Technical SEO Services: What It Actually Costs
What drives the price, indicative bands from a small single-language site to a large multilingual migration, the difference between an audit and a retainer, and how to tell a real audit from a tool export with a logo on it.
Why this page is about cost
Most technical SEO pages tell you what the service is. This one tells you what it costs, because that is the question people actually type, and because almost nobody answers it honestly. The usual pattern is a page that promises a "bespoke quote" and a phone number, which tells a buyer nothing about whether the work is a three-thousand or a thirty-thousand pound decision.
So: real ranges, on this page, with the caveat that they are indicative market ranges rather than quotes. Technical SEO pricing is genuinely wide, because the work is genuinely variable, and a single number quoted before anyone has looked at your site is a sales figure rather than an estimate.
What actually drives the price
Eight variables explain almost all of the variation between two quotes for "a technical SEO audit".
Site size and page count
The crawlable URL count sets the floor on effort. Fifty thousand URLs need log-file analysis, segmentation and crawl-budget work. Five hundred URLs do not.
Platform and stack
A standard content-managed site with clean templates is faster to diagnose than a headless build, a heavily customised storefront or an ERP-driven site where the markup is generated by the application.
Number of templates
Template count matters more than page count. A 50,000-URL site with five templates is a smaller job than a 2,000-URL site with forty distinct layouts, because every template needs its own diagnosis and fix.
Whether a dev team will ship the fixes
A document handed to an able in-house team is far cheaper than the same findings plus the implementation. It also changes who is accountable when a fix does not work.
Migration involvement
Migrations add redirect mapping, pre-launch validation, post-launch monitoring and, if it goes wrong, recovery work. This is the single most expensive line item on most technical engagements.
Locales and languages
Every added locale multiplies template checks, hreflang pair validation, currency and tax wording, and the risk that a localised page is competing with its own translation.
Audit only, or audit and execute
Delivering findings is a bounded piece of work. Executing them is a project with dependencies, release cycles and re-testing. Always establish which one is being priced.
Access and data quality
Server log access, Search Console and analytics access, a working staging environment and a CMS that permits template edits all reduce cost. Their absence converts straightforward work into archaeology.
Indicative price bands
These are indicative UK market ranges, exclusive of VAT, published so you can budget rather than guess. They are not quotes, and a reputable supplier will not treat them as one. Expect genuine quotes to land anywhere inside these bands, and expect the top of a band to be justified by specifics rather than by adjectives.
| Engagement | Typical shape | Indicative range (ex VAT) |
|---|---|---|
| Focused technical audit | Small single-language site, up to roughly 500 URLs, no log-file analysis | £600 – £1,500 |
| Full technical audit | Mid-size site, 500 to 5,000 URLs, one language, dev team available | £1,500 – £4,000 |
| Deep audit | 5,000+ URLs, JavaScript rendering, server log analysis, faceted navigation | £4,000 – £9,000 |
| Enterprise audit | 100,000+ URLs, multiple markets, multiple platforms or a legacy stack | £9,000 – £25,000+ |
| Implementation retainer | We ship the prioritised fix list and re-test it, over several months | £900 – £3,000 per month |
| Migration, single language | Like-for-like move, redirect map, pre and post validation | £3,000 – £8,000 |
| Migration, multilingual or platform change | Replatforming, URL restructuring, locale work, redirect management at scale | £8,000 – £20,000+ |
| Individual deliverables | Structured data implementation; information architecture and crawl-depth rebuild | £1,500 – £6,000; £4,000 – £12,000 |
| Day rate, senior UK agency | Use this to sanity-check any retainer: fee divided by rate equals hours | £500 – £1,200 per day |
The most useful arithmetic on this page is in the last row. Divide any monthly retainer by the day rate and you have the maximum number of senior hours you can possibly be receiving. A £1,200 monthly engagement at £600 a day is two days of work a month. If a proposal at that level promises a full audit, structured data, content and link building, the hours do not exist and something is being skipped. Ask for the hours, ask who does the work, and ask what the supplier will refuse to do.
Audit or retainer: two different products
A technical audit (one-off)
A bounded piece of analysis with a written output. Buy this when you need to know what is wrong, when you have a capable team to fix it, or when you are deciding whether to replatform.
- What you should receive: the crawl dataset, not just a summary of it.
- A prioritised fix list where each item names the URL, the tag or header, the observed value, the consequence of leaving it and the effort to fix it.
- Indexation analysis: what is indexed, what you intended to be indexed, and where the two differ.
- Rendering and JavaScript diagnosis, if the site depends on it.
- Core Web Vitals findings with causes attached, not just scores.
- Canonical, pagination, parameter and internal link architecture review.
- A walkthrough call, and a defined window in which we re-check the fixes.
A retainer (ongoing)
Buy this when the list is long, the fixes need sequencing across releases, or nobody internally owns technical SEO. A retainer is execution capacity, and it should be priced as time.
- What you should receive: fixes actually shipped, with evidence, against the agreed list.
- A monthly report of what changed, what was tested, and what it moved.
- Regression monitoring, so a template release does not quietly undo three months of work.
- Direct liaison with your developers, in their language and their tracker.
- Re-crawls that diff against the previous state rather than starting from a blank report.
- An honest statement of what was not done and why.
Two things worth knowing before you buy either. An audit nobody implements is an expense rather than an investment, so if you have no development capacity, price the implementation in from the start. And a retainer that guarantees rankings is not a technical SEO retainer, because technical work removes obstacles rather than manufacturing demand. If your problem is that nobody wants the product, no amount of crawl hygiene will fix it, and the audit should say so.
