SEO Audit Services: What a Real Audit Includes and Costs

An SEO audit service should give you a prioritised list of what is stopping your site from being found, with the evidence for each item and the fix for it. A technical audit covers crawling, indexing, speed and structured data. A full audit adds content, links, local signals and AI-search readiness. Our one-time audit and 90-day plan is CAD $1,800; this guide explains what that kind of audit includes, what a free tool can and cannot tell you, and how to judge any audit you are quoted.

What an SEO audit service delivers

A good audit delivers three things: a list of problems ranked by how much traffic they cost, the evidence behind each one, and the specific fix. It should be written so that your developer can act on it without a call and you can understand it without a glossary.

What it should not be is a score. Automated tools produce a number out of 100 and a long list of items with equal weight. That is useful as a starting point, and our free audit tool does exactly that in about twenty seconds. It is not an audit service, because a tool cannot tell you which of forty warnings actually matters for your site and your market. A person with your Search Console open can.

The other thing a real audit includes is a baseline. Before anything is changed, the audit records where the site stands: indexed pages, impressions and clicks for the last twelve months, the pages and queries that bring most of the traffic, and the leads or revenue those visits produce. Without that, nobody can tell you later whether the fixes worked.

Technical SEO audit versus full audit

The two are often sold under the same name. A technical audit asks whether Google and AI crawlers can reach, read and trust the site. A full audit asks that and then asks whether the site deserves to rank once they can. Buy the technical one when traffic has dropped, the site was recently rebuilt, or pages are missing from Google. Buy the full one when the site is healthy but not growing.

The technical SEO service page describes the technical side in detail. Our one-time audit is the full kind, because for most businesses the technical findings only make sense next to the content and local findings.

What should be in the deliverable

Use this list to check any audit you receive, including ours. If more than two items are missing, ask why before paying the balance.

• A one-page summary saying what the three biggest problems are and what they cost you.
• A priority order for every finding: fix now, fix this quarter, ignore. Not everything found is worth fixing.
• Evidence for each item: the URL, the screenshot or the Search Console export that shows the problem.
• The fix, written as a ticket your developer can pick up, or done directly if the auditor has access.
• The pages and queries that bring most of your traffic, so nobody breaks them while fixing something else.
• A list of what the audit did not check and why.
• A 90-day plan with owners and dates, if you bought a full audit.

Our guide on how to read an SEO audit walks through a typical report section by section and explains which findings to act on first. Read it before the audit arrives, so you can push back on the day rather than a month later.

Free audit tools versus a paid audit

Free tools are worth running first. They catch template-level problems, which are often the biggest ones, and they do it before you spend anything. What they cannot do is weigh the findings, read your content the way a customer would, or look at your competitors.

One honest note on rich results: some formats that tools still flag, such as FAQ and how-to markup, no longer produce rich results for most sites. A paid audit should say so rather than list them as missing opportunities. Our guide on rich results that still work keeps the current list.

What an SEO audit costs

Our one-time full audit and 90-day plan is CAD $1,800, credited against month one if you start a plan within 60 days. Site migration protection, which is a specialised audit before and after a rebuild, is from CAD $3,500. Both are listed on the pricing page with what they include.

Across the market the price of an audit is driven by the size of the site, the platform, whether the auditor also implements the fixes, and how senior the person doing it is. Large catalogue sites and custom builds take longer because there are more templates to test. A very cheap audit is usually a tool export with a logo on it, and a very expensive one is usually bundled with a retainer you have not agreed to yet. Ask for the audit price on its own.

How long it takes and what happens after

A full audit of a typical business site takes about two weeks from access to delivery. Larger sites take longer. It needs read-only access to Search Console and analytics, a CMS login or a developer contact, and about an hour of your time to explain the business and what a lead is worth.

After delivery, three things should happen. The blocking technical items get fixed, either by your developer from the tickets or by the auditor. The baseline is recorded so progress can be measured. And the 90-day plan is agreed, which is where you decide whether the rest is a project or a retainer. Our how we work page shows the monthly cycle that follows if you continue, and the sample report shows what you would receive each month.

If you want to know where your site stands today, run the free audit on your home page and your most important service page. Then, if the results raise questions the tool cannot answer, book a strategy call and we will scope the full audit against what the tool found.

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