How much does an SEO audit actually cost?

By Garnett Banfield · Harlem, NYC · 6 min read

Most pages answering this question are written by people selling audits, this one included. So here is the version that is useful anyway: what separates the bands, and how to work out which one you actually need before you spend anything.

The four price bands

Why the gap between $99 and $2,000 is so large

Because they are not the same product, even though both are called an audit.

A crawler is excellent at what it does: it will find your missing meta descriptions, your broken canonical tags, your images without alt text, your slow pages. If those are your problems, a free tool has genuinely solved them and you should stop reading and go fix them.

What a crawler cannot do is exercise judgement. It cannot tell you that thirty-eight of its forty findings are cosmetic and the other two are why nobody can find you. It cannot look at your competitor and notice they publish a category of content you have never touched. It cannot ask whether the keyword you have optimized for is one anybody actually searches. Every one of those is a person’s work, and a person’s work is what you are paying the difference for.

There is also a whole category of checks that live outside your HTML entirely, where a crawler has nothing to read:

• Citation and NAP consistency — whether your name, address and phone match character-for-character across the directories that feed local results. Inconsistent NAP is among the most common causes of weak local visibility, and it is invisible from your own website.
• AI answer-engine visibility — whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews cite you, mention you, or cite a competitor instead. Answering that means querying the engines, by hand, and reading what comes back.
• Competitor comparison — what they publish that you do not. Requires reading their site, not yours.

Which one do you need?

Start free, always. Run a free audit before you spend anything. If it surfaces something obvious and fixable, fix it and see what happens. Plenty of small sites are being held back by one or two things a crawler finds in ten seconds.

Pay for a freelancer if you want a second pair of eyes on a small, simple site and you are comfortable that the depth depends heavily on the individual.

Pay agency rates when the free audit came back clean and you still are not getting enquiries. That is the specific situation where the expensive audit earns its money, because the problem is somewhere a tool cannot look — and it is the situation where guessing gets costly. Rebuilding a site that was never the problem is a five-figure mistake that a $2,000 diagnosis prevents.

Three questions worth asking before you pay

• Can I see a redacted example? You are looking for whether it reads as specific to a real business or as a tool export with a logo on the cover. This eliminates more providers than anything else you can ask.
• Is implementation included? Usually it is not, and that is fine — but it should be said plainly. “Prioritized action list” can read like a promise to action it.
• Does the fee credit toward later work? Crediting the audit against a build or retainer is common practice and worth asking for. It also means the provider has no incentive to inflate what they find.

What we charge, for the sake of transparency

Meridian’s audit is $2,000 — the entry of the agency band, not below it, because it is agency work: a person reads the site, queries five AI answer engines by hand, checks the citation sources, benchmarks three competitors you nominate, and writes a roadmap ordered by severity. It is delivered within three weeks and credited in full against a $15,000 Done-For-You build, so for anyone who proceeds it does not add to the total.

Our free audit is genuinely free and genuinely useful, and we would rather you ran that first. If it tells you what you needed to know, you have saved $2,000 and we have lost nothing worth keeping.

The honest part

No audit at any price guarantees a ranking, and any provider quoting a price alongside a guaranteed position is selling something they cannot deliver. An audit tells you what is wrong and what to do about it, in order. Whether that turns into traffic depends on execution, competition, and how Google behaves — none of which is inside the document you paid for.

Related: what the $2,000 audit covers · full pricing, ours and the market’s · how to choose an SEO agency