How Much Does Technical SEO Cost, and What Changes the Number

The Four Ways Technical SEO Gets Sold

Technical SEO is sold four ways, and the price only makes sense once you know which one is on the table. A one time audit is a report. Someone crawls your site, reads your Search Console data, and hands you a list of problems in priority order. Nobody fixes anything. An audit plus implementation includes the fixes. That is a project with a start and an end, usually eight to fourteen weeks, and it costs more because someone does the work and tests it. A monthly retainer is ongoing. It covers the first cleanup, then monitoring, checks on new pages, and whatever breaks next. Hourly or fixed project work covers one job. A migration, a speed pass on one template, or schema across a set of pages. Owners get burned most often on the first option. They buy a report, assume the fixes come with it, and find out months later that nothing shipped. Ask which of the four you are buying before you ask what it costs. The answer can change the number by five times.

You Are Paying for Hours, Not Software

Almost all of the cost is skilled hours. Tools are real but small. A crawler license and a couple of monitoring subscriptions run a few thousand a year across every client a shop has. That is not what you are paying for. Here is where the hours go on an audit of a hundred page site. Setting up and running the crawl takes two to three hours. Pulling and cleaning a year of Search Console data takes another two. The crawl output is the easy part. Reading it against the real site, deciding what actually matters, and throwing out the four hundred warnings that do not, takes ten to twenty hours. Writing the findings as instructions a developer can follow takes about ten more. That is roughly thirty to forty hours of experienced time, and that is where audit pricing comes from. When you see a two hundred dollar audit, you are looking at a tool export with a cover page. The crawl ran. The thinking did not.

Seven Things That Move a Quote Up or Down

You can estimate your own range before anyone calls you back. Page count is the obvious factor, but templates matter more. A thousand page site built from six templates is often less work than a ninety page site where every page was built by hand. Platform is next. WordPress and Shopify have known fixes and known limits. A custom build or a headless setup means every change goes through a developer. Rendering matters too. If your site draws itself with JavaScript, testing takes longer and more things break. History is the quiet one. A site that changed domains twice and got redesigned three times carries old redirects and dead URLs that all need untangling. Who ships the fixes may be the biggest lever of all. If your own developer implements the tickets, you pay for diagnosis only, and the price can drop by a third or more. Last is access. When every change waits on a corporate queue or a franchise approval, add weeks and hours to the estimate.

Ranges You Will Actually See Quoted

Here are the ranges quoted around this market, so you can tell a normal number from a strange one. A one time audit on a small site, under about a hundred pages, commonly runs from 1,500 to 3,000. A mid sized site with several templates and a messy history runs 3,000 to 7,500. Large sites go past that, sometimes well past. An audit plus the fixes, delivered as a project, often lands between 5,000 and 25,000 depending on how much shipping is involved. Ongoing monthly work usually falls between 1,000 and 5,000 a month, and the top of that range assumes the agency is also implementing. Hourly rates for experienced technical help run about 100 to 250. Two honest notes. Prices move with region and with who is doing the work, so a Southern California shop and a solo consultant elsewhere will not quote the same. And a low number is not automatically bad. A short audit from someone good, on a small clean site, can be exactly the right buy.

Where Technical SEO Money Gets Wasted

Some of this spending buys nothing, and the patterns repeat. The first is the ninety page PDF. It is a tool export with a logo on it, sorted by the tool's idea of severity, which rates a missing meta description on a thank you page the same as a canonical tag pointing your whole blog at the homepage. Nobody can act on it. The second is the retainer where nothing ships. Month after month of monitoring, reporting, and recommendations, with no changes made because the developer never got the tickets. If three months pass and you cannot name one change that went live, you are paying for a newsletter. The third is a rebuild you did not need. Sometimes a rebuild is right. Often the site is fine and four specific fixes would do it. Get a second opinion before replacing something that mostly works. The fourth is tool licenses you never open. Ask what happens to those accounts when the engagement ends.

Costs That Show Up After You Sign

A few real costs sit outside the quote and surprise people later. Developer hours are the big one. If the agency writes tickets and your developer ships them, that is time on their invoice, often ten to thirty hours across a project. Hosting is second. Some speed problems are hosting problems, and no amount of image work saves a server that takes two seconds to answer. Better hosting might add 50 to 300 a month. A content delivery network is usually cheap and sometimes free. Plugin licenses for caching or image handling run maybe a hundred a year. A staging environment may be included in your hosting or may not. Content edits are the sneaky one. When the fix for near duplicate city pages is rewriting nine of them, that is writing, and writing is billed separately almost everywhere. Ask about each of these during the quote. A shop that answers plainly is showing you how it works.

How to Compare Two Quotes That Look Nothing Alike

Two quotes for the same site can differ by four times and both be honest. The gap is almost always scope, so compare scope, not price. Ask what the deliverable is. A ranked list of issues with the affected URLs and clear acceptance criteria is a real deliverable. A file of tool warnings is not. Ask who implements. Ask what happens after the fixes ship, since verification takes weeks and someone has to watch the reports. Ask what gets measured and when it gets reported. Indexed page counts, field speed data, and impressions are the honest early measures. Calls come later. Then ask the uncomfortable question. What would you tell me not to buy? A shop willing to say your site is mostly fine, or that you need content before you need technical work, is worth more than one that finds four hundred urgent problems on every site it opens. That answer tells you more about the next year than the price does.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Google Search Central: Do You Need an SEO?(opens in a new tab) Google's own advice on hiring, including questions to ask before signing.
• Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide(opens in a new tab) The baseline work an owner can reasonably do without paying anyone.
• Google Search Console Help: Page Indexing report(opens in a new tab) The free report used to record starting numbers before work begins.
• PageSpeed Insights(opens in a new tab) Free field and lab speed data for any public page, used as a baseline.

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