How much does an SEO audit cost, and what should it earn you?

An SEO audit usually costs between €1,000 and €3,000 when carried out by a freelance consultant for a mid-sized site, according to the ranges published by French platforms Codeur.com and Wisestart. An automated scan can be free, and the audit of a large online store with tens of thousands of pages can exceed €10,000.

But comparing prices is pointless if you don't compare what you're buying. A €500 audit that boils down to a tool export costs more than a €2,500 audit that tells you exactly what to fix, in what order, and what to expect from it.

What drives the price of an SEO audit

So the first reflex is to ask what's included, not just how much it costs.

What a good SEO audit should include

A useful audit doesn't list everything that could be improved. It tells you what matters for your business, and in what order.

1. A summary your leadership can read: the top 5 priorities on one page, with the expected impact.
2. A table of recommendations prioritised by impact and effort, with an owner for each line (developer, content, you).
3. The technical analysis: indexing, error pages, redirects, speed and Core Web Vitals, URL structure, internal linking.
4. The keyword analysis: which queries you already appear for, the ones where you're almost on page one, and the ones your competitors are taking from you.
5. The analysis of real data: the Search Console performance report keeps up to 16 months of history. It's the most reliable basis for spotting what has grown or dropped.
6. A debrief: a conversation where the priorities are explained and you can ask your questions.

An audit is only worth something if it leads to results. On one of the sites I worked on, the technical audit, keyword strategy and structural overhaul took organic traffic from 3,500 to 21,600 unique visitors a month in 8 months. For a food supplement online store, SEO became the main sales channel: over 80% of revenue came from organic search.

Signs of a sloppy SEO audit

• An unsorted tool export: 300 "errors" listed by Semrush or Screaming Frog, without saying which ones matter.
• No prioritisation: everything is presented as urgent, so nothing is.
• No data from your Search Console: the audit relies on third-party tool estimates, not your actual traffic.
• No competitor analysis: no way to know why they outrank you.
• Guaranteed rankings: nobody can guarantee a position on Google.
• A "full audit" sold for a few hundred euros: at that price, the time spent can't cover an in-depth analysis. It's often a gateway to a monthly subscription.

SEO audit for an online store: the specific checks

An online store isn't a brochure site with more pages. It has its own traps, which generic audits often skip:

• Filters and facets (size, colour, price): they can generate thousands of near-identical URLs that Google crawls for nothing. Google even has a whole guide on faceted navigation.
• Category pages: they're often the pages able to rank for high-volume queries ("women's trail running shoes"), more than product pages. An e-commerce audit should check they have useful content and strong internal linking.
• Product pages: descriptions copied from the manufacturer, out-of-stock products left with no alternative, duplicate variants.
• Platform limits: on Shopify, for example, the same product is reachable through several URLs (with and without the collection path); you need to check that the canonical tag does its job and that internal links point to the right version.
• The link with sales: an e-commerce audit should cross organic traffic with revenue, to prioritise the categories that make money, not just those that attract visits.

What does an SEO audit earn you?

An audit earns nothing until the fixes are made. To judge whether it's worth the price, ask yourself three questions:

1. What is an organic visitor worth to you? Organic revenue ÷ organic sessions over the same period.
2. What extra traffic is realistic? Queries where you sit on page two are the fastest wins: a good audit should list them.
3. Who will make the fixes, and when? An audit whose recommendations sit in a folder is worth nothing, whatever its price.

Compared with paid ads, SEO has a decisive advantage: once a ranking is earned, each visit costs you nothing more. That's what lets a brand lower its overall acquisition cost and depend less on its ad budget.

How I run an SEO audit

I spend about a week of work on an SEO audit. You receive:

• a one-page summary with the top 5 priorities and the expected impact of each;
• a table of recommendations ranked by impact and effort, with who can handle each one;
• the technical analysis of the site (indexing, errors, speed, structure, internal linking);
• the keyword and competitor analysis: the queries where you're almost on page one, and the ones your competitors are taking from you;
• for an online store, organic traffic crossed with revenue by category, to see where effort will pay off most.

It all ends with a video debrief, where I walk you through every point in plain language: you should leave knowing what to do, not with a report nobody will open.

Then I can implement the fixes myself, or support your team. Both the audit and the implementation come with a tailored quote, based on the size of your site and your goals.

Because I also work on ads, conversion and CRM, I look at SEO within your whole acquisition: which queries you pay for in Google Ads when you could capture them organically, which pages attract traffic but don't convert. To learn more about my approach, see the e-commerce page, my background, or my article on hiring a freelance Google Ads consultant.

Want SEO to be part of a complete strategy? Hand your growth to a digital marketing consultant who connects SEO, ads and conversion.