How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost? [In 2023]

Written By

Nick Zviadadze

Nick Zviadadze

Founder at MintSEO

Contents

An SEO audit is a process of analyzing a website’s existing SEO performance and figuring out ways to improve the site’s rankings.

The price of an SEO audit can vary significantly depending on the type of audit, the scope of the audit, and the size of the website.

Want to learn how much it’ll cost you to audit your website’s SEO?

Read on!

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

  • How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?
  • What Does an SEO Audit Cover – 3 Types of Audits
  • What Tools do You Need to do an SEO Audit?

And more! Let’s dive right in.

How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?

The price of an SEO audit can be anything from $500 to $15,000, depending on several factors.

For example, if you’re a local business with a simple website of fewer than ten pages, the price is going to be on the lower end – anything from $500 to $1,000.

If, on the other hand, you own a large website with thousands of pages and a LOT of SEO work to be done, then it’s very likely that the pricing will range from $2,000 to $15,000 and beyond.

What Determines the Price of an SEO Audit?

There are a ton of things that determine the price of an SEO audit, but the most important factors are as follows:

  • Size of your website. The bigger your website, the more an SEO audit will cost. This is, arguably, the biggest pricing factor for an SEO audit. Analyzing the SEO performance of a website with 1,000+ pages is going to be significantly more costly than analyzing a website with ten pages.
  • Scope of the audit. Is the SEO agency only going to audit ten of your landing pages, or 100?
  • Type of audit. There are different types of SEO audit you can purchase, including technical SEO audit, content audit, and backlink audit. Each of these services has a different price range.
  • Agency pricing. Every agency has its pricing structure. If you’re looking to work with a high-profile agency, the pricing is most probably going to be higher.
  • Turnaround time. If you need your SEO audit delivered ASAP, that’s likely going to cost extra. Usually, an SEO audit can take anything from two weeks to two months (and maybe even more, if your website is very large).
  • Audit implementation. Does the agency also implement the changes recommended by the audit? If so, the pricing of the SEO audit service might be significantly higher.

SEO Audit Pricing Ranges in 2023

The ballpark prices for an SEO audit in 2023 are as follows:

  • $500 – $1,000. The scope of the audit is limited and your website is relatively small (up to 20 pages).
  • $1,000 – $3,000. Your business targets several locations, your website size is medium (20-50 pages, more or less), and the scope of the audit includes several different audit types.
  • $3,000 – $6,000. Your business targets a dozen plus locations (or is an e-commerce site, SaaS, or any other type of online business), your website has 100-200 pages, and the scope of the audit is comprehensive (backlink audit, on-page audit, content audit, etc.).
  • $6,000 – $10,000. Your website has hundreds of pages, it’s your primary business driver, you get a lot of traffic from organic search, and the scope of the audit is very comprehensive.
  • $10,000 and beyond. An SEO audit can cost $10,000 or beyond in very specific cases – primarily when the scope of the audit is very comprehensive, the website is very large, or you’re looking to solve a complicated SEO problem.

What is an SEO Audit, Exactly?

An SEO audit is a routine review of your website’s SEO performance.

If you’re not seeing much improvement in your Google rankings, then an SEO audit can determine the cause and help you get unstuck.

While there are different types of SEO audits (which we’ll cover below), an SEO audit is generally about:

  • Reviewing (and improving) your website’s technical performance in terms of loading speed, mobile-friendliness, etc.
  • Analyzing whether your website’s content is based on SEO best practices to understand if there’s anything that can be improved.
  • Solving specific business problems. For example, why is your website not ranking for a certain set of keywords?
  • Reviewing your website’s SEO rankings and comparing it to your competitors (as well as figuring out how to improve your standing).

What Does an SEO Audit Include?

Depending on the specifics of your situation, an SEO audit can include several different types of services.

The three primary SEO audit types are as follows:

#1. Technical Audit

A technical SEO audit is a process of analyzing your website’s technical performance. It involves answering questions like:

  • Is your website as fast as it can be?
  • Are there opportunities to speed up your website using caching, image compression, or other techniques?
  • Is your website mobile-friendly?
  • Are there any technical roadblocks that prevent your website from ranking on Google?

A typical technical SEO audit involves doing the following:

  • Ensuring the website meets Google’s core web vital standards.
  • Making sure that your website is mobile-friendly (as Google does mobile-first indexing)
  • Looking for (and fixing) missing page issues. 404s, redirects, etc, both for internal and external links.
  • Getting rid of duplicate or thin content and eliminating cases of keyword cannibalization.
  • Ensuring that your website follows a clean URL structure.
  • Adding structured data/markup to your site’s content.
  • Making sure that your website has a robots.txt and a sitemap.
  • Blocking crawlers from visiting your staging pages (this one’s extra-important for SaaS technical SEO).

#2. Content Audit

A content audit, as the name implies, is an audit of your website’s contents.

This includes both blog content and your landing pages.

The typical SEO content audit involves doing the following:

  • Taking all your website’s contents and mapping them on a Google Sheet.
  • Making sure that your content follows Google’s best practices. This means having the keyword in the H1 header, in an H2 header, throughout the body text, using lots of internal links, having several external links, and so on.
  • Determining whether your blog content meets the search intent behind the keyword that it’s targeting.
  • Creating an action plan for improving your content. This might involve removing articles, rewriting them, merging several articles into one, and more.

#3. Backlink Audit

A backlink audit is the audit of your website’s (or your competitors’) backlink profile. The goal of such an audit is to understand the quantity/quality of your backlinks, compare it to your competitors, and create an action plan to breach the gap.

