SEO technical audit services, judged on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy a technical audit

1. Fix the scope before the price. Agree the crawl depth, whether staging and international variants are included, and whether JavaScript rendering and server log files are in scope. Those four choices move the price more than the agency's brand does.
2. Ask for a sample deliverable. A good audit ranks findings by expected impact and names the role that has to fix each one. Ask to see a redacted example before you pay; a provider with none has not shipped many.
3. Insist on access, not screenshots. Grant read-only Search Console and analytics access for the audit window. A provider working only from a third-party crawler is guessing about indexing, and indexing is where most of the money is lost.
4. Buy the implementation separately. Keep the audit and the fixes as two decisions. A weak audit then costs one invoice, and a good one can be implemented by whoever is closest to the codebase, including your own developers.

What a real technical audit checks

The floor is crawlability and indexing: whether robots directives, canonical tags, redirects and sitemaps agree with each other, and whether the pages you care about are in the index at all. Google's own documentation on consolidating duplicate URLs and on how its crawlers work is the reference a competent auditor cites, not a proprietary score. Above that sits rendering, because a site that depends on client-side JavaScript can look complete to a person and nearly empty to a crawler.

Then comes performance, measured against Google's published Core Web Vitals thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads and split between mobile and desktop. An audit quoting a single lab score from one run of one page has not measured what Google measures. Structured data, internal linking and site architecture complete the standard scope.

What moves the price

Size and complexity move it first. A forty-page brochure site is a day of work. An ecommerce catalogue with faceted navigation, a headless front end and three country variants is a multi-week engagement, because the failure modes multiply rather than repeat. Log file analysis, JavaScript rendering diagnosis and migration planning each add a specialist and a fee.

Seniority moves it second. The value of an audit sits in the judgement about what to ignore, and judgement is the expensive part. A cheap audit is usually a crawler export with a template wrapped around it, and it is cheap because nobody senior read it. Ask who is doing the work rather than who is selling it, and ask how many hours of their time the fee buys.

Audit or retainer?

A one-off audit suits a site with a specific suspected problem: traffic fell after a migration, a section will not index, a new template shipped and rankings moved. A retainer suits a site whose technical surface changes every sprint, because a single snapshot goes stale as soon as the next release lands.

Buying a retainer to solve a one-off problem is the most common overspend in this category, and buying a single audit for a site that ships weekly is the most common underspend. Decide which you are before you read a single quote, because the two are priced on completely different logic and comparing across them makes the range look absurd.

Questions people actually ask

How long should a technical SEO audit take?

For a small site, days. For a large ecommerce or multi-country site, several weeks, because the analysis depends on crawl and log data that takes time to gather and interpret. Be wary of a same-week turnaround on a complex site: it usually means a crawler ran and nobody read the output.

Do I need an audit if my rankings are fine?

Not urgently. Audits earn their money before a migration, after a traffic drop, or when a large part of the site is not being indexed. If nothing has changed and nothing has fallen, put the budget into content or links and audit annually instead.

Should the agency that does the audit also do the fixes?

Not necessarily, and there is a mild conflict of interest in letting the diagnostician quote for the treatment. Keep them as separate decisions. Many fixes belong with your own developers anyway, because they touch templates and infrastructure an agency cannot reach.

What should the deliverable actually contain?

A prioritised list of findings, each with the evidence behind it, the expected effect if fixed, the effort required and the role that owns the fix, plus the raw crawl and measurement data. Anything that cannot be assigned to an owner and a sprint is a note, not a finding.

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