SEO tech audit service, scoped and verified

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy a technical audit

1. Fix the scope in writing before the price. Number of URLs crawled, whether JavaScript rendering is included, which templates are examined, whether staging and production are both covered, and whether a re-check after fixes is in the fee. An audit priced without these named is a quote for an unknown quantity of work.
2. Grant read access only, at this stage. Google's guidance on hiring an SEO says that for an audit you should only grant read access to Search Console and not write access. That single sentence settles a negotiation that otherwise turns into a debate; hand over write access, if ever, when implementation is agreed.
3. Insist findings are ranked by impact and effort. A useful audit is a work queue, not an inventory. Every finding should carry the affected template, the estimated effort, who has to do it, and what is expected to change. A list of several hundred undifferentiated warnings from a crawler is a tool export, not a diagnosis.
4. Check the recommendations against Google's own docs. Before implementing anything substantial, look up the underlying guidance in Google Search Central. Google does not endorse third-party SEO tools and those tools cannot see internal ranking data, so a finding that exists only inside a crawler's scoring system deserves a second look.

What a technical audit actually examines

The core of the work is discovery and eligibility: can Googlebot reach the page, is it allowed to, does the rendered version contain the content a user sees, and is the canonical version the one you want indexed. Google's starter guide is explicit that crawlers need access to the same resources a browser gets, including CSS and JavaScript files, and that the URL Inspection tool is how you confirm a specific page can be crawled. An auditor who never opens that tool on your templates has not checked the thing that matters most.

Around that core sit the structural questions: internal linking and whether important pages are more than a few clicks from the home page, duplicate and parameterised URLs, sitemaps and robots directives, redirect chains left behind by past migrations, structured data validity, and page performance on real devices. Each of these is a plumbing problem with a definite answer, which is why the audit is the part of SEO that can genuinely be delivered as a fixed-price piece of work.

Telling a diagnosis from a tool export

Two documents can carry the same findings and be worth very different money. The tool export lists every issue a crawler flagged, sorted by the crawler's own severity labels. The diagnosis names the three or four things holding the site back, shows the evidence for each, explains what happens if they are fixed, and says which of the remaining hundred items are safe to ignore. Ask to see a redacted sample audit before you commit; agencies that do this work well are usually willing to show one.

Ask also what the audit will not cover. An audit is not a content strategy, not a link programme and not a forecast. If a fixed-fee audit arrives with a ranking projection attached, treat the projection as sales material: Google states that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and an audit proposal should offer realistic estimates of improvement rather than guarantees.

Who implements the fixes

The commonest failure of a technical audit is that nobody implements it. Decide before you buy whether the agency, your in-house developers or your platform vendor will do the work, and price accordingly; an audit whose fixes require a template rebuild in a system your team does not control can sit unread for a year. Where the agency implements, agree a re-crawl after deployment so both sides can see which findings actually closed.

Agencies in this index are listed on what can be verified from their own published pages, including printed prices where they publish them. Audit work is one of the areas where published pricing is most common, so it is one of the easier services to compare on paper before you speak to anyone.

Questions people actually ask

What should an SEO tech audit service include?

Crawlability and indexation checks on real templates, rendering, canonicals, sitemaps and robots, internal linking, redirects left by migrations, structured data validity and page performance; plus findings ranked by impact and effort with a named owner for each.

What access does an auditor need?

Analytics and Search Console at read level, plus a crawl of the live site. Google's hiring guidance says to grant only read access to Search Console at the audit stage. Server logs and staging access help but should be scoped and time-limited.

How is an audit different from an ongoing SEO retainer?

An audit is a diagnosis with a fixed deliverable and an end date. A retainer is continuing work across content, technical and authority. Buying the audit first gives you a priced, comparable object before you commit to a monthly fee.

Should the audit come with a ranking forecast?

It can carry realistic estimates of improvement, but not guarantees. Google states that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and its hiring guidance treats such promises as a warning sign, so read any attached forecast as an assumption set rather than a commitment.

Browse agencies by specialty

• SEO agencies with verified facts
• PPC agencies with verified facts
• Social media agencies with verified facts
• Content marketing agencies with verified facts
• Email marketing agencies with verified facts
• Performance marketing agencies with verified facts