depth, and neither are one language and nine. Before asking for quotes, state the page count, the platform, the number of markets and languages, whether you want content and links examined or only the technical layer, and whether you need somebody to present it to your developers. Suppliers quoting without asking those questions are quoting for something else.
The deliverable should be ranked and finishable
The most common failure of a paid audit is a document listing two hundred issues with no order, which is unusable and therefore never used. What you want is a short ranked list of the things that will make a difference, each with the reason it matters, the effort it takes and who has to do it, followed by the exhaustive list as an appendix. Ask to see a redacted example before paying; the shape of a previous deliverable tells you more than any proposal.
A free audit is a sales document
There is nothing wrong with that as long as everyone knows it. A free audit exists to find alarming-looking problems and create urgency, which means it is optimised for persuasion rather than for accuracy and usually skips the expensive analysis entirely. Treat it as a useful sample of how a supplier thinks and communicates, and never as the diagnosis you act on.
Budget for the work the audit creates
An audit produces no benefit whatsoever until somebody changes the site, and the implementation almost always costs more than the audit did. If there is no developer time, no content capacity and no budget for the fixes, buying the diagnosis first is spending money to acquire a list of things you cannot do. Establish the implementation capacity first, then size the audit to match it.
Questions people ask about seo audit cost
How much should an SEO audit cost?
It depends entirely on which of the four deliverables you mean and on the size of the site. The useful discipline is to specify the deliverable, the page count and the scope first, then compare quotes for that, rather than comparing prices for an unspecified word.
Is a free SEO audit worth having?
As a sample of the supplier's thinking and communication, yes. As the basis for spending money, no. It is produced to sell you something and is optimised accordingly, which is not a criticism as long as you read it that way.
How long should an audit take?
A serious diagnosis of a mid-sized site is typically one to three weeks of elapsed time. Same-day turnaround means a tool produced it; several months usually means it is being done between other work and will be stale before it arrives.
Do we need an audit at all?
Only if you can act on it. If you already know the main problems and lack the capacity to fix them, buy the fixing. An audit is worth its price when the problem is genuinely that nobody knows what is wrong.