SEO Audit Services: What I Check and What It Costs

I run SEO audit services for sites that stopped growing: rankings plateaued, organic traffic dropped, a migration went sideways. You get a prioritised action plan, not an 80-page PDF full of low-priority warnings nobody reads. SEO consultant since 2020, one rule that never changes: every finding is checked against your own Search Console data before it lands in the report. This page covers exactly what I check, what you receive, what it costs in US dollars, and how long it takes.

⚡ At a glance

• 🎯 Three formats: Mini Audit from $560, full audit around $2,240, custom quote for large sites.
• 📊 Tools actually used: Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs. No black box.
• ⏱️ Timeline: 4 to 7 days for a standard audit, several weeks for a large ecommerce site.
• 🧠 Scope: technical, content, backlinks, plus AI visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews.
• 💬 Deliverable: prioritised action plan and a walkthrough call.
• 💳 Payment: one-off, spreadable over several months.
• 🚫 No lock-in: the audit is yours, you can hand it to your own team or another agency.

🔬 What the audit covers

Four blocks, same method every time. Depth changes with the site, never the process.

Technical SEO audit service

Full crawl with Screaming Frog, cross-checked against Google Search Console: robots.txt and sitemaps, status codes, redirect chains, canonicals, index bloat, faceted URLs, pagination, internal linking depth, duplication, mobile rendering, structured data, and Core Web Vitals using Google's field data definitions. Most sites lose traffic to 5 to 15 technical issues, not 500. I rank them by traffic at stake first, effort to fix second, then hand your developer a list they can work through without asking me what it means.

Content audit

Heading structure, title and meta quality, search intent match, semantic coverage, keyword weighting, thin and orphaned pages, publishing cadence. A website SEO audit that skips cannibalisation misses the most common cause of flat rankings. Mapping every indexable URL to its target query exposes the pages competing against each other, and the ones that should be merged, rewritten or removed.

Backlinks audit

Ahrefs for the data: referring domains, anchor distribution, follow and nofollow patterns, monthly growth, lost links, and the gap against three to five competitors in your niche. I judge link quality in context, not on a generic authority score. A single DR 40 link from a relevant trade publication often outperforms fifty directory links, and the report says so plainly.

AI visibility audit

Now standard in every audit. I check whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews can read, extract and cite you: clean entities, passages that stand alone out of context, consistency between the site and your LinkedIn, G2 or Wikipedia footprint. AI engines cite pages they can pull clean sentences from, so this block is as much a writing audit as a technical one. ChatSEO, the AI SEO agent I co-founded, can then help your team rewrite those passages.

📦 The deliverable

One spreadsheet, one walkthrough, no filler:

• Every issue with URL, evidence, traffic at stake, effort, and priority.
• A "do this first" tab: the 10 to 15 fixes that move real traffic within 90 days.
• Annotated screenshots for anything ambiguous.
• A walkthrough call with your dev or content team, so every fix has an owner.

Every SEO audit service I sell stands alone: you can hand the file to your in-house team, a developer or another agency and never hire me again. No locked portal, no monthly licence to read your own data.

⏱️ Process and timeline

1. Access and kickoff: Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs, CMS access, server logs where they exist.
2. Data pull: full crawl, exports, Core Web Vitals field data, backlink profile, query-level performance.
3. Analysis: pillar by pillar, each finding priced in traffic, with a recommended fix.
4. Delivery: report, walkthrough call, priority order.

A standard audit takes 4 to 7 days from data access to delivery. Pillars run 2 days for technical, 1 day for content, 1 day for links. Large ecommerce sites with faceted navigation and tens of thousands of URLs need several weeks of full-time work, and you hear that before you pay, not after.

💰 Pricing

The full audit at about $2,240 costs less than buying the three pillars separately at $3,920, so a site that needs everything should not assemble it piece by piece. Payment is one-off per audit, and can be spread over several months. Prices are converted from my euro rates at the European Central Bank reference rate of 23 October 2026 (1 EUR = 1.1193 USD), with the scope confirmed in writing before work starts.

🎯 Who it is for and who should not buy it

A good fit:

• Sites with 50+ indexable pages and flat or declining organic traffic.
• Ecommerce stores with template, faceted URL or pagination problems.
• Sites after a redesign, a domain change or a CMS migration.
• In-house teams and agencies that need an outside diagnosis and a priority order.
• Founders who want a number, a deadline and no retainer.

Not a fit:

• Sites under 20 pages: run the basics yourself, a paid audit is overkill.
• Anyone shopping for a $50 automated report: that is a crawler export, not an audit.
• Teams that want the fixes done for them: the audit scopes the work, it does not execute it.
• Sites under a manual action who need recovery work, which is a different project with a different scope.

I would rather lose the sale than sell a $2,240 audit to a five-page site. If a mini audit covers it, I say so.

⚖️ How it compares with a free tool audit

Free crawlers give you data. They do not give you diagnosis. A free crawl tells you a page is slow; an audit tells you which slow template costs you traffic on your money pages, and fixes that one first. Most SEO website audit services stop at the export, ranking 400 issues by severity score rather than by money at stake.

Three things no free tool shows you:

• Search Console query data mapped to pages, including cannibalisation and intent mismatch.
• Backlink quality judged against your actual competitors, not an abstract score.
• AI visibility: whether assistants quote you or your competitor when someone asks.

A website audit service that only runs a crawler will miss the content and link causes behind your traffic drop. If you are technical, have a small site and want to learn, run the free crawl yourself: the Screaming Frog user guide is enough, and my lists of the best free SEO tools and best technical SEO tools cover the rest. Hire me when the trade-off between a 300-hour fix list and a 90-day business plan is worth $2,240. Usually it is.

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