Technical SEO audit services, compared on evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy a technical audit

1. Fix the scope in writing first. Crawlability, indexing, site speed, structured data, internal linking, redirects and mobile rendering are separate workstreams. Name the ones you are paying for, and name the templates or sections that are in scope, before any quote is comparable.
2. Ask what the deliverable actually is. A spreadsheet of crawler warnings is not an audit. Ask for a prioritised list of findings, each with the evidence behind it, the business impact and the specific fix, plus who is expected to implement it and roughly how long that takes.
3. Grant read-only access, never write access. Google's own hiring guidance tells site owners to grant read access to Search Console during an audit phase and to withhold write access at that stage. A provider that insists on more before it has delivered anything is asking you to trust it early.
4. Judge the audit, then decide on the retainer. Read the document against Google's published documentation. Recommendations that cite Search Central and explain why a fix matters are checkable; recommendations that cite only a third-party tool score are the tool talking, not the agency.

What a technical audit can and cannot tell you

A technical audit answers one question well: is anything about how this site is built stopping search engines reaching, understanding or fairly ranking its pages. That includes pages that cannot be crawled, duplicate URLs competing with each other, slow or unstable templates, broken redirect chains and markup that does not describe the page it sits on. Those are real defects with real fixes, and a good audit will show you the evidence for each one rather than asserting it.

What an audit cannot do is promise what happens after the fixes land. Google's own guidance is that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and that some changes take effect within hours while others take months. A provider that prices an audit against a promised position is selling something the search engine it claims to influence says cannot be sold. The honest version quantifies the defect and the exposure, then reports what moved.

Separating audit work from implementation

Many agencies sell the audit at or below cost because the implementation retainer is where the margin sits. That is not dishonest, but it changes the incentive: an audit written to justify a retainer looks different from one written to be handed to your own developers. Ask up front whether you may take the document elsewhere, and whether the findings are yours to keep.

The strongest signal in this index is an agency that publishes the shape of its audit before you enquire: the sections it covers, the tools it uses, a sample or redacted extract, and a price or price range. Agencies are listed here only on what can be verified from their own published pages, and a firm that will not describe its own deliverable in public is asking you to buy it blind.

Questions people actually ask

What should technical SEO audit services include?

At minimum: crawling and indexing, site architecture and internal linking, redirects and status codes, page speed and rendering on mobile, structured data, and a prioritised fix list with evidence and effort estimates. Anything narrower is a partial audit and should be priced as one.

How long does a technical audit take?

Scope decides it. A single-template brochure site is a different job from a large catalogue with faceted navigation. Ask for a stated turnaround in the proposal and for the reason behind it; a provider that cannot explain what drives the timeline has not sized the work.

Will fixing the audit findings improve my rankings?

Fixing genuine defects removes obstacles; it does not buy a position. Google states plainly that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and its starter guide notes some changes take effect in a few hours and others can take several months. Judge the work by whether the defects were real and are gone.

Should the same agency audit and implement?

It is efficient and it is also a conflict of interest, so make it explicit. Agree that the audit document is yours regardless of what you do next, then decide on implementation once you have read it.

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