There are plenty of tools that will spit out a generic SEO audit.
But cheap and easy doesn’t usually get results and you can expect the same from an SEO audit.
Professional SEO experts have spent years or even decades honing their skills.
I’m not saying they don’t use tools but rather they use multiple tools, their experience and their proprietary processes.
Therefore, high quality SEO audits cost thousands of dollars.
Check out the below resources to find out SEO audit pricing in 2018:
Service | Price |
---|---|
495 - 1,995 pounds | |
Quote | |
$2,000 - $5,000 | |
$11,900 | |
$25-$75 per hour | |
$3,000 - $11,000 | |
Free |
2019 Best SEO Audit Software Pricing
SEO audit software does the grunt work very quickly.
It enables SEO experts to focus on interpreting the data.
For example SEO software can very quickly run through an entire website and determine:
- broken links,
- duplicate content,
- 301 redirects,
- server status of pages,
- Meta titles and descriptions
- Etc
SEO experts then interpret this data and recommend improvements.
Below is a list of the 2019 best SEO Audit software pricing:
Service | Price |
---|---|
$50 - $250 per month | |
$99 - $399 per annum | |
$100 - $400 per month | |
$100 - $600 per month | |
$99 - $500 per month | |
$40 - $80 per month | |
Quote | |
Free - $150 pounds per annum |
What is the Best SEO Audit Software?
The best SEO audit software needs to perform the following tasks:
- Find broken links
- Find duplicate content issues
- Find 301, 302 redirects and redirect chains
- Find server status of pages
- Return Meta Titles and Descriptions and highlight missing Titles and Descriptions
- Determine keyword densities
- Determine LSI
- Determine toxic backlinks
What is Google SEO tools?
Google SEO tools is referring to Google Search Console. I’ve highlighted some of the important tasks you can achieve with the tools available in Google Search Console:
- Search Appearance – see structured data on your site and highlights any errors, data highlighter enables markup of structured data on your website, HTML improvements highlights duplicate meta titles and descriptions.
- Search Traffic – search analytics enables you to see clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for queries that are triggering for your website, links to your site enables you to see the backlinks coming into your website, internal links shows the internal links and manual actions tells you whether there are any manual actions.
- Crawl – enables you to see crawl errors and stats, fetch as Google and submit a new page to Google, test your robots.txt file and add a sitemap.
- Security issues – tells you whether Google has found malware or viruses on your website.
What to Expect From Free SEO Audits
There’s free SEO software that can do a pretty good job of auditing your website.
For example, siteliner.com will crawl through your site and indicate duplicate content issues, thin content, broken links etc
If you know what you’re doing then there are a lot of free SEO tools that can help you audit your website yourself.
Some SEO firms will send through a free audit – they’ll do this by running your website through their SEO tools which automatically generates an audit report for them.
So you can expect to get some good insight from a free SEO audit.
But what you won’t get is an expert SEO telling you their in-house SEO audit process to identify issues with your SEO and their plan to fix them.
How do you Audit a Website?
In order to audit a website you have to understand what problems can occur and how to fix them.
My advice is to find a free SEO audit checklist
When you don’t understand something on the checklist, do some research on Google to educate yourself what it means.
Here are some things you’ll want to check when you audit your website:
- Look for missing/duplicate meta title and description tags
- Look for indexing issues – either thin content being indexed or important pages not being indexed
- Look for duplicate content issues
- Look for toxic/ spammy backlinks
- Check user metrics like bounce rates & time on site
- Check mobile friendliness
- Check page load speeds
Is SEO Free?
Ultimately SEO is not free as it will either take your time or money to rank in the search engines.
To explore this concept further let’s look at what it takes to rank in the search engines.
Firstly you’ll need to produce high quality content.
In theory, you can produce content yourself and therefore you could say that SEO is free.
But time is money and therefore there is a cost which is the time it takes you to produce the content yourself.
On the other hand you could hire a writer to produce the content for you but then there will be a cost.
Second you’ll need to get high quality links.
Once again in theory you could build high quality links yourself but once again this would take up your time.
On the other hand you could buy high quality links which will cost you.
So really SEO is not free, it has a cost in terms of time or money.
Ultimately the cost of SEO is dependant on how much you value your time!
How to Perform an SEO Audit?