Typically, a backlink audit involves doing the following:

  • Extracting all your backlinks to a Google Sheet via Ahrefs or SEMrush.
  • Excluding all scraper or bot links from the backlink sheet.
  • Analyzing the existing backlinks and looking for potential signs of a black hat backlink attack.
  • Extracting your competitor’s backlinks and getting an understanding of what strategies they’re using to build backlinks.
  • Creating a link-building strategy that’s going to help you build as many (or even more) backlinks as your competitors.

What Type of SEO Audit Should You Buy?

Naturally, your next question is probably what type of SEO audit YOU should buy.

The answer depends on your current business needs, but here’s a general frame of reference:

  • Are you a small business that needs a regular SEO health check-up? Then you should go for a mixture of technical and content audits.
  • Is your website’s health OK, but certain pages aren’t ranking no matter what you do? Go for a content and backlink audit.
  • Is your website loading too slowly or underperforming on mobile? You should go for a technical audit.
  • Are you looking to get a comprehensive, 360° view of your website’s SEO performance? You’d want to get all 3 types of audits.

How Long Does an SEO Audit Take?

This primarily depends on how many pages your website has but, on average, an SEO audit can take anywhere from two weeks to two months, and potentially even more.

For the average small business, you’d be looking at the lower end of this range, while as a large website with thousands of pages, an SEO audit can stretch for way longer.

What Tools Do You Need to Do an SEO Audit?

You wouldn’t check up on your car yourself, right? You’d take it to a professional mechanic.

The same goes for an SEO audit – while it’s something you can technically try doing yourself, it’s better to hire an SEO pro to do it.

That said, the tools that you’d typically use to perform an SEO audit are as follows:

  • Ahrefs or SEMrush. Both of these SEO suites help you with all three types of SEO audits. You can check up on your website’s technical health, audit your backlink profile, and even get improvement ideas for your content.
  • ScreamingFrog. A must-have tool for a technical SEO audit. This tool crawls your entire website and pinpoints errors.
  • Google Search Console. GSC is the best tool for finding your existing Google rankings and understanding which of your pages are performing well and which ones need an overhaul.
  • Google Analytics. GA is primarily used for auditing your website’s conversions. You can use it to find which of your pages or blog posts are driving revenue and which ones need conversion optimization. You can also use GA to understand what happens to your users after they land on your site – do they visit additional pages or do they just drop off?
  • SurferSEO. Surfer is a great tool for auditing your website’s contents. You can use it to do a gap analysis between your content and your competitors’ content and understand where it’s lacking.

What’s the Difference Between SEO Audit Services and SEO Audit Tools?

Chances are, you’ve already stumbled across the free SEO audit tools that give you a general health checkup of your website.

HubSpot’s Website Grader is one example of this:

website grade screenshot

You input your website and it gives you a general idea of where it stands in terms of SEO.

Now, you might be wondering – is a free SEO audit tool the same thing as an actual SEO audit service?

The answer is no, they’re actually two completely different things. Here’s how the two differ:

  • A free SEO audit tool gives you a very general SEO health checkup. It tells you if your website is missing meta text for images, for example, or if it takes too long to load.
  • An SEO audit service is significantly more actionable and comprehensive. In addition to giving you the basic info (e.g. missing alt text, load speed issues), an audit also pinpoints the cause of specific errors and how to fix them.

While a free SEO audit tool is good to get a very surface-level review of your website’s SEO, if you’re looking for an actionable plan to improve your rankings, then you need to go for a comprehensive SEO audit.

Feeling Lost With Your SEO? Try Out SEO Audit Services

Looking for a trusted partner to help audit your website’s SEO?

We’ve got your back!

At MintSEO, we’ve audited dozens of websites in all sorts of industries, including SaaS, E-commerce, small-to-medium local businesses, and more!

Click here to reach out for a free SEO consultation call.

Or read our case studies:

FAQ

And that about sums up everything you need to know about the pricing of an SEO audit!

Below, we’ll cover some popular FAQs on the topic, starting with:

#1. Do SEO Services Include Audits?

Yes! Every SEO service usually starts with an SEO audit. Before an SEO agency can implement improvements to your website, they need to first find existing problems and what they need to improve.

As such, if you’re looking to buy SEO services, the agency is usually going to start with:

  • Technical SEO audit
  • Content audit
  • Backlink audit

#2. Is an SEO Audit Worth It?

Yes, an SEO audit is almost always worth it.

If you’re a small business owner looking to improve your rankings, an SEO audit can be your guiding north star.

Even if you’re a seasoned SEO professional, an SEO audit can help you get an outside perspective of your work. Oftentimes, an outside audit will uncover things that even the best SEOs overlooked.

#3. How Often Should You Get an SEO Audit?

You should get an SEO audit whenever you feel like you need it. 

Some common cases where you’d need an SEO audit are:

  • You don’t know much about SEO and need an expert to give you a helping hand.
  • You’re stuck with your SEO – you’re not making any progress, despite doing everything right.
  • You’ve actively been working on your SEO, but think that there’s still room for improvement. In such a case, an outside perspective can help you find some mistakes you’ve missed.
  • It’s been over a year since your last SEO audit and you want an outside company to check whether you’ve been doing everything right.
  • There have been major fluctuations in your website’s rankings and you lost your rankings. You need someone to analyze your website and pinpoint the potential reason for this.

Nick Zviadadze

Nick Zviadadze

Founder at MintSEO
Need a Hand with Your SEO?
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