How Much to Charge for an SEO Audit

Ask ten SEOs what they charge for an audit and you will get ten numbers and, if you push, ten different definitions of "audit". That is the honest starting point: the price of an SEO audit is mostly the price of its scope, and the scope is whatever you and the client agree it is. The good news is that you do not need to guess at a market rate. There is some real data, there is a straightforward method, and the method matters more than the data.

This post does three things. It sets out what published pricing data actually says, and where it runs out. It gives you a scope-first way to price an audit that you can explain to a client in one sentence. And it points at the places where the hours, and therefore the price, can be brought down without cutting what the client gets.

What the published data says, and what it doesn't

Two data sets are worth knowing about. Both were read directly from the publishers' own pages in September 2026, and both come with caveats you should carry into any quote.

Credo's Digital Marketing Industry Pricing Survey. Credo is a US agency marketplace, and its survey is one of the few that asks providers what they charge rather than asking clients what they paid. The published results (last updated on the site in 2022 and 2023) draw on 507 respondents, 383 of whom sell SEO. The headline figures: SEO agencies worldwide reported an average of $134.14 an hour (from 320 agency respondents), SEO consultants $139.29, and 85.49% of SEO respondents charge somewhere between $50 and $200 an hour, with $100 to $200 the most common band at 57.26%. Half of SEO providers had a monthly retainer minimum under $3,000, and only 2% said they do not take one-off, non-retainer projects at all, which tells you that a standalone audit is a normal thing to sell.

The caveats are real. Around 62% of respondents were US-based and only about 8% were in the UK, so these are North American prices in dollars. The survey also skews established: fewer than 15% of consultant respondents had under five years' experience. Treat it as evidence about what experienced firms in expensive markets charge per hour, not as a UK price list.

YunoJuno's UK freelancer rates reports. YunoJuno is a UK freelancer management platform, and its rates reports are built from bookings that actually happened rather than from a questionnaire. The 2025 report analysed more than 261,000 contracts and put the all-discipline average day rate at £390 (about £49 an hour). The 2026 report, drawing on more than 182,000 data points across 2024 and 2025, gives Marketing and Communications an average day rate of £418, inside a discipline range of £385 to £566. Neither report breaks out SEO on its own, so this is the day rate of the wider marketing freelance market, which is the pool most SEO freelancers price against.

What does not exist is a published, methodologically described survey of UK SEO audit prices. Searching for one turns up dozens of agency blog posts offering ranges like "£500 to £7,500 depending on depth". Those are the agencies' own price menus dressed as market data, and a survey of one is a price list. They are useful as a check on whether your quote is wildly out of line, and useless as a justification for it. We have not quoted any of them here for that reason.

Price the scope, not the word "audit"

A client is not buying an audit. They are buying a set of deliverables, and the price is the hours those deliverables take multiplied by a rate you can defend. So start by writing the deliverables down. For most technical SEO audits the list looks something like this:

• A crawl and its configuration. Setting up the crawl properly, choosing what to include, deciding whether JavaScript rendering is needed, and running it. The fast part.
• Triage. Turning a few hundred or a few thousand raw findings into a prioritised list of the ones that matter for this site. The slow part, and the part clients cannot see, which is why it is so often under-priced.
• A Search Console and analytics read. Which pages actually earn impressions and clicks, which are indexed and which are not, and where the crawl findings intersect with real traffic.
• The write-up. A client-facing report with an executive summary, the prioritised issues in plain language, and fix steps. How to present an SEO audit to a client covers the structure; our audit report template shows a real one.
• The presentation. The call or meeting where the client hears it, plus the questions afterwards.
• A follow-up crawl. Re-crawling once fixes have shipped, to show which findings are genuinely gone. Cheap to do and frequently forgotten from the quote, then done for free.

Anything you would also include, such as a content review, a backlink profile review or a competitor comparison, is another line with its own hours. Anything you would not include, say so in the proposal, because "audit" means different things to different clients and the disagreement is cheaper to have before the invoice.

A worked example

The arithmetic is the whole method, so here it is with the assumptions stated. These are illustrative hours for a mid-sized site with no unusual complications, not a benchmark; substitute your own.

Assume a site of a couple of thousand pages, one language, no significant JavaScript rendering issues, and a client who wants a written report and a presentation but will do the implementation in-house.

A freelancer working at £50 an hour, which is close to YunoJuno's 2025 all-discipline hourly average, arrives at about £1,150 for those 23 hours. An agency with a blended rate of £100 an hour, which is the kind of figure you get when a senior person scopes and reviews and a mid-level person does the bulk of the work, arrives at about £2,300 for the same deliverables. Neither number is "the price of an SEO audit". They are the price of that scope at that rate, and either party could change the scope tomorrow.

