An SEO audit is the most commonly mis-sold product in this industry — not because audits are bad, but because they are sold to people who need something else, at a price set by how thorough the document looks.
Here is what they cost, what should be in one, and the three situations where buying one is a mistake regardless of quality.
What they cost
Market range as I observe it in August 2026 from quotes clients bring me and published agency rates. My own price is on the pricing page.
The spread looks irrational until you see what is inside it. At the top end you are often paying for length: a fifty-page document, professionally formatted, covering everything a crawler can detect. At the bottom you are paying for someone to run a tool and export it.
Neither is the useful thing. The useful thing is someone who knows which three of the forty findings actually explain your problem, and can tell you the order.
In short: The last two rows are most of the value and most of the price difference. A finding nobody implements has changed nothing about your website.
What should be in one
Index coverage first, because a page Google has not stored cannot be fixed by anything else on the list. Then crawlability and redirects, including the chains that quietly waste authority. Then page speed and Core Web Vitals measured on real service and product pages — the homepage is usually the fastest page on any site and the least representative of what customers load.
Then structured data, the mobile experience as it actually behaves on a phone on mobile data, and internal linking, which is the most neglected item on every audit I inherit.
And then the part that technical audits routinely skip: do these pages target things people search for? A perfectly optimised page built around a phrase nobody types is a perfectly optimised page nobody will find. That is a content problem discovered by a technical process, and leaving it out because it is not strictly technical is how businesses end up with a clean bill of health and no traffic.
The three times not to buy one
When you already know what is wrong. If traffic fell the week you relaunched, you do not need £2,000 spent confirming that the relaunch did it. You need the redirects fixed. Diagnosis you already have is not worth buying twice.
When there is no budget left to act. An audit is a diagnosis, and a diagnosis with no treatment is an expensive way to feel informed. If the money stretches to either the report or the work, buy the work.
When the real problem is that no page exists. Plenty of businesses have a technically sound site that simply has nothing to rank — no page for the service, no answer to the question customers ask. An audit will report a healthy site and you will be no better off. What you needed was keyword research and some pages.
What mine is
£599, fixed, and the number does not move after I have looked. It covers a full technical audit — crawl, index coverage, redirects, structured data — Core Web Vitals measured on real pages, a prioritised fix list, and I implement the fixes myself rather than handing you a list of instructions for a developer you would have to brief and pay separately.
There is a follow-up check once Google has recrawled, so you know the fixes took, and you keep the audit file whether or not we work together again.
If it turns out an audit is not what you need, I will say so — that is the most common outcome of the first conversation, and it is why the free look comes before the invoice rather than after it. More on what SEO costs in general, and the full detail on technical work.
Common questions
How much does an SEO audit cost in the UK?
The wider market runs roughly £1,000 to £5,000, with agency audits at the top of that and freelancers lower. My own is £599 as a fixed price, which includes implementing the fixes rather than handing over a document. The spread is mostly explained by whether the audit ends with a report or with the problems actually gone.
Is a free SEO audit worth anything?
As a sales tool, occasionally. A free audit is almost always an automated crawl report with a call booked at the end, and automated crawlers are good at finding trivia and bad at finding causes. The one useful thing about them is that a genuinely alarming finding — mass noindex, a robots.txt block — will show up even in a bad report.
How long does an SEO audit take?
A few days of work for a normal small business site, spread over a week or two. Anyone offering one in an hour is running a tool. Anyone taking six weeks is writing a document for its own sake.
What should an SEO audit include?
Index coverage, crawlability, redirects and their chains, page speed measured on real pages rather than the homepage, structured data, the mobile experience, internal linking, and whether the pages target searches anyone performs. It should end with a prioritised list — first, second, third — not an undifferentiated list of everything wrong.
Do I need an SEO audit every year?
No. You need one when something changed or something is wrong: a redesign, a migration, a traffic drop, or a site that has never been checked. On a healthy site that is already being maintained, an annual full audit mostly re-discovers that things are fine.
Is an audit the same as SEO?
No, and conflating the two is the most expensive mistake in this area. An audit tells you what is wrong. It changes nothing on its own. A report bought without the budget or intention to act on it is the purest waste of money in this industry.