How to tell a real audit from a templated tool export
Most "technical SEO audits" sold at the low end of the market are the output of a crawler, exported to a document, with a cover page added. That is not worthless, but it is not analysis, and it is why so many businesses have paid for three audits and fixed nothing.
The tell is specificity. A real finding names the URL, the tag, the observed value and the consequence. Here is what a genuine finding looks like:
URL: /fr/nos-services
Finding: points at /en/our-services,
which is a different language version, not a duplicate.
Consequence: the French page cannot be indexed in its own right, so it
will never rank for French queries however good it is.
hreflang cannot fix this: the canonical has to be
self-referencing for a genuinely localised page.
Fix: Make the canonical self-referencing; keep hreflang for pairing.
Effort: Template change, one line, plus a re-crawl to confirm.
And here is what a tool export looks like:
- Improve page speed (score: 62/100) - Add missing meta descriptions (14 pages) - Enable compression - Fix 3 broken links - Your site could rank better with more content
Nothing in the second list is wrong, and none of it is actionable at a level a developer can work from. It has no URLs, no evidence, no consequence and no sense of priority. A useful test before you commission: ask for two or three findings from a similar site, redacted, and check whether each one survives the question "which URL, which tag, and what happens if we do nothing?"
Three further checks. Does the report show the actual HTML, headers or log lines it is reasoning from, or only scores? Was the crawl authenticated, so that logged-in and staging states were seen? And does the audit rule anything out? A real one will tell you which of your suspicions do not matter, and will say when the honest answer is that your problem is content, not technical debt.
How we approach it, and why a team in Rabat is in your working day
Technical SEO is the part of search that has a correct answer. A page either renders or it does not. A canonical either points where it should or it does not. That makes it a good fit for a team working remotely, because the deliverable is a document and a set of shipped fixes rather than a promise to be available at nine in the morning.
Our first engagement is a fixed-scope audit with a fixed price and a written deliverable. You can implement it yourself, hand it to your developer, or ask us to. If the honest finding is that your problem is content or links rather than anything technical, the audit will say that rather than bill you for work you do not need.
The price is scoped after that audit, not before it. We do not publish a package price for technical SEO, because a number quoted before anyone has seen your crawl, your templates and your release process would be invented. Tell us the domain and the three things that worry you, and the scope comes back in writing.
Why a Morocco-based team sits inside the UK working day. Morocco runs UTC+0/+1. The United Kingdom runs UTC+0 in winter and UTC+1 in summer. That is at most one hour apart, all year. When you raise something at ten on a Tuesday morning, an engineer reads it at ten on a Tuesday morning: not an overnight queue, and not a 6am call arranged to reach a team in California. We work in English, French and Arabic, which is useful if your site has a French or Arabic version that needs auditing alongside the English one.
What we will not claim. We are not a UK-registered agency and we do not have a London office. Our datacentres are in Rabat, Morocco and New York, USA, and those are the only two we operate: we have none in the UK, Ireland, the EU, Canada or Australia, and we will not imply otherwise. That does matter for one part of this work, favourably: because we run our own infrastructure, the fixes that involve servers, caching, DNS, CDN configuration and hosting are things we can actually implement rather than merely recommend, and the same team that writes the finding owns the fix. If your procurement requires a UK entity, we are not the right supplier and we will tell you so on the first call.
Frequently asked questions about technical SEO pricing
Why can't you give me a price before looking at my site?
Because the two largest cost drivers, template count and whether the fixes need executing, are invisible until someone looks. Any supplier who prices confidently from a URL and a page count is guessing, and the guess is usually replaced by a change order once the real scope appears.
Is a cheap audit worth buying at all?
Sometimes, if you go in knowing it is a crawler export. A tool export is a reasonable starting inventory for a small single-language site with an in-house developer. It is not a substitute for analysis on a large, JavaScript-heavy or multilingual site, where the expensive problems live exactly where automated tools cannot reason.
Should I choose the audit or the retainer?
Start with an audit unless you already know what is wrong and have nobody to fix it. The audit tells you the size of the problem, and it makes the retainer accountable to a list rather than to a monthly report. Buying a retainer first usually means paying for discovery at retainer rates.
How long does a technical audit take?
A focused audit on a small site is typically one to two weeks. A deep audit with log-file analysis on a large site is commonly three to five weeks, and the crawl and analysis window is usually the smaller part of that. If you need it faster, say so at scoping: rush is a scope decision, not a discount.
Do I need to give you access to my analytics and server logs?
Search Console access makes the indexation analysis dramatically better, and server logs are the only way to see what search engines actually request rather than what you assume. Analytics is useful but not essential. If you cannot grant access, the audit will be narrower, and we will say which conclusions became provisional as a result.
Can technical SEO fix a site that has no traffic?
No, and it is important to be clear about that. Technical work removes obstacles to being crawled, indexed and served quickly. It does not create demand. A site with no traffic usually has a relevance, content or authority problem, and a technical audit will identify the technical share of it honestly rather than sell you a fix that will not move the number.
Start with a fixed-scope audit
Send us your domain and your three biggest worries. You get a written, prioritised fix list that names the URL, the tag and the consequence, priced before we start and delivered in your working day. If you would rather run the site on infrastructure we control, our KVM NVMe plans start at $9.99 a month.