What an SEO Audit Actually Costs
My own one-off audits run $450 to $1,500, published on my SEO audit page. That is one data point, not a market average, and almost nobody selling audits to stores puts a number on the page at all. The pages that do talk about price mostly price a generic business, not a store, and none of them tells you the one thing that actually decides whether a given quote is fair: what you get for the extra money.
That is what this post answers. Not a range, which you can get from any search result, but the three things that actually move the price. One of them is a visible tell you can check on a sample report before you pay anyone.
On this page
- How much does an SEO audit cost?
- The three ways audits get priced, and what each one rewards
- What actually separates a cheap audit from an expensive one?
- The tell that nobody read the report before sending it
- Does the price include account access?
- Am I being overcharged?
- Does the fee count toward anything if I hire the auditor after?
- Who should not buy an audit yet
How much does an SEO audit cost?
For a store, a real one-off audit runs from a few hundred dollars for a crawl-only scan up to a few thousand for a full account audit that adds paid media and competitors. My own three tiers: SURFACE at $450 (crawl, on-page, Core Web Vitals, backlinks, no account access needed), CORE at $700 (SURFACE plus your own Search Console and Analytics, with a walkthrough call), and SPECTRUM at $1,500 (CORE plus Google Ads, Meta and three competitor teardowns). All three are on the audit page, and the full retainer pricing above them is on pricing.
I publish these because almost nobody in this market does. A quote with no number attached until after a sales call is not automatically a scam, but it removes your ability to compare before you spend an hour on the phone.
The three ways audits get priced, and what each one rewards
Three models, and each one pays the person doing the work for a different behavior.
| Model | What it rewards | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Flat fee per audit | Finishing and shipping a report. The incentive is speed and a fixed scope. | Ask what happens if your site is bigger or messier than the scope assumed. A good flat fee has a stated page limit, like mine, rather than a surprise change order. |
| Hourly | Depth, in theory. Good when the scope is genuinely unknown, like a first look at an account nobody has touched in years. | No ceiling unless you set one. Ask for an estimate in hours before work starts, and a check-in if it runs over. |
| Bundled into a retainer | Getting hired. The audit becomes the sales document for the real engagement. | Read the audit on its own merits. A free audit is a fair way to see where you stand, as long as its findings hold up without you hiring anybody. |
I use the first model because it is the easiest for a store owner to evaluate cold: you know the number and the scope before you pick up the phone.
What actually separates a cheap audit from an expensive one?
Account access, not page count, is the real boundary for most stores. A Shopify store with 300 products and a store with 3,000 usually share the same handful of page templates, so the crawl work is similar. What changes the price is whether the person doing the audit is working from what is publicly visible, or from inside your actual Search Console and Analytics.
A crawl-only audit can tell you your titles are duplicated and your Core Web Vitals are weak. It cannot tell you that your top landing page dropped 40% of its organic clicks last quarter, because that fact only exists inside your own account. That is the entire reason CORE costs more than SURFACE on my pricing, and it is the question worth asking anyone quoting you: is this read from outside, or read from inside my own data?
The tell that nobody read the report before sending it
Open the sample report before you pay. Every audit worth having is built on software, including mine: a crawler, a rank tracker and a backlink index do the measuring, and that is the correct way to measure. What the fee buys is what happens after the measuring. If the findings arrive in whatever order the software produced them, if nothing says which to fix first, and if no finding shows the evidence it came from, then the second half was never done. The data is fine. The report was never written.
A second version of the same tell: ask what was prioritized and why. A report worth paying for ranks findings by what is worth fixing first for your business, and shows the evidence behind each one. An unranked list of everything the software found is the raw material, not the audit.
Does the price include account access?
Sometimes, and it is worth asking directly, because it is the single biggest lever on both price and usefulness. An audit built only from what is publicly crawlable can check your pages, your markup and your backlinks. It cannot see your actual Search Console queries, your actual Analytics conversions, or whether your purchase tracking even works, because none of that is visible from outside your account.
Google’s own guidance on deciding whether to hire an SEO is written for exactly this moment, before you grant anyone access to anything. It is worth reading once, because it is also where the next section’s warning comes from.
Am I being overcharged?
You are probably being overcharged if the price is attached to a promise nobody can keep, not if the number is simply high. Google’s own page on hiring an SEO says it plainly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” A quote that comes with a ranking guarantee is not a generous one. It is a quote from someone who does not expect you to check.
- A ranking or traffic guarantee. See above. No legitimate auditor offers one.
- No request for account access, on a quote priced like it includes it. If the price matches a full account audit but nobody has asked for Search Console or Analytics access, check what you are actually paying for.
- A report that is only a list, with nothing marked as first. Prioritization is most of the value. A list in software order is not a plan.
- A sales call before a scope. If you cannot get a page limit and a price without booking a call first, you cannot compare the quote to anyone else’s.
Does the fee count toward anything if I hire the auditor after?
On mine, yes: the audit fee is credited in full against your first month if you start a retainer within 30 days of the report. If you do not start one, you keep the report and owe nothing further. That policy is on the audit page, and it is a fair question to ask anyone else quoting you, because the answer tells you whether the audit is a genuine deliverable or a foot in the door you pay for either way.
Who should not buy an audit yet
A few situations where I would tell you to wait, and where this is likely true of any audit, not just mine.
- Your purchase tracking is broken. An audit of rankings and pages is wasted if you cannot later tell whether anything it recommended moved revenue. Fix tracking first; it is the first thing CORE and SPECTRUM check anyway.
- You are about to replatform. Paying to audit a theme you are about to leave is money spent twice. Migrate first, then audit the new site.
- Your catalog is brand new. A new product line has no search history to diagnose yet. Let it run for a few months before spending on an audit of it.
- You want this done inside a quarter. An audit produces a list of fixes, not a result. For how long the fixes themselves take to show up, see how long SEO takes to work.
If you are in one of those four, you can still see where the store stands without paying anybody. I built SEO Karbon to run 71 checks on a Shopify store from the outside and hand back the whole report, with no login, no email and no app install. It ranks what it finds by the revenue at risk and shows the evidence behind every line, which is the standard this page has been describing. Use it to work out whether there is anything here worth paying somebody to look at.
Everything else I write about store SEO, including what ongoing work costs once the audit is done, is in Shopify SEO on the blog.
Questions people ask
How much should an SEO audit cost for a small business?
Is a cheap SEO audit a scam?
Does an SEO audit include fixing the problems it finds?
Should the audit fee count toward hiring the agency afterward?
Want this run properly?
I am Greg Asuncion, an ecommerce paid media consultant. I run Google Ads, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft for direct‑to‑consumer brands on Shopify — one person, published pricing, and a free audit after a call. Here is exactly what each audit tier includes.