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What Is an SEO Audit?
Before we talk about how much an SEO audit costs, it’s probably a good idea to understand what this service actually is.
An SEO audit is a comprehensive diagnosis of a website’s content, structure, and performance in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
It involves technical checks (indexation, code, page structure etc.), content audit (word count, use of keywords, ease of reading, heading hierarchy), image audit (alt tags, file size and naming) and UX related review: loading speed, overall design, Conversion Rate Optimization etc.
During our SEO audit we’ll examine the following: page titles, meta descriptions, headings, URLs, keyword density, internal linking strategies, image ALT tags, anchor text links and other factors that are important for optimizing webpages.
What does the SEO Audit Cover?
For many SEO agencies, it’s just a checklist of technical issues that need addressing (and not even completely).
A website is not just keywords and backlinks though, its performance in lead generation is affected by many other elements: CTAs (Call to Action), the content itself, the use of imagery etc.
Does your website look professional? Does it look like a 10-year-old put it together?
Is your imagery gory and unpleasant? Is your content written so that your potential patients can understand or is it so expertly written that we’d need a medical degree ourselves to read it?
In all my years as an SEO consultant, I’ve seen some crazy stuff, so I try to be as thorough as possible.
This is in short what insights you’ll get;
- Domain history, authority, rankings, penalties;
- FULL technical SEO audit,
- Website scan and page-by-page performance assessment,
- Backlink profile analysis,
- Content and image quality audit,
- Design, usability, code, marketing review,
- Traffic/rankings analysis from multiple sources,
- Competitor analysis,
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Audit
- Comprehensive keyword research and mapping.
Many medical marketing agencies provide huge Word docs with many definitions, which make the audit almost look like an SEO book.
In all my years spent working with medical professionals, I understand one thing: you don’t have time to read books and most likely have better things to do than read some dry copy-pasted marketing mambo-jambo.
If words like “canonicalization“, “htaccess” and “topical map” sound foreign to you, let us perform your SEO audit, while you can focus on your work.
This is why I work with Excel reports, show you the entire checklist there, a separate website scan on another sheet, and the main issues listed in an easy-to-read format.
Because this comprehensive SEO audit report might not make sense otherwise, we always finish the project with a one-on-one video call to show you all my findings and allow you to ask questions as I present.
Although advertised as a 1 hour call, I usually instruct my clients to make room for at least 2 hours, so that we can take a deep dive into all their marketing issues and allow for enough time for the Q&A.
If needed, we schedule another extra call to go over the strategies, and this comes at no extra cost.
Which leads us to the main question:
How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?
Here, at The Medically, an SEO audit costs $750.
Other companies charge a little less, big agencies drive up the price to over $10,000.
There is no right or wrong price and I personally like to be upfront when it comes to our fees.
Marketers would say this means I leave money on the table (as I could overcharge bigger clients), but for our business model being very transparent has worked best.
I don’t believe in increasing prices just because we deal with a big company. We worked with medical businesses that got even listed on the Stock Exchange and they paid the same fee as private practices or e-commerce website owners.
Another strategy that has proven not to work in our case is to keep prices secret, so that we get you to call. Have done it in the past and wasted 30 minutes providing free strategies to leads, only to hear them say “oh, wished I could afford your prices“.
Yes, you can schedule a complimentary 30-minute call with me, no strings attached, if you find it valuable, but you also know exactly what our pricing model is and what to expect.
This way, we don’t waste your time and you don’t feel bad, having to admit that, although our prices are pretty small, they are still out of your range.
What Are the Factors that Influence the SEO Audit Price?
The cost of an SEO audit for a medical website will vary depending on the size, complexity and scope of the project.
Factors such as the number of pages, depth of content, technical architecture and other elements can influence how much time and resources are required to complete the assessment.
SEO Audit Depth and Complexity
While touching all aspects of a healthy online marketing campaign and assessing your previous SEO efforts, we do not provide page-by-page audits and don’t take 3 months to finish the work.
Based on my medical marketing experience, a comprehensive checklist and a deep dive into the most important issues we find has worked better for our clients, than a crazy extensive review, which takes months to finish and costs a fortune.
I would rather take 1 week to audit your website (which is usually our turnaround) and have you pay $750 for it than take months to finish and get you to pay 10 times more.
Even if you do have an extensive SEO budget (which you should in such a competitive niche), I’d rather spend the next 3 months cleaning up your website and getting it to rank, while the money you save from the audit can get you months of SEO work from The Medically (with our affordable SEO packages, we’d be working for you at least 4 months in that price range).
Super-extensive reports don’t get your website ranked unless you act upon those findings. It’s like going too deep into a medical diagnosis, when the patient needs medication NOW to get better and not wait for weeks, until you assess their health situation “cell by cell”.
The SEO Auditor’s Expertise
You’ll find agencies providing free SEO audits (which usually are just exported data from an SEO tool), just to get some business.
After 2 decades in the online marketing world, as an experienced SEO consultant, I don’t have to resort to these gimmicks, my audits are extremely valuable and comprehensive, so I do expect to get paid.
On the other hand, although not free, our SEO services are not too expensive, which brings us to the next point:
The Agency’s Overhead and Location
The Medically is a small healthcare marketing agency and I intend to keep it this way. We are a handful of consultants who provide the services remotely, so we don’t have fancy offices and I actually drive a Subaru 🙂
So you are not paying for a posh office, you are not paying for a luxury car, you are paying for high-quality work performed with a minimum overhead.
FAQ
Do I Need An Expert Team To Conduct An SEO Audit?
If you can personally perform a technical audit, run various SEO tools and gather data and insights, you can do it yourself.
If you don’t have premium licenses for Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, GMB Everywhere, NeuronWriter or other tools, you’ll probably want to hire an SEO expert (just paying for these would get your costs close to our SEO audit fees, while also having to waste many hours to do the work itself).
Is An SEO Audit The First Step In The SEO Process?
Yes. Just like you don’t prescribe medication just because a patient tells you they have a headache, I don’t prescribe any SEO strategies, without knowing exactly why your website fails to bring you leads and patient bookings.
