Technical SEO companies, compared on what they publish

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a technical SEO company

1. Decide whether you need an audit or an engagement. An audit is a diagnostic document and ends when it is delivered. An engagement means someone works with your developers over months to get the findings shipped. Buying the first when you needed the second is the most common waste in this category, because a report nobody implements changes nothing at all.
2. Ask who implements, and against whose roadmap. Establish whether the firm writes tickets, reviews pull requests, or hands over a document and hopes. Then check with your own engineering leads how much roadmap capacity actually exists. A recommendation requiring six weeks of development time you do not have is not a recommendation, it is a wish.
3. Test them on a specific problem you already have. Describe a real issue on your site, faceted navigation, a rendering problem, a migration you are planning, and ask how they would approach it. Genuine practitioners answer with specific mechanisms and trade offs. Generalists answer with a process diagram and a promise to run an audit first.
4. Filter on the disclosed minimum engagement. Ask every candidate in writing for the smallest engagement they will accept and the minimum term. It removes more names from a shortlist than any other question and takes one email to answer. Treat published starting prices as floors for the narrowest scope rather than as forecasts.

What the work actually covers

Crawling and indexing control, meaning which URLs a search engine is allowed to fetch and which should appear in results, which is where faceted navigation, parameters and pagination decisions live. Rendering, since a site whose content arrives via JavaScript can be seen very differently by a crawler than by a person. Site architecture and internal linking. Structured data. Performance, where Google's Core Web Vitals documentation sets out the field measurements used to describe loading, responsiveness and visual stability. International and multi language configuration. And migrations, which is the highest stakes work in the discipline because a botched one can remove a business's visibility in a weekend.

Google's own robots.txt documentation is a useful test of a candidate: ask them to explain the difference between preventing a page being crawled and preventing it appearing in results. Confusing the two is the most common serious error in this field, and a practitioner will explain the distinction without being prompted.

What we record about each firm

Our index records what each firm states publicly on its own website, with the date we checked it, rather than what a badge or an award page claims: published starting prices where they exist, disclosed minimum engagements, named clients and stated service lines. Where a firm publishes nothing, we record the absence rather than filling it with an estimate, because an invented figure is worse than a blank.

In this category the publishing habit splits by buyer. Firms selling audits to mid sized companies publish a starting price relatively often, because price is how an audit competes. Firms selling ongoing engagements to enterprises publish nothing and scope in a call. Neither predicts quality; published pricing simply makes a shortlist cheaper to build, which is why it is the first column here.

What moves the price

Site size and complexity, since a catalogue of hundreds of thousands of URLs is a different problem from a fifty page site. Whether implementation support is included or the deliverable ends at the document. Whether a migration is in scope, which carries risk and therefore price. Access to senior people, which is where the largest real difference between quotes usually sits, because this specialism depends heavily on individual experience. And reporting depth, including whether log file analysis is included.

Compare on an identical written scope. Send the same brief to every candidate and ask them to price it, then ask which named person will do the work and how much of their week you get. A firm charging a premium for senior attention should be able to answer that in one sentence. Where the answer is a coordinator relaying work to contractors, the premium is buying a brand rather than a practitioner.

Questions people actually ask

How often does a site need a technical audit?

Less often than vendors suggest for a stable site, and immediately before and after any migration, replatform or major redesign. Ongoing monitoring for regressions is usually more valuable than a repeated full audit, because most technical damage arrives from a deployment rather than accumulating slowly.

Can our developers just do this?

They can implement it, and they should. What they usually lack is knowing which of a hundred possible issues actually affects results and in what order, which is the judgement you are buying. The best arrangement is a specialist producing prioritised, specific tickets that your own team ships.

What should a technical audit deliver?

A prioritised list of specific issues with the evidence for each, the expected impact, and enough implementation detail for a developer to act without a follow up call. A document listing crawler warnings without priority or reasoning is a tool export with a cover page, and you can generate that yourself.

Is technical work worth it if our content is weak?

Technical work removes obstacles; it does not create demand. If nothing on the site answers what people search for, fixing crawling will not produce visitors. The exception is a site with genuinely good content that is being blocked, misrendered or wrecked by a migration, where technical work alone can produce large recoveries.

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