A client rang me in early 2024 — decent e-commerce brand, about 4,000 SKUs, Shopify Plus — and told me a London agency had quoted them £18,000 for a "technical SEO audit and remediation package." I asked what was in it. Silence. Then: "They said it was comprehensive." I've been doing this for nine years and built over 12,000 sites throughSeahawk Media. That word — comprehensive — is almost always a sign that nobody inside the proposal can tell you exactly what work is being done. So let's actually talk about money.
Why Technical SEO Pricing Is Such a Mess
The honest answer is that there's no standardisation. None. A freelancer in Manchester might charge £400 for an audit that covers the same ground as a £4,000 deliverable from a mid-size agency. Both could be worth exactly what they cost. Or neither could be.
The problem is that "technical SEO" spans an enormous surface area — crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals, structured data, log file analysis, hreflang, JavaScript rendering, site architecture, internal linking topology. You can spend three hours on a site or three weeks. Both are technically "a technical SEO audit."
Seahawk had a fintech project in 2022 where the client had already paid another agency £6,500 for an audit. When we looked at the deliverable, it was a 47-page Screaming Frog export with a colour-coded Excel sheet on top. No prioritisation, no root-cause analysis, no implementation notes. The client had no idea what to fix first. That's the gap between what gets sold and what actually gets delivered.
What a Technical SEO Audit Should Actually Include
Before you can judge pricing, you need to know what you're buying. A proper audit — not a crawl dump dressed up with formatting — should cover:
- Crawl analysis: Screaming Frog or Sitebulb run against the live site, not a staging URL. Identifying orphaned pages, redirect chains, broken links.
- Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP (replaced FID in March 2024), and CLS assessed viaGoogle Search Consolefield data and PageSpeed Insights lab data.
- Indexation audit: What's actually in Google's index vs what should be. Index bloat is massively underdiagnosed.
- Log file analysis: This one gets skipped constantly because it's fiddly. But it's the only way to see what Googlebot is actually crawling. Tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider's log file analyser or Splunk if the logs are enormous.
- Structured data validation: Running Schema through theGoogle Rich Results Testand identifying missed opportunities.
- JavaScript rendering check: Fetch as Google, compare raw HTML vs rendered DOM. Critical for React and Vue sites.
- Internal linking and architecture: Depth from homepage, PageRank distribution, silo integrity.
If someone's quoting you for a technical audit and they can't tell you whether they're doing log file analysis — ask. The answer tells you everything.
Real Pricing Tiers in 2026
Right. Numbers. Here's how the market breaks down right now based on what I see quoted to clients who come to us after shopping around, and what we charge ourselves.
One-Off Audits
A small site — under 500 pages, no JavaScript complexity, no international targeting — should cost somewhere between£500 and £1,500from a competent freelancer. From an agency with a structured process and a senior consultant reviewing the output, £1,800 to £3,500 is reasonable.
Medium sites — 500 to 10,000 pages, possibly some JS rendering, maybe a bit of hreflang — you're looking at£2,500 to £6,000from a solid independent consultant, and£5,000 to £12,000from a specialist agency. That £18,000 quote my client got? It included remediation work, which changes things — but even so, it was padded.
Enterprise-level. Large e-commerce, news sites, SaaS platforms with dynamic URL structures, multinational hreflang setups — honestly, budget£10,000 upwards. I've seen quotes hit £40,000 for a global retailer and every penny was justified because log file analysis alone took two weeks.
Monthly Retainers
This is where it gets complicated, because retainer scope varies wildly.
- Basic monitoring retainer— Search Console checks, crawl health monitoring, alerting on indexation drops. £300–£800/month. Fine for stable sites that just need eyes on them.
- Active optimisation retainer— Ongoing fixes, CWV improvements, structured data additions, internal linking work. £1,200–£3,500/month. This is where most growing businesses should be.
- Full technical partnership— You essentially have an outsourced technical SEO team. Includes sprint planning, dev collaboration, log file reviews, A/B testing crawl directives. £4,000–£12,000/month. Makes sense for mid-market e-commerce or high-traffic publishers.
We run several clients at that middle tier at Seahawk. The honest truth is that most sites don't need more than that unless they're publishing hundreds of new URLs a week or running complex international setups.
Tool Costs Nobody Mentions
Here's something agencies rarely itemise in their proposals: the tooling overhead is real and it should be factored into pricing judgements.
Screaming Frog SEO Spidercosts £259/year. That's fine. But then add Ahrefs at £99/month (or £179 for the plan that actually lets you do serious site audit work), Semrush at roughly similar, Sitebulb at £55/month for the cloud version, and suddenly you're looking at a £400+/month tooling stack before anyone's done a single hour of work.
A freelancer charging £500 for an audit is often subsidising their tooling across multiple clients. Which is fine — that's just how it works. But when an agency quotes you £8,000 and lists "access to enterprise SEO tools" as a line item, you should ask what tools those are and what the actual licence cost is. I've seen "enterprise tooling" billed at £800/month that was just a shared Ahrefs account.
