SEO Costs · Part 6
What a website audit costs
A website audit can cost nothing, a few hundred dollars, or several thousand. All three prices are real, and they are for three different products that happen to share a name.
- Free: an automated scan, or a short human review offered as an introduction.
- A few hundred dollars: a written audit of a small site with instructions for fixing what was found.
- $1,500 to $5,000 and up: a full technical audit of a larger site. A 2026 GoodFirms survey of more than 300 agencies put full technical audits in that range as a project fee.
Before comparing prices, find out which of the three you are being offered. Most disappointment with audits comes from paying for one kind and receiving another.
Website audit free, SEO audit free: what the tools do
Type your address into a free audit tool and within a minute you have a score out of 100 and a list of warnings. Missing alt text. Title too long. No H1 on this page. Render-blocking scripts.
These tools are useful for what they are. They read the code of a page and compare it with a checklist. They are fast, and they catch real mechanical faults.
What they cannot do is tell you whether anything on the list matters. A scanner treats a missing image description and a blocked homepage as two items on the same list. It has no idea which pages earn you money, what your customers search for, or how your competitors compare. It will happily give 94 out of 100 to a site that no one can find. Tools support decisions; they do not make them.
Many free scans are also lead forms. The score is designed to look a little alarming, and a salesperson calls the next day.
Website audit pricing for a real audit
A real audit is a person reading your site with judgment. That costs their time, and the time depends on four things.
- Size. Twenty pages take an afternoon. Two thousand take a week.
- Depth. Does it cover only the pages, or also the server’s responses, the index, the business profile and the links pointing in?
- Competitors. Comparing you with the sites that outrank you roughly doubles the work.
- What you receive. A list of problems is cheaper to produce than a list of problems with the fix written out for each one.
For a small business site, a careful human audit usually falls between $250 and $1,500. ProVAE’s own prices sit in that band: the DIY SEO Audit runs $275 to $527 depending on site size, and the Strategic Consultant Audit, which adds competitors and a longer-range plan, runs $550 to $1,500.
Technical SEO audit cost, and when you need one
A technical audit looks under the pages at how the site is built and delivered: what the server answers, what is blocked from crawling, how redirects chain together, what Google has indexed against what you meant it to index.
These are the expensive ones, and most small sites do not need a large one. A fifteen-page site on ordinary hosting has a limited number of ways to be technically wrong. You need the deeper version when:
- The site has been rebuilt or moved and traffic dropped afterward.
- Pages you published months ago are still not in Google.
- The site was hacked, and you need to know what Google is still holding.
- There are hundreds or thousands of pages, or an online store.
What a website audit report should contain
Whatever you pay, a report worth having does five things.
- It names specific pages. Addresses, not categories.
- It ranks the findings. What to fix first, and what can wait forever.
- It shows its evidence. You should be able to check a finding yourself.
- It separates fact from opinion. “This page returns an error” is a fact. “This page should be longer” is a judgment, and should be labeled as one.
- It says what it did not look at. Every audit has limits. An honest one states them.
A report that is long, colorful and impossible to act on has failed, at any price. Forty pages of charts with no order of work is a brochure.
The SEO audit checklist problem
Search for an SEO audit checklist and you will find lists of eighty, a hundred, two hundred items. They are not wrong. They are unsorted. On a typical small site, five or six items account for nearly all the lost visibility, and the rest are polish.
The value of an audit is not the checking. Software checks. The value is the sorting: someone deciding that on this site, these three things are holding everything else back, and the other ninety can be ignored for now. If an audit hands you the whole checklist with every item marked urgent, the sorting was never done.
When free is genuinely enough
A free look is the right first step for almost everyone, provided you know what it is. It answers one question: is there a problem worth paying to understand?
ProVAE’s free product is deliberately narrow. It is an analysis, not an audit. It reports what Google can see and offers no fixes, because the fixes are the paid work. That is stated plainly so nobody mistakes one for the other.
Choosing between them
If you only want to know whether something is wrong, take the free look. If you want to fix it yourself, pay for a written audit with instructions; the DIY SEO Audit lists each fix for your site in working order. If you want someone else to do the work, the audit is their first step, and you should still ask to see it.
How often a site needs auditing
Less often than the people selling audits suggest. A small site that is not changing does not develop new faults by sitting still. One careful audit, acted on, can stay accurate for a long time.
The moments that justify a fresh look are events, not dates: a redesign, a move to a new platform or host, a sudden drop in calls, a batch of new pages, or a security incident. Outside those, a quarterly glance at Search Console will tell you whether anything has shifted. An audit sold as a monthly item is usually the same scan run again.
The starting point costs nothing. The Free Visibility Snapshot shows what Google sees on your site today, so you can decide whether a paid audit is worth it at all.
See what Google seesFree · the Free Visibility Snapshot™ · a narrow look at four signals, not an audit
Back: SEO Pricing Packages: What Is Actually in Them
Next: Is SEO Free? What You Can Do Without Paying Anyone
ProVAE is a local SEO company in Douglas, Georgia, serving South Georgia.