What an SEO Audit Includes and What It Costs

What does an SEO audit include?

A real SEO audit answers three questions and then ranks the answers. Can Google reach and index your pages? Does each page match what your buyers search for? How do you compare with the pages that already rank? The output is a prioritized list of fixes with an estimate of the work. Google puts the standard briefly: "An SEO audit should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved."

That sentence is the best test of any quote. A report that lists 400 "issues" with no order and no estimate is a scan. The sections below set out what belongs inside, and the evidence each part should leave behind so you can check it.

Which parts of an audit matter most?

A thin audit covers the first rows with a tool and skips the last two. A strong one spends most of its time on the plan.

What does the technical part check?

Start with indexing, because a page that is not in Google's index cannot rank. Google's Page indexing report sorts every known address into "Indexed" or "Not indexed" and gives a reason for each. The reasons include server errors (5xx), a robots.txt block, a "noindex" tag, a 404 or soft 404, "Crawled - currently not indexed", "Discovered - currently not indexed", and duplicates where Google chose a different canonical than you did. Some of these are deliberate. Others are mistakes that quietly hide a page you want found.

Next come the settings that cause those statuses: robots.txt not blocking pages that should be indexable, canonical tags pointing at the right address, redirects that go straight to the final page rather than through chains, HTTPS on every page and a sitemap that lists the addresses you want indexed.

Then speed. Google's web.dev defines the three Core Web Vitals and their "good" thresholds, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads: Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or less. An audit should report which of your key pages meet them on mobile, not just a lab score for the homepage.

If a rebuild is on the table, an audit is also the safe first step; our guide to redesigning a website without losing SEO shows what to record before addresses change.

What does the content part check?

This is where audits differ most. A tool can tell you a title is missing. It cannot tell you that two of your pages compete for the same search, that your service page answers a different question from the one buyers type, or that the pages ranking above you all include a price table and yours does not.

A useful content review takes the searches that matter to your business and, for each, looks at the live results. It then records which of your pages should own that search, what the top pages cover that yours leaves out, and whether to improve, merge or remove the page. It should use your own Search Console data to find pages that already appear and could win more. That is usually where the fastest gains are, since the page already has some visibility.

What does an SEO audit cost?

Published figures disagree by about tenfold, and it is worth seeing why. Each is that publisher's own figure for its own audience.

Two cautions. These are vendor and agency pages, selling audits or audit software, and no independent survey of audit prices appeared in our search. And the ExpertMarket figures are almost four years old. Treat them as the range buyers will see, not a price list.

Neil Patel's page also warns that some low-priced audits are "exports from paid SEO tools with a logo slapped on", which is the shallow scan described above.

For Pakistan, the useful comparison is different: several local SEO firms bundle an audit into a monthly package or offer a free one. Our guide to SEO package prices in Pakistan lists what named firms publish.

What makes one audit cost more than another?

The spread comes from a short list of drivers, so ask about each in your quote.

The "fixes included" line causes the most confusion. A quote for an audit is not a quote for the SEO work. If the report lists 60 fixes, someone still has to make them, either your developer, your team or the agency on a monthly plan. Our guide to what an SEO agency does each month shows how to check that work, and what SEO costs a small business sets out the monthly side.

How do you tell an audit from a tool export?

Ask for these before you pay:

1. A sample report with the client name removed. Look for a ranked plan, not only a score.
2. Which pages will be reviewed. All of them, or a sample, and how the sample is chosen.
3. Which data sources are used. Your Search Console and analytics access, a crawl, or both.
4. Who makes the fixes. And whether that is in the price.
5. What result to expect and when. Google lists this among the questions to put to any SEO, with "How do you measure your success?"
6. How long delivery takes. And whether there is a walkthrough call.

Google's guidance on hiring an SEO also names the red flags. Be careful if a company is "secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do." Beware of promises of a guaranteed first place: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Grant only read access to Search Console at the audit stage.

An audit should also not recommend tactics that Google's spam policies cover, such as buying links, which the policies treat as link spam, or publishing pages in bulk to manipulate rankings, which they call scaled content abuse. If a report's top fix is to buy links, the report is a sales pitch.

When is a free audit enough?

Free tools are a fair first pass. Google Search Console shows indexing and performance, and free crawlers and Lighthouse show missing tags, broken links and speed. Run them yourself before you pay anyone. If the free tools show a handful of clear errors, fix those and wait.

Pay for an audit when the problems are not obvious from the tools: traffic fell and you do not know why, pages are "Crawled - currently not indexed", the site is about to be rebuilt, or you cannot tell which pages deserve work. The paid part is the judgment about order and effort, not the crawl.

What should you do with the report?

Work through it in this order:

1. Fix what blocks indexing first. Accidental noindex tags, robots.txt blocks, broken redirects and server errors on pages you want found.
2. Improve the pages closest to winning. Pages already showing for a search you want, where the title, answer or internal links are weak.
3. Fix duplicates and thin pages. Merge or remove pages competing for the same search.
4. Do the rest by effort. Small fixes in bulk, large ones scheduled.
5. Re-check in Search Console. The Page indexing report lets you request validation of a fix.

Give each fix an owner and a date. An audit nobody acts on is the most common reason SEO spending produces nothing.

How does 1920 Agency approach an SEO audit?

1920 Agency is based in Islamabad, with locations in Rawalpindi and Lahore. We rebuilt and run SEO for Progen Aesthetics, a UK clinic, and we run daily SEO monitoring of our own site, with the crawl and Search Console data recorded. That is the same material an audit starts from. Our SEO service begins by auditing the site and its Search Console data, and we quote after mapping the job. We do not publish prices, and we do not promise rankings. The report lists the fixes in order with an estimate of the work, and you decide whether to carry them out yourself or with us. If you are comparing who should do the work, see agency vs freelancer vs in-house.