When I researched the term “seo audit services” for KOODOS, one of the agencies ranking for it charged £1,499 for an audit.1 Another offered one free. Several sold a report generated by a tool for under £100. All of them called it an SEO audit, and all of them meant something different by it.

So the useful question is not “how much does an SEO audit cost?” It is “what does this particular audit look at, and will I be able to make a decision from it?” This guide is the answer to the second question, with prices attached where they help.

The three things sold as an SEO audit

1. The tool report: free to about £100

Semrush, Ahrefs, Sitebulb and a dozen others will crawl your site and list what is technically wrong: missing titles, slow pages, broken links, duplicate content, thin pages. This is genuinely useful, and if a provider is charging you more than £100 for it, you are paying for their subscription. Its limitation is that it audits the site you have against a generic standard. It cannot tell you whether the site you have is the site your market needs.

2. The technical audit: £300 to £1,500

A person reads the tool report, checks it against the site, adds crawl budget, indexing, site speed, structured data and internal linking, and writes recommendations in priority order. Good ones are worth the money if the site is large or has a specific problem — an ecommerce site with 4,000 products, a site that lost rankings after a migration. For a small business site of twenty pages, most of what a technical audit finds could be fixed in an afternoon, and the audit costs more than the fixes.

3. The market audit: what most small businesses actually need

This starts from a different question. Not “what is wrong with the site?” but “what does the market search for, who is winning it, and what should the site be?” It includes the technical review, but ranks every fault against demand: a broken page that nobody searches for is not a priority; a missing page that 880 people a month search for is. This is what GroundWork is, at £250, and the reason it is priced below the technical audits is that it is scoped for a small business rather than an enterprise site.

What the fee should buy, whichever kind you choose

Regardless of price, an audit that is worth paying for hands you these:

  • A prioritised list — not everything that is wrong, but what to do first and why. If the report is forty pages with no ranking, you have been sent a tool export.
  • Target terms — one per page, with the volume and difficulty behind each. Without these you cannot tell whether the recommended work is aimed at anything.
  • Competitor evidence — who ranks for those terms and what their pages look like. The audit should show you the bar, not just your distance from it.
  • A protected list — the pages, URLs and links that are currently earning and must not be broken by whatever you do next.
  • A decision — fix, rebuild, or leave alone. An audit that ends without a recommendation has not finished.

If you want to see what that looks like on the page, there is a full sample Demand Map on this site. Read the summary and the action list; that is the part you are paying for.

Questions to ask before you pay

  1. “Does the audit look at search demand for my market, or only at my current site?” If only the site, it is a technical audit, and you should judge the price on that basis.
  2. “Will it name the terms each page should target?” If not, the recommendations have no measure.
  3. “Will I be able to give this to a web designer as a brief?” A good audit is the first half of a build plan. A bad one is a list of complaints.
  4. “What happens to the findings?” Some audits are a sales tool for a retainer. That is not wrong, but you should know.
  5. “How long does it take?” Three or four working days is reasonable for a small business site. Three weeks means you are in a queue.

The short version

A free tool report tells you what is broken. A £1,000 technical audit tells you what is broken in detail. A £250 market audit tells you what the site should be. For a small business deciding whether and how to redesign, the third is the one that answers the question, which is why it comes first in the research-before-redesign guide.

  1. Live Google UK results for “seo audit services”, desktop, 16 September 2026, as recorded in the KOODOS GroundWork research. ↩