Here are some steps on how to perform an SEO audit:
- Check the site using the site command at Google (site:domain.com)
- Check for issues in Google Search Console (error messages, 404 pages, indexing issues, security problems)
- Check for issues in Google Analytics (high bounce rates, low time on site, low traffic)
- Check a sitemap has been generated
- Check the robots.txt file for indexing issues
- Check backlinks in a tool like moz explorer, or ahrefs and look for low quality links
- Observe the sites navigation and check site is easy to navigate
- Check the mobile version of the website
- Look for keyword cannibalisation issues
- Look at cross linking and siloing
- Check posts are easy to share on social media
- Review redirects and redirect chains
- Check page load speed and fix issues
- Check for duplicate content issues
- Look for duplicate or missing titles and descriptions and fix them
How Can I Do SEO Yourself?
My advice for those wanting to know how to do SEO yourself is to sign up to a SEO course on Udemy.
Here are a few that are highly rated:
The Complete SEO Guide to Ranking Local Business Websites
Complete SEO Training With Top SEO Expert Peter Kent!
Complete WordPress SEO Course 2018+SEO Audit Checklist
#1 way to rank in Google SEO: Link building (backlinks)
An alternative to learning how to do SEO yourself is to find cheap SEO service providers that offer white label services.
Here are a few that I recommend:
How Do I Start with SEO?
The answer to this question depends on whether you’re wanting to learn SEO or whether you want to start implementing SEO and want to know the quickest way to get results.
If you’re wanting to learn SEO then the quickest way to start is to sign up to a SEO course on Udemy.
Here are some SEO courses to consider:
The Complete SEO Guide to Ranking Local Business Websites
Complete SEO Training With Top SEO Expert Peter Kent!
Complete WordPress SEO Course 2018+SEO Audit Checklist
#1 way to rank in Google SEO: Link building (backlinks)
If you’re wanting to implement SEO then the quickest way to start is to use white label SEO services.
Here are some white label services to consider:
2019 SEO Technical Audit Prices - SEO Experts
Professional SEO experts have spent years or even decades honing their skills.
They use a combination of paid SEO tools, their experience and their proprietary processes.
High quality, technical SEO audits from experienced SEO professionals cost thousands of dollars.
Check out the below resources to find out technical SEO audit pricing in 2018:
Service | Price |
---|---|
495 - 1,995 pounds | |
$2,000 - $5,000 | |
$11,900 | |
$3,000 - $11,000 |
How Much do you Pay for an SEO Audit?
How much you should pay for an SEO audit depends on:
- the complexity of your website,
- the professional skill of the SEO expert performing the audit and
- the time it takes them to complete the audit.
The audit of a small local business should cost a lot less than the audit of a complex ecommerce store.
You can expect an experienced SEO professional to charge at least US$50 per hour.
A small local business with less than 50 pages should take between 5-10 hours to audit.
As the website becomes more complex the pricing is more difficult. If the SEO finds issues, they may take more time investigating them.
I’ve seen SEO audits priced based on the number of webpages but a lot of SEO professional just give a fixed price.
What is a SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is an in-depth process of looking into technical factors that may prevent a website from ranking highly in the search engines.
Below are some of the factors that are looked at when doing a technical SEO audit:
- Check the site using the site command at Google (site:domain.com)
- Check for issues in Google Search Console (error messages, 404 pages, indexing issues, security problems)
- Check for issues in Google Analytics (high bounce rates, low time on site, low traffic)
- Check a sitemap has been generated
- Check the robots.txt file for indexing issues
- Check backlinks in a tool like moz explorer, or ahrefs and look for low quality links
- Observe the sites navigation and check site is easy to navigate
- Check the mobile version of the website
- Look for keyword cannibalisation issues
- Look at cross linking and siloing
- Check posts are easy to share on social media
- Review redirects and redirect chains
- Check page load speed and fix issues
- Check for duplicate content issues
- Look for duplicate or missing titles and descriptions and fix them
How Long Does it Take to See Results from SEO?
Statistically SEO has one of the best ROI’s of any marketing medium.
However, asking how long it takes to see results from SEO is a very difficult question to answer as there are so many factors that are involved.
It all depends on your expectations and what you want to achieve.
If your expectation is that you want to rank for a head term – such as SEO – then my answer is that it’s going to take you a very long time and lots of money to see any results from SEO – the reality is that you may never rank for this term.
However, if your expectation is that you would like to rank for long tail keywords such as how long does it take to see results from SEO then you could see results in a very short time frame.
Here are a number of factors that determine how long it could take to see results from SEO:
- The search volume of the keyword
- The cost per click of the keyword
- The on-page optimisation rates of the pages ranking for the keyword
- The age of the websites competing for the keyword
- The pagerank and page authority of the pages ranking for the keyword
- The popularity as measured by bounce rate, time on site and direct traffic