Ask three providers what an SEO audit costs and you'll get three answers a long way apart. That's not because someone is overcharging. "SEO audit" covers everything from an automated check that takes a minute to a month of specialist analysis on a site with a million pages. The useful question isn't "what does an audit cost?" but "what do I need, and what should that cost?"
Here's how the market breaks down in the UK, what drives the price, and how to judge a quote.
The short answer
As a rough guide, and these are ranges rather than a price list:
| Type of audit | Typical UK cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Automated scan (free tools) | Free | A first look, or a quick check after changes |
| SEO tool subscription (do it yourself) | Tens of pounds a month and up | Someone with the time and skills to interpret raw data |
| Freelance audit, small site | Roughly £300 to £1,500 | Small business sites up to a few dozen pages |
| Agency audit, small to medium site | Roughly £1,000 to £5,000 | Larger sites, or when you need a plan and help delivering it |
| Specialist audit (large, e-commerce, migration) | £5,000 and up | Thousands of pages, complex platforms, pre-migration checks |
Where a quote falls within those ranges depends mostly on the factors below.
What drives the price
Size and complexity of the site. A 20-page brochure site and a 20,000-product shop are different jobs. More page templates, more languages, faceted navigation and JavaScript frameworks all add analysis time.
Depth of the audit. A technical-only audit (crawling, indexing, speed, structured data) is quicker than one that also covers content quality, backlinks, competitors and keyword gaps. Check which you're being quoted for.
Access to your data. An auditor with access to your Google Search Console and Analytics can tell you which problems are actually costing you traffic, not just which ones exist. That's worth paying for, and it takes more time.
Manual review versus tools. Most audits start with the same crawling tools. The difference in price is largely the hours a person spends interpreting the output, prioritising it and writing it up in a way you can act on.
Whether it includes a plan, or help doing the work. Some quotes are for a report. Others include a prioritised roadmap, a walkthrough call, or implementation support. The last of those is where the price climbs fastest, and where it's often most worth it.
What you get at each level
Free automated scans check the things a machine can check reliably: missing titles and descriptions, broken links, speed metrics, missing structured data, blocked crawlers, security basics. They're genuinely useful as a first look and for checking changes landed. What they can't do is know your business: which pages matter most, or which of twenty findings is worth your Tuesday afternoon. The better ones rank findings by impact and effort to narrow that gap.
Tool subscriptions give you the raw material of a professional audit (site-wide crawls, keyword and backlink data) for a monthly fee. Excellent value if you or someone on your team knows how to read them. Poor value if the reports sit unopened.
Freelance and agency audits add judgement: someone who looks at your site in the context of your business, your competitors and your goals, and tells you what to do first. For most small businesses a freelance audit of the pages that matter is enough. Agencies make sense when there's a lot of site, a lot at stake, or you want the same team to deliver the fixes.
Specialist audits are for sites where a mistake is expensive: large e-commerce catalogues, international sites, and anything about to be migrated to a new platform or domain. See our website migration SEO checklist for why migrations in particular justify the cost.
How to judge a quote
Whatever you're quoted, ask for an example report first. Then check it against these questions:
- Does it say what to do first? A good audit prioritises. A bad one lists 200 issues and marks them all "critical".
- Is every finding specific? It should name the page, the value and the fix, not "improve your page speed".
- Does each fix have an owner and effort estimate? You need to know whether it's a five-minute job for you or a week for a developer.
- Does it explain how you'll know it worked? Verification is what turns an audit into results.
- Is it written for you? If you can't understand it, you can't act on it, whatever it cost.
Our SEO audit report template shows the structure worth asking for, and you can compare any quote against our published sample report.
Red flags
- Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee is a sales tactic.
- A score with no explanation. "Your site scored 62" tells you nothing about what to do next.
- Everything is urgent. If every finding is high priority, nothing has been prioritised.
- A long report with no roadmap. Length isn't value. The first page should tell you what to do.
- Pressure to buy a retainer before you've seen the audit. The audit should stand on its own.
Start free, then decide
The sensible order for most small businesses: run a free automated check first, fix the obvious issues it finds, and only then decide whether you need someone to go deeper. You'll get more from a paid audit if the basics are already sorted, and you'll know better what to ask for.
A free AuditCrow scan checks one page across SEO, speed, accessibility, trust and AI readiness and ranks what it finds by impact and effort, in plain English. Our guide to how to audit a website covers the manual version, step by step.