SEO Audit Service: A Fix List Your Web Person Can Start Monday

Most SEO audit service reports are written for the person who paid for them, not for the person who has to fix things. You get a score out of 100, a pie chart, and 140 "issues" sorted by color. Your web developer opens it, sighs, and closes it again.

I write audits the other way around. Every finding names the exact URL, file or setting, says why it matters in plain English, and says how to fix it. It's ranked by impact, so your web person knows what to do first on Monday morning.

The other difference is depth. A lot of audits are a crawler export with a logo on top. I also check the server: robots.txt responses, redirect chains, response headers, and the access logs that show what Google actually requested. That's where the expensive problems usually hide. If you'd like me to look at your site, tell me about it in the audit questionnaire. I reply with a plan and a fixed quote within one business day.

Starting at $750 for sites under 100 pages, or $1,500 for sites with 100 to 1,000 pages (that tier includes a roadmap). Both cover the crawl, indexation, speed, server and redirect checks, and a prioritized fix list.

What's in my technical SEO audit

• A full crawl. Every URL a crawler can find, checked for status codes, titles, canonicals (a tag that names the "real" copy of a page), noindex tags, broken links and orphan pages (pages nothing links to).
• Indexation review. I compare what you want indexed with what Google actually indexed, using Google Search Console (Google's free dashboard for site owners). Gaps in either direction are findings.
• Speed and Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are Google's three page-experience measurements: loading, responsiveness and visual stability. I check real-user data where it exists and lab tests where it doesn't.
• Server and redirect checks. robots.txt responses, redirect chains, HTTP headers, HTTPS and www handling, and a sample of your server access logs if your host provides them.
• A prioritized fix list. One row per finding: what's wrong, where, why it matters, how to fix it, rough effort, and who should do it (developer, content writer or you).
• A roadmap (100 to 1,000 page tier). The same list, sequenced into phases, so a larger site can fix things in a sensible order without breaking anything.

How the audit works

1. You fill in the questionnaire. Site address, platform (WordPress, Shopify, custom), rough page count, and what made you want an audit now.
2. I reply with a plan and a fixed quote within one business day.
3. You share access. Search Console and GA4 as read-only users. Hosting or Cloudflare read access, or simply a few days of raw access logs, if you can get them. I don't need to change anything on your site to audit it.
4. I run the audit. A site under 100 pages typically takes five to seven business days. Larger sites typically take two to three weeks. Very slow servers, JavaScript-heavy builds and missing log access are what usually stretch it.
5. You get the report. A written fix list in a shared doc or spreadsheet your developer can turn into tickets. If they have questions about a finding, they can email me.

The server-side checks most audits skip

Crawlers like Screaming Frog are great, and I use one. But a crawler sees your site as a visitor does. It doesn't see what your server tells Google on a bad day, or which bots your firewall quietly turned away. These are the checks I add on top.

robots.txt that fails at the wrong moment

robots.txt (a small file telling crawlers what they may visit) is usually fine. Until it returns a server error. Google's documentation says that if robots.txt returns a 5xx error, Google stops crawling the site for the first 12 hours, then uses the last good copy for up to 30 days. A flaky host or a misconfigured firewall rule can pause your whole site's crawling without a single visible error on the homepage.

Redirect chains and headers

Every hop in a redirect chain (old URL to new URL to newer URL) slows crawlers and visitors. Google says Googlebot generally follows up to 10 redirect hops and that indexed URLs returning server errors for too long are eventually dropped. I trace chains from old http, non-www and trailing-slash variants, because those are where three-hop chains tend to grow.

Headers matter too. An X-Robots-Tag (a noindex instruction sent in the HTTP header instead of the page code) is invisible in your browser, but Google obeys it for PDFs, images and pages alike. A header left behind from a staging site can hide pages for months.

Here are three of the read-only checks, so you can see the level I work at:

# Read-only. Safe to run from any computer with curl. Replace example.com with your site.
# 1) robots.txt should answer 200 (or 404). A 5xx or a login page here is a red flag.
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com/robots.txt

# 2) Show every hop of a redirect chain with its status code. One hop is the goal.
curl -sIL http://example.com/old-page | grep -iE "^(HTTP|location)"

# 3) Look for hidden noindex headers and odd caching on the homepage.
curl -sI https://example.com/ | grep -iE "x-robots-tag|cache-control"

Who's really crawling you

Server logs show every request, including the ones Google made. But plenty of bots call themselves "Googlebot" and aren't. Google's own method is a reverse DNS lookup followed by a forward lookup, and the hostname must end in googlebot.com, google.com or googleusercontent.com.

