How much does a SEO audit cost?

Most SEO pricing guides sort audits by website size or agency type. The common brackets look like this:

0 to 500 dollars for automated scans
500 to 2,500 dollars for basic technical checks
5,000 to 20,000 dollars for strategic audits
5,000 to 30,000+ dollars for complex enterprise systems
*all prices in USD

These prices show what you pay but not what you receive. At the end of 2025, the real differentiator is ease of implementation. A one-thousand-dollar audit that gets turned into real tasks can outperform a five-thousand-dollar audit that stays in a PDF.

Below is a more helpful way to understand SEO audit pricing based on utility, friction, and ability to execute.

The sales artifact SEO audit

Market rate: Free to 500 dollars

These audits exist to generate leads. They appear serious, but are usually surface-level automated scans.

What you receive:
• A long list of Critical Errors
• Generic recommendations
• Frequent false positives

Who it helps:
People who want raw data.

Who does it not help:
Businesses that need clarity or strategy.

We discourage our clients from engaging in those kinds of audits, as the information is often poor or not mapped to ROI-positive outcomes. A site can have many significant technical issues without search engines taking action against it.

The punch list SEO audit

Market rate: 500 to 2,500 dollars

This is the standard audit. It identifies what is broken, not how to win.

What you receive:
Fixes for 404s, image weight, metadata cleanup, redirect adjustments, and fundamental performance issues.

What is missing:
• Prioritization
• Revenue impact modeling
• Competitive insights
• Architecture planning

In our experience, this level of audit can help provide a sense of the kinds of issues that may exist on a website before making a larger commitment. Unfortunately, it is easy to have inflated expectations that significant issues can be solved quickly or for a small cost. We see too many businesses come to us after experiencing this level of audit, getting no return on investment out of the implementation, and feeling discouraged or misguided. A light audit can reveal surface-level problems, but it cannot diagnose the deeper structural or strategic issues that actually drive ranking and revenue. When the findings are shallow, the fixes are shallow, and the impact is equally shallow. This often leaves teams believing that SEO "does not work," when in reality, they simply never received the level of analysis required to drive meaningful change.

The forensic SEO audit

Market rate: 5,000 to 20,000 dollars

Choose this when something is wrong, and the financial impact is real.

Typical scenarios:
• Traffic loss after a migration
• Drops after a Core Update
• JavaScript rendering issues
• Conversion path collapse

What you receive:
• Log file analysis
• Render diagnostics
• Historical comparisons
• Internal link graph modeling
• Recovery scenarios

The value:
Even partial recovery often covers the entire audit cost.

In our work with clients, the forensic tier is almost always the stage that unlocks the truth about why a site is underperforming. When teams come to us after a migration, a redesign, or a Core Update drop, the priority is identifying the specific factors that caused the decline. We often uncover issues that lighter audits never detected, such as rendering failures that hide key content, redirect chains introduced during platform changes, or internal link paths that collapse after structural updates.

The outcome of this audit is clarity. It establishes what went wrong, what must be corrected, and which fixes will stabilize performance before any growth work can begin. While the most meaningful wins come from the next tier, the forensic audit is the turning point that transforms confusion into a grounded recovery plan and sets the foundation for long-term improvement.

The growth roadmap SEO audit

Market rate: 5,000 to 30,000+ dollars

This audit focuses on growth and execution readiness.

What you receive:
• Competitive content map
• Topic clusters and entities
• Developer specs as user stories
• Writer ready content briefs
• Prioritization frameworks
• A six-to twelve-month roadmap

Important note:
You must have marketers, writers, designers, and developers to unlock the value.

This is the tier where we consistently see the most significant and most durable gains for clients. Once the technical groundwork is stable, the growth audit becomes the engine that translates opportunity into predictable results. Many organizations wait until something breaks before investing at this level, even though it is common for a business to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in value per month from organic search. That level of recurring revenue is a true asset, yet it is rarely managed with the same intention, protection, or stewardship as other high-value assets within the business.

Our work at this stage focuses on mapping content to product value, building an information architecture that strengthens long-term discoverability, and providing writers and developers with the specifications needed to produce consistent outcomes. The shift is immediate. Teams move from reacting to fires to operating from a clear, prioritized roadmap that expands visibility month after month. Brands often unlock new categories, rebuild authority they did not realize they had lost, and create content systems that continue compounding well after the audit is complete. This tier does more than improve performance. It reshapes how an organization grows through search and treats organic visibility as the valuable, revenue-producing asset it truly is.

AI now plays a meaningful role in scaling the execution layer, but it cannot replace the strategic foundation required for this level of audit. Large models can accelerate tasks such as content brief generation, internal linking suggestions, pattern detection, and technical ticket drafting, but they cannot (we are trying) fully absorb a business's context, product priorities, or competitive landscape without human direction. When the strategy is clear, AI becomes a force multiplier, enabling teams to deliver in weeks what used to take months. When the strategy is missing, AI only accelerates the production of work that lacks impact.

The real pricing driver in 2025 and beyond: integration cost

Two audits may cost the same but deliver very different results. The difference is in the friction and how ready the recommendations are for implementation.

How eHook fits into this through owned media

At this point, the audit stops being a one-time technical report and becomes part of a long-term owned media system. This is where eHook’s model strengthens the outcome.

What this changes:
• Technical recommendations are tied to content opportunities
• Topic clusters align with product value and user intent
• Engineering tickets support long-term architecture
• Content briefs become part of a compounding information ecosystem

This shifts the audit from a one-off diagnostic to the foundation of durable search equity.

The litmus test for any SEO proposal

Ask this single question:

Will your final deliverable include a prioritized Impact and Effort matrix, and will you join a handover call with my developers to explain the technical items?

If the answer is Yes, the audit is strategic.
If the answer is No, the audit is a commodity.

SEO audits should accelerate execution, not sit unused.

A low-cost audit with high friction becomes expensive when internal time is added. A high-cost audit with low friction becomes an efficient multiplier for your team.

Choose the audit that moves your business forward, not the one that lists what is wrong.