SEO Site Audit Cost: What Actually Changes the Price

A site-wide technical SEO audit is not one product with one price. The two things that actually move the number are how many pages there are to crawl, and which platform those pages run on — and most pages that quote a price mention one of those and skip the other.

My own three tiers scope explicitly by page count, published on the audit page rather than quoted only after a call: SURFACE at $450 and CORE at $700, both up to 100 pages, and SPECTRUM at $1,500, up to 250 pages. Larger stores are quoted separately rather than rushed through the same scope, because the crawl and the findings genuinely scale with how many pages exist.

How much does a site-wide SEO audit cost?

For a direct-to-consumer store, a real site-wide technical audit runs from a few hundred dollars for a crawl-only scan up to a few thousand for a full audit that adds account data and competitors. SURFACE ($450) and CORE ($700) cover sites up to 100 pages, SPECTRUM ($1,500) covers up to 250, and anything larger gets a separate quote rather than a shortcut. The difference between SURFACE and CORE is account access, not page count — that part is covered in full on what an SEO audit actually costs. This post is about the other lever: scope.

Why page count is the first lever, not an afterthought

A crawl is work proportional to pages, not to the business behind them. A 40-page brochure site and a 40-page store take a similar number of hours to crawl and read. A 4,000-page catalog takes meaningfully longer than either, no matter how simple the underlying templates are, because someone still has to look at what the crawler returns and decide what matters.

That is why a flat price with no stated page limit is a guess dressed up as a number. WebFX’s own pricing page has a site-size factor built into its cost framework — 1 to 20 pages, 21 to 100, 101 to 1,000, 1,001 and up — but never connects it to what a technical audit specifically costs. The factor exists in the model and never reaches the quote.

Why platform changes the audit as much as page count does

Two sites with the same page count can need a completely different audit, because where the technical debt lives depends on the platform underneath the pages. A crawl tool returns the same kind of report either way; what differs is which findings turn out to be the actual problem.

• Shopify concentrates its technical debt in duplicate product and collection URLs, variant pages competing with each other, and faceted navigation that multiplies crawlable URLs well past the number of products actually for sale. None of this shows up by counting pages — it shows up by reading what the crawl actually returns.
• WordPress and WooCommerce concentrate it in plugin bloat, redirect chains built up over years of theme and URL changes, and page weight added by whatever was installed to solve last year’s problem and never removed.
• Custom or headless builds concentrate it in whether Google can render the JavaScript at all. A site that looks complete in a browser can be functionally empty to a crawler, and that failure mode does not exist on a templated platform.

A quote that only counts pages treats all three of these as the same job. They are not, and the technical checks specific to Shopify cover the first case in more detail than a general audit price page ever will.

Shopify, WordPress, and custom or headless, compared

What happens if my site is bigger than the stated limit?

You get quoted separately, which is the honest answer and the one most pages avoid giving. SURFACE and CORE cover up to 100 pages and SPECTRUM up to 250 on my own pricing; a store past that gets a real scope conversation rather than being squeezed into a tier that was not built for it. Treat a flat price with no stated page limit as a sign the quote has not actually been scoped to your site yet.

Am I being overcharged for a technical audit?

• No stated page limit on a flat-fee quote. If the number does not come with a scope, you cannot tell whether your 3,000-page catalog was priced the same as a 40-page brochure site by mistake.
• No mention of your platform at all. A quote that would be identical whether you run Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom build has not actually looked at where your specific technical debt is likely to be.
• A single lab Core Web Vitals score presented as the finding. One run is not a measurement, on any platform.
• A ranking or traffic guarantee attached to the audit. An audit is a diagnosis. Nobody can guarantee what a diagnosis finds before they have read it.

Who should not buy a site-wide audit yet

A few situations where a site-wide technical audit is money spent too early, whatever platform you run.

• You are mid-migration or about to replatform. Auditing a site you are about to leave is money spent twice. Migrate first, then audit what you land on.
• Your catalog is brand new. A new store has little crawl history to diagnose yet. Let it run for a few months before paying to audit it.
• You already know the fix and just have not shipped it. An audit produces a priority list. If you already have one sitting in a backlog, the limiting factor is time, not diagnosis.

Full retainer pricing above any single audit tier is on the pricing page, and everything else I write about store SEO is in Shopify SEO on the blog.

Questions people ask