# Verify a "Googlebot" IP from your logs. The second lookup must return the same IP.
# Changes nothing. If the names don't match, that visitor is pretending.
host 66.249.66.1
host crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com

This matters in both directions. Fake Googlebots can burn server resources. And a security plugin or firewall that blocks the real one costs you rankings while every dashboard looks normal. I cross-check the logs with the Crawl Stats report in Search Console, which shows robots.txt fetch failures, DNS problems and server connectivity over the past 90 days.

Speed, measured honestly

For responsiveness, Google's guidance is that a good INP (Interaction to Next Paint, how fast a page reacts to a tap or click) is 200 milliseconds or less for at least 75% of real visits. I use field data from PageSpeed Insights when your site has enough traffic, and I say plainly when it doesn't. If speed turns out to be your biggest problem, the fixes themselves are a separate job: my site speed optimization service handles caching, images and scripts.

Who this audit is for (and who it isn't)

This is a good fit if you run a site with roughly 20 to 1,000 pages and something feels off:

• Pages you care about aren't indexed, or Google indexes junk you never meant to publish
• Traffic slid after a redesign, migration or host change
• Your developer wants a clear list, not a sales deck
• You're about to hire an SEO and want an honest baseline first
• You've had an "audit" before and couldn't act on it

It isn't for you if your site has five pages and launched last month. The free website check covers the basics for a site that size. It also isn't the right first step if traffic fell off a cliff on a specific date. That needs root-cause work, which is what traffic drop diagnosis is for.

And if you're handy, you can do a lot yourself: Search Console's Pages report plus the free version of Screaming Frog (it crawls up to 500 URLs) will surface most obvious problems. My technical SEO checklist walks through it.

Technical SEO audit pricing

Audit prices vary a lot, mostly because the word "audit" covers anything from an automated export to weeks of analysis. Backlinko's survey of 300+ SEO professionals puts simple audits under $1,000 and in-depth site audits at $1,000 to $5,000. For what each price band usually leaves out, see my breakdown of what an audit at each price includes. Here's mine, as of October 2026:

Sites over 1,000 pages, online stores with faceted navigation (filter pages that multiply URLs) and multilingual sites get a custom quote first. All prices are in USD, and Canadian clients can pay in CAD at the day's exchange rate. Everything else is on the pricing page.

Why hand it to me

I've spent 20+ years in search marketing, and a good part of it doing technical SEO audits from the server up: cPanel/WHM, Plesk, Cloudflare and Linux setups, .htaccess and regex (pattern-matching) redirects, and server-side and browser caching. So when the audit says "fix this redirect rule," I can usually write the rule, too.

I've also trained and led junior SEO specialists, which taught me to write findings someone else can act on without a meeting. That's the whole point of this audit.

You get the same person from questionnaire to final report. The one who ran the crawl is the one who answers your developer's emails.

SEO audit service FAQ

How much does an SEO audit service cost?

At BigRed, a technical SEO audit starts at $750 for sites under 100 pages and $1,500 for sites with 100 to 1,000 pages, including a roadmap. Industry surveys put simple audits under $1,000 and in-depth audits between $1,000 and $5,000. The price difference usually comes down to whether a person checks the server, logs and indexation, or the report is a tool export.

How long does a technical SEO audit take?

For a site under 100 pages, typically five to seven business days after I get access. Sites with 100 to 1,000 pages typically take two to three weeks. Slow servers, JavaScript-heavy sites and missing log access stretch the timeline, and I'll tell you before I start if I expect that. The quote itself comes within one business day of your questionnaire.

What's the difference between a technical SEO audit and a website SEO audit?

A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can crawl, render and index your pages: status codes, redirects, robots.txt, canonicals, speed and server behavior. A website SEO audit sometimes means the broader picture, adding content quality, keywords and links. Mine is technical first, with notes on obvious content problems I see along the way. Content strategy is a separate engagement.

Do you fix the problems too?

The audit is the diagnosis and a fix list. It doesn't include implementation, because many clients already have a developer. If you don't, I can quote the fixes separately once you've seen the list. Simple items like redirect rules, robots.txt and header changes are often quick for me to do myself, since I work on the server side every day.

What access do you need for an SEO audit?

Read-only access to Google Search Console and GA4 at minimum. Hosting or Cloudflare read access, or a few days of raw server access logs, makes the audit much better, because that's where the server-side findings come from. I don't need admin access to WordPress or your theme, and I don't change anything on the site during the audit.

Next step

If you want a fix list your web person can start on Monday, send me your site through the audit questionnaire. I'll come back with a plan and a fixed price, and the report will be written for the person doing the work.