SEO Audit Cost: Prices and What You Should Get
Published SEO audit prices in Europe run from about €290 to €1,800. What free tools catch, what they miss, and what a paid audit has to deliver.
A one-off SEO audit from a European agency costs from about €290 to €1,800, going by published starting prices, which are mostly quoted excl. VAT. We checked the public price pages of 50 European agencies and freelancers in 13 countries on 23 October 2026. Only seven of them publish a price for a one-off audit, and the median of those seven is €599. Seven prices is a small sample, so treat the median as a rough midpoint and expect your own SEO audit cost to depend on the size of your site.
An audit is a one-time diagnosis, and the fixes that follow are a separate budget line. If you are weighing an audit against a retainer, our pillar guide explains what ongoing SEO costs per month.
In short
- Seven European agencies in our sample publish starting prices for a one-time audit from €290 to €1,800, mostly excl. VAT (median €599, small sample).
- Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and the free version of Screaming Frog (up to 500 URLs) cover a basic technical check at no cost.
- The main entry plans of Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz list at $99 to $139 a month. They give you data and leave the interpretation to you.
- A useful audit ends in a prioritised fix list with effort estimates.
- Caladona’s SEO audit is €990 one-time excl. VAT, and a technical SEO audit is already part of the €690/mo SEO plan (excl. VAT).
How much do audits usually cost?
Search results for this question mix in financial audits, which are a different service at a different price level. For SEO audits, these are the price points we found:
| Source | What it shows | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Published audit prices, 7 European agencies (seen 23 Oct 2026) | One-time SEO audit, published starting price, mostly excl. VAT | €290 to €1,800, median €599 |
| Same sample, other offers | One agency audits for free, another bundles the audit into a paid onboarding fee | €0, or included |
| US price guides that top this search | Mixed surveys and agency estimates in USD | From about $100 to $10,000+ |
| Caladona SEO audit | Full technical and content audit with a prioritised fix list | €990 one-time, excl. VAT |
The US figures run higher partly because they include large-site and enterprise audits. Agencies that publish prices in Europe tend to sell packages to small businesses, so a quote for a large webshop or a multilingual site is likely to land at the top of our range or above it.
What free tools find, and what they miss
You can run a decent first check yourself without paying anything. Three tools do most of the work.
| Tool | What it finds | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Whether Google can crawl and index your pages, which queries show your site, clicks, alerts for indexing, spam or security issues, and which sites link to you | Anything about competitors, keywords you don’t rank for yet, and which problems matter most |
| PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse | Lab tests in a simulated environment for performance, accessibility, best practices and basic SEO, plus real-user data from the previous 28 days where available | It tests one URL at a time, so a template problem across 200 pages looks like one page’s problem |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free version | Broken links, redirects, page titles and meta data, exact duplicate pages, on up to 500 URLs per crawl | Larger sites, and in the free version you can’t save crawls, change the crawl configuration, render JavaScript or connect APIs |
Together these give you a list of symptoms. They won’t tell you which symptom is costing you traffic, whether thin content or weak internal linking is the bigger issue, or what a competitor ranking above you does differently. Working that out is the part you pay an auditor for.
What paid SEO tools cost
If you want competitor and keyword data yourself, the main suites are priced per month in USD. These are list prices from the vendors’ own pages on 23 October 2026, plus VAT where it applies:
| Tool | Plan | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | Lite | $129/mo, billed monthly |
| Semrush | SEO | $139/mo, billed monthly |
| Moz Pro | Standard | $99/mo, billed monthly |
| Screaming Frog | Paid licence | €245 per year |
Cheaper starter tiers with fewer features exist, such as Ahrefs Starter at $29/mo and a single-site Moz plan at $49/mo.
Can ChatGPT do an SEO audit?
Partly. ChatGPT can help explain a Search Console export, group a crawl report into themes or suggest a better page title. It works from the data you give it and the pages it manages to fetch, and it doesn’t check every URL on your site the way a crawler does. OpenAI’s own help centre says the model can produce incorrect or misleading outputs, sometimes with confidence, and that it may not be able to read a website because of technical issues, paywalls or robots.txt settings.
Use it on data you have already collected, and check its findings in a crawler before anyone starts fixing.
What a real SEO audit should contain
In its advice on hiring an SEO, Google says an audit should be about giving you “realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved”. The same page says to give an SEO who offers an audit only read access to Search Console at that stage, not write access.
A paid audit should cover at least:
- Crawling and indexing: which pages Google can reach, which it skips, and why.
- Technical health: redirects, broken links, page speed and Core Web Vitals per template, structured data, mobile rendering.
- On-page and content: titles, headings, thin or duplicate pages, pages competing for the same keyword.
- Links: internal link structure and the external links pointing to you.
- Competitors: what the sites above you rank for that you don’t.
- A prioritised fix list: each item with an owner, an effort estimate and the expected impact.
Your developer and your writer will work from that fix list, so each item has to be specific enough for them to start on.
What a €100 audit and a €990 audit deliver
US price guides describe the cheapest paid tier, roughly $100 to $500, as mostly automated tool output. No agency in our European sample lists a €100 audit. Here is how that kind of scan compares with a manual audit priced above our sample’s median:
| Automated scan (around €100) | Manual audit (€990 and up) | |
|---|---|---|
| How it’s made | Automated scan, often a branded tool export | A person crawls, reads and checks the data |
| Data sources | One tool | Search Console, a crawler, speed data, keyword and link data |
| Context | None about your business or market | Your goals, your competitors, your priority pages |
| Output | A long list of warnings, often unranked | A ranked fix list with effort estimates |
| Follow-up | Usually none | A walkthrough so you can ask questions |
A cheap automated report can be enough if your developer can read it and decide what matters.
What happens after the audit
The audit price usually covers the diagnosis only. Your developer, your writer or the agency bills the fixes separately. Six agencies in the same European sample publish an hourly rate, ranging from €57 to €175, with a median of €92.50. Multiply that by the effort estimates in your fix list and you have a rough fix budget.
Google says crawling a changed page can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and that site-wide quality improvements can take several months to register. If you are planning around results, read how long SEO takes before you set a deadline. If your business depends more on a map listing than on organic rankings, the cost of local SEO is a separate budget with its own tools.
What Caladona’s SEO audit costs
Our SEO audit is €990 one-time, excl. VAT: a full technical and content audit with a prioritised fix list. You can buy it on its own or add it to any plan. If you’re on our SEO plan at €690/mo excl. VAT, a technical SEO audit and fixes are already included, so you don’t need the add-on.
All our prices are published on the Caladona pricing page. If you’re not sure whether you need a one-off audit or ongoing work, get in touch and ask which one fits your site.