How much does an SEO audit cost?

SEO audit pricing has a 500× range — from £29 self-serve to £15,000+ enterprise consultant engagements — because the deliverable, depth, and execution model all vary. Understanding what you're actually paying for is the difference between a useful audit and an expensive PDF that sits in Google Drive.

At the bottom of the market, self-serve audit tools (£0–£49) crawl your site, surface issues, and provide a prioritised report. The best of these match agency-tier diagnostic depth — AuditMySite checks 240+ signals against Google's published documentation, the same canonical sources agency consultants reference. The trade-off is that you act on the findings yourself, unless the tool also ships fixes.

Mid-tier consultant and agency audits (£750–£7,500) layer on bespoke commentary, prioritisation aligned to your business, and (sometimes) a kickoff session. The hidden cost is timeline: a 4–6 week turnaround means six weeks of compounding losses if the issue is a Core Web Vitals regression actively suppressing rankings. The diagnostic depth is rarely better than a good self-serve tool — what you're paying for is interpretation and accountability.

Enterprise audits (£8,000–£25,000+) typically bundle technical audit, content strategy, competitive analysis, and a quarterly retainer. They make sense for sites with 50,000+ URLs, multi-region operations, or regulated industries where the consultant's accountability is the deliverable. For sub-10,000-URL UK sites — including most law firms, accountants, and B2B SaaS companies — they are over-specified.

The right pricing tier is a function of two questions: (1) is the bottleneck identifying the issues, or fixing them? (2) what is the cost of waiting six weeks for an agency report? If the answer to (1) is 'fixing them' or the answer to (2) is 'material', a self-serve audit-plus-execution tool beats an agency audit on both diagnostic depth and time-to-fix.