Notice which lever is bigger. Doubling the rate doubled the price, but so would adding a second language with hreflang, a faceted-navigation catalogue that multiplies the crawl, or a rendering problem that means every template has to be checked twice. Scope moves the price at least as much as rate does, and it is the lever the client can see and agree to.

The three ways to charge, and when each fits

A fixed fee per audit, usually tiered by site size, is what most clients want and what most audits should be. The tiering is honest because page count is a genuine driver of hours: a 300-page brochure site and a 30,000-page shop are not the same job. State what each tier includes and what it does not.

Hourly fits badly with audits because the client wants certainty on a bounded piece of work and you are asking them to carry the risk of your estimate. Credo's data shows 48% of SEO providers offer hourly billing, but that is across all their work. Keep hourly for implementation, where scope genuinely cannot be pinned down in advance.

The audit as the front end of a retainer is the model many agencies actually run: a modestly priced audit that produces the prioritised list, and a monthly retainer to work through it. It is a good model provided the audit is priced as a real deliverable rather than given away in the hope of the retainer. If the client takes the report and walks, you should still have been paid for the report.

What pushes the price up or down

These are the questions to ask before you quote, in rough order of how much each one moves the hours.

• Page count. The single largest driver. Run a quick crawl before quoting; the first few hundred pages tell you the shape of the site.
• Whether implementation is included. An audit that ends at the report is a fraction of an audit that ends when the fixes ship.
• JavaScript rendering. A site that depends on client-side rendering needs the crawl run with rendering on and the differences checked, which roughly doubles the crawl and triage work.
• International setups. Multiple languages or countries mean hreflang, duplicate-content checks across locales and a report that is longer in proportion.
• Migrations and redesigns. An audit before or after a migration carries a redirect-mapping job inside it that can dwarf the rest.
• Reporting format. A branded PDF for the client's board and a Google Sheet for their developer are different amounts of work; agree which one, or both, up front.

Where the hours actually go, and where tooling changes the maths

Look back at the worked example. The crawl itself was two hours of twenty-three. Triage, the write-up and the re-crawl were sixteen. Those are the hours that decide whether a quote is competitive, and they are the hours where the tool you use makes a difference.

Triage shrinks when findings arrive prioritised rather than as a flat list. Crawl Cove's impact score weights each finding by the real Search Console impressions of the page it sits on, so the "fix these first" list falls out of the crawl instead of being built by hand across a Friday afternoon. The write-up shrinks when the report is generated from the audit data rather than assembled in a document: a white-label report with the client's logo and colours comes straight from the run. The re-crawl becomes a few minutes when the tool keeps versioned audit runs and marks each finding as new, fixed or still open, which also happens to be the strongest evidence you can put in front of a client that the work landed.

Tool cost belongs in the quote as well, and it is worth stating plainly. A flat monthly plan that covers every client site you audit is a known overhead you spread across the year's audits; a per-seat or per-crawl model is a cost that rises with the work. Crawl Cove's plans are flat and per plan rather than per user, which is the structure that suits agencies running several audits a month, and we have set out the argument for it on the agencies and freelancers pages. Whatever you use, put the number in the spreadsheet next to the hours, because a cheaper tool that adds four hours of triage to every audit is not the cheaper tool.

Mistakes that cost money

• Quoting before crawling. Ten minutes with a crawler before the proposal goes out prevents the most common bad surprise, which is discovering the "small" site has 40,000 URLs of filtered category pages.
• Pricing the crawl instead of the thinking. Clients can see the crawl and cannot see the triage, so the temptation is to price what they can see. Resist it; the triage is the product.
• Forgetting the follow-up. If proving the fix is not in the quote, it gets done unpaid or not at all, and not at all is how audit relationships go quiet.
• Copying a competitor's menu. Their price reflects their scope, their rate and their overheads, none of which you know. Yours should reflect yours.
• Under-scoping "free" audits. A free audit with no defined limit becomes a paid audit you did not invoice for. Fix the scope, name what the paid version adds, and treat the free one as marketing spend with a budget.

Wrap-up

There is no published market rate for an SEO audit, in the UK or anywhere else, and the ranges that claim to be one are price lists. What there is: reasonable hourly and day-rate data from Credo and YunoJuno to anchor your rate, a deliverables list that turns the word "audit" into hours, and a set of scope questions that move the price more than the rate does. Write the deliverables down, estimate the hours honestly, multiply, and then spend your effort on the hours that tooling can take out rather than on the rate the client will negotiate anyway.