Back in 2019 a client handed me a brief that specifically asked me to "use enterprise tools only." I asked which ones. They meant Moz Pro. Which at the time cost $99/month. The word enterprise is doing a lot of lifting in this industry.
Where Agencies Pad the Bill
I'm going to be straight with you because I run an agency and I know exactly where the fat lives.
Report formatting.A 90-page PDF with custom graphics, brand colours, and executive summaries takes time — but it doesn't improve your rankings. Some clients need it for internal stakeholder sign-off. Most don't. If your agency is charging for beautiful deliverables, make sure you actually need beautiful deliverables.
"Strategy" hours without implementation.Recommendations that sit in a Google Doc and never get actioned are worth nothing. If your retainer is heavy on strategy hours and light on implementation support, you're paying for permission to do work yourself.
Duplicate crawling.Running Screaming FrogandSitebulbandAhrefs Site Audit on the same 1,000-page site and billing hours for all three. One thorough crawl is enough for most sites. The second and third are confirmation bias with extra invoices.
Tooling arbitrage.Buying a £200/year tool and billing it as a £150/month "platform fee." I've seen this. It's not illegal. But it is a bit grim.
What You Should Actually Push Back On
If you're reviewing a proposal or retainer, ask for:
- A breakdown of hours by activity (not just by deliverable)
- The name of the senior person who will review the output — not just deliver it
- Clarification on whether log file analysis is included
- What happens to recommendations that require dev work — who tracks implementation?
- How CWV improvements are measured after fixes are deployed
If they can't answer question 4, there's a gap in the process. Most technical SEO work dies in the gap between "here's what needs fixing" and "here's someone who will actually fix it."
Freelancer vs Agency: Honest Take
Freelancers are better value on straightforward audits. Full stop. A solo consultant with seven years of experience and low overhead will often do cleaner work on a 2,000-page site than a junior at a big agency supervised loosely by a senior who's spread across twelve clients.
Agencies make sense when:
- You need ongoing dev collaboration (agencies usually have the bandwidth)
- The site is large enough that one person genuinely can't manage the workload
- You need someone to interface with multiple internal stakeholders
I'll be honest — Seahawk sits somewhere in between. We run lean teams on each client rather than throwing headcount at things. It keeps quality up and frankly keeps our pricing from going stupid.
One thing I'd flag: be cautious of very cheap offshore technical SEO. I've reviewed audit deliverables from providers charging £200 for a "full technical audit" and it was a Semrush site audit screenshot with colour filters applied. The tool cost more than the labour. That's not a bargain — that's a liability if you act on bad recommendations.
How to Evaluate a Quote Before You Sign Anything
Ask for a sample deliverable. Any legitimate provider should be able to show you a redacted example of past work. If they won't, that tells you something.
Check whether the scope explicitly states page count or URL limit. Crawling 500 pages and crawling 50,000 pages are different jobs. Contracts that don't specify this often expand in ways that create awkward conversations later.
And honestly — talk to whoever will be doing the work. Not the salesperson. The actual analyst. A fifteen-minute call will tell you more about quality than any proposal document.
FAQ
What's a fair price for a technical SEO audit in 2026?
For a small site (under 500 pages), £800–£2,500 is reasonable depending on complexity. Medium sites with JS rendering or international elements, expect £3,000–£8,000. Larger sites vary enormously. If a quote is dramatically below these ranges, ask very specific questions about methodology. If it's dramatically above them, ask for an itemised hour breakdown.
Is a monthly retainer better than a one-off audit?
Depends entirely on your situation. A one-off audit makes sense if your site is relatively stable and you have internal resource to implement fixes. A retainer makes sense if you're actively building the site out, publishing regularly, or making structural changes. The worst outcome is paying for a retainer on a site where nobody is implementing the recommendations — that's just a standing invoice for reports nobody reads.
Can I do technical SEO myself instead of hiring someone?
For smaller sites, yes — tools likeGoogle Search Consoleand the free tier of Screaming Frog (500 URL crawl limit) will surface the majority of issues. The honest limitation is that diagnosis is only half the job. Knowing what to prioritise, how to fix JavaScript rendering problems, or how to approach a crawl budget issue on a million-URL site — that's where experience earns its money.
Do Core Web Vitals work actually cost extra?
It should be in scope for any retainer worth its price. But in practice, significant CWV improvements — especially LCP fixes on image-heavy pages or INP improvements on JS-heavy interfaces — often require dev hours on top of SEO hours. Make sure your contract is clear about who handles implementation and whether that's included.
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Look, there's no universally "right" number here. The range is wide because the work is wide. What I'd push for is clarity over credentials. I'd rather hire someone who can explain exactly what they'll look at and why than someone with a polished case study and a vague scope. The sites I've seen damaged by bad technical SEO work weren't damaged by people who charged too much — they were damaged by people who delivered too little and moved on before anyone noticed.