Technical SEO Audit
An audit that ends in a prioritized fix list a developer can actually execute — crawl traps, indexation wounds, slow templates, broken schema — sequenced by what moves revenue, not by tool severity labels.
Most technical SEO audits are crawler exports wearing a report cover: four hundred flagged issues, no prioritization, no judgment about which twelve actually matter. The useful version is narrower and more honest — a senior reads the crawl, the Search Console data and the templates, then writes down what is broken, what it costs you, and the order to fix it.
This audit is written from the developer side of the table: the findings map to real changes — a robots rule, a canonical decision, a template split, a render-blocking chain — because the person writing it builds these fixes for WordPress, Shopify and custom stacks every week. You get the prioritized list, the expected effort per item, and the "do not touch" items that look scary and are not.
The honest limits: an audit diagnoses. It does not guarantee rankings — Google itself says nobody honestly can. What it does is remove the technical ceiling on your content and links, before you spend another dollar on either. Roughly half of audit clients hand the fix list to their own team; both paths are fine, the deliverable is written for execution either way.
What the engagement covers
- Full crawl analysis — indexation, canonicals, redirect chains, orphan pages, crawl traps
- Core Web Vitals breakdown per template, with the specific render/CSS/JS causes named
- Structured data validation — what is emitted, what Google actually parses, what is missing
- Search Console and log-shaped signals review — what gets crawled, indexed, and dropped
- Prioritized fix list: P0/P1/P2 by revenue impact, each with effort estimate and risk note
- A "leave it alone" list — scary-looking findings that are not worth touching
- Walkthrough call or async write-up, your choice — the report is written to stand alone
Honest limits
What this is deliberately not.
Not this: Ranking guarantees — nobody honest sells them; the deliverable is a prioritized technical fix list
Not this: Link building, content calendars, keyword strategizing — different work, not this engagement
Not this: Automated $99 tool exports — if a crawler dump is all you need, run the tool and skip the invoice
Not this: "SEO health" theater — monthly re-audits of a site that has not shipped the first fix list
Questions · Technical audit
Asked before building.
Published 2026 data puts freelance audits at $500–$2,000 for small sites and $1,500–$5,000 for mid-size ones; Ahrefs' survey of 439 providers found $2,501–$5,000 the most common per-project fee. This practice prices in that market — $800 to $5,000 depending on page count and template complexity — and quotes fixed, in writing, before starting.
The tool finds the issues; the audit is the judgment layer — which findings matter to your revenue, which are noise, what each fix costs in developer hours, and what order to do them in. If the crawl export alone is enough for you, run it: the report here says so explicitly when that is the honest answer.
Optionally, quoted from the fix list — never bundled blind. Industry data shows audit-plus-implementation commonly lands at $2,000–$8,000 beyond the audit for P0+P1 items. Taking the list to your own developer is equally fine; the deliverable is written to be executed by anyone.
Sites under 1,000 URLs: 3–7 working days for the audit itself. Larger or multi-template sites scale accordingly and the quote says so. The clock starts when access to the crawl, analytics and Search Console is in place.
Related: all SEO services · rate benchmarks · the vetting guide.
Also in this section
WordPress SEO · Shopify SEO · Ecommerce SEO · Local SEO · Core Web Vitals Optimization · Schema Markup Implementation · SEO-Safe Website Migration · SEO Penalty Recovery
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Written scope within two business days — deliverables, milestones, timeline, terms, price at the bottom. Compare it against anyone.