An audit is a diagnosis with a document attached. It is not a retainer, and it is not a ranking forecast. Philippine buyers still meet it as a line on a menu, sometimes free, sometimes bundled, sometimes quoted as a serious one-off. The public market for a proper one-off audit commonly sits around 20,000 to 60,000 PHP. That band is what other firms advertise and what many independent specialists charge. It is not a Bright Forge rate, and it is not a claim that every URL belongs in the middle of the band.
The fee should buy named problems, named URLs, and a sequence of work a team can start. If the output is a 40 page PDF of definitions, you bought a template. If the output is a short list of blockers with owners and expected effect, you bought an audit.
Free audits exist. They are usually a sales visit. A crawl of the public homepage, a few tool screenshots, and a call. That can still be useful as a first look. It is not the same product as a paid diagnosis of indexation, templates, local listings and the path from landing page to enquiry.
What The 20,000 To 60,000 PHP Band Usually Buys
At the lower end of that public band you are often buying a structured look at a small site. Crawl of the main templates, title and heading review, a pass through Search Console if access is granted, a comment on the contact path, and a written note. Enough to decide whether a retainer is even the right next purchase.
Towards 60,000 PHP the market is usually pricing more pages, more templates, or more depth. Ecommerce catalogues, multi location service businesses, migrations, and sites with a messy history take longer to crawl and longer to explain. The upper end can also buy competitor page inventories, log sampling where it is available, and a 90 day plan that a developer can work from.
Above that band, one-off work starts to look like a project rather than an audit: content inventories across hundreds of URLs, international architecture, or recovery from a previous vendor. Those jobs should be quoted as projects. Calling them audits so they fit a familiar word is how the document never ends.
Below 20,000 PHP you can still buy a useful hour. A specialist on a call, watching you click through Search Console, can save a lot of fiction. You should not expect a full written artefact at that fee, and you should not pretend a checklist generated by a tool is the same as either.
What Changes The Fee On A Real Site
Size is the obvious multiplier. Twenty brochure pages and four thousand catalogue URLs do not take the same crawl, the same sampling, or the same write-up. A vendor who quotes the same number for both has not thought about the second site.
Access is the quiet multiplier. With Search Console, analytics, the CMS and a Google Business Profile login, the auditor can see what Google sees and what users do. Without them, the audit is a review of public HTML. That is still worth something. It is worth less, and it should cost less or come with a clear caveat that indexation claims are inferred.
Implementation reality changes the document. If a developer is available two days a month, the audit should produce tickets in an order that fits that window. If legal must approve copy, the audit should not recommend a case study engine. A diagnosis that ignores constraints will be accurate and unused.
Local presence changes the scope. A service-area business with one profile is a contained review. Five branches with inconsistent names, missing services and review gaps is a programme inside the audit. Maps and the website have to be read together or the recommendations will fight.
History changes risk. A redesign, a migration, a burst of city pages, or a bulk link campaign all leave residue. Finding that residue is part of the job. An audit that never asks what was tried last year will repeat it.
Competition changes how much page-level comparison is worth doing. You do not need a 50 page competitor report. You do need to know whether the pages that win the jobs you want are winning on completeness, proof, speed, or simply on being about the query.
Cheap Audits And What They Skip
Tool-only audits skip judgement. A crawler will list 800 missing alt attributes and four blocked resources. It will not tell you that the category template is the reason the products cannot rank, or that the enquiry form sits below a newsletter gate. The cheap artefact is a sorted export. The expensive part, relatively, is deciding which ten items would change the next quarter.
Homepage-only audits skip templates. Many Philippine business sites look fine on the home URL and fall apart on service, location, category or pagination templates. If the auditor never sampled those, the document is a brochure review.
No-access audits skip indexation truth. You cannot see coverage, query pages, or the effect of a prior noindex from the public site alone. You can guess. Guessing is how a business spends a retainer on content while half the money pages are excluded.
Sales audits skip refusals. The document ends with a 12 month package. That can be the right commercial next step. It should not be the only finding. A diagnosis that never says "do not do this yet" is a pitch.
AI summary audits skip the site. Pasting the homepage into a model and asking for SEO advice produces fluent paragraphs about meta tags and keywords. It does not open robots.txt, it does not compare canonicals across a parameter, and it does not notice that the phone number in the footer disagrees with the listing. Fluency is not fieldwork.
What You Should Receive In The File
Named URLs. Not "improve on-page optimisation". The service page, the category template, the location URL, the blog post that cannibalises the offer.
Named owners. Developer, writer, whoever controls the Business Profile, whoever owns legal sign-off. An audit without owners is a wish list.
A sequence. Indexation before content volume. Conversion path on the highest intent URLs before a new blog idea. Local consistency before a review generation stunt. Sequence is the difference between a campaign and a pile.
Evidence. Screenshots or exports from Search Console, crawl samples, live title tags, and the current enquiry path. You should be able to reopen the evidence without the vendor in the room.
A stop list. Pages not to publish, link types not to buy, claims the brand cannot make, and tools you do not need to rent this quarter.
What a proper SEO audit should include is the same list from the quality side. Cost only makes sense after you know the artefact. Paying 50,000 PHP for a template and 25,000 PHP for a URL-level plan are not comparable purchases.
You should also receive a conversation. A file dumped in Drive with no walkthrough will be skimmed and ignored. An hour on the findings is part of the product. If it is not in the quote, ask for it.
When To Pay For An Audit Before A Retainer
Pay first when you do not know whether the site can be crawled and indexed cleanly. Publishing into a blocked site is a way to set fire to a content budget.
Pay first when a previous vendor left residue. You need a map of what to unwind before you fund more of the same.
Pay first when two salespeople are quoting wildly different retainers for the same URL. The audit is how you find out which quote was guessing.
Pay first when the business is about to migrate, redesign, or change CMS. The cheapest time to catch a mapping error is before the cutover, not in the quarter after traffic drops.
You can skip a paid audit when the site is small, the owner already knows the pages that matter, and a specialist can work in the CMS from week one. Even then, month one of a retainer should still produce a written diagnosis. If it does not, you are buying activity.
Do not skip the audit because a vendor offered it free if the free version is the entire relationship. A complimentary look can qualify the work. It should not replace the document you need when the site is large or damaged.
How To Brief The Auditor So The Fee Is Not Wasted
Send the commercial job. What you sell, to whom, in which geography, and which enquiries are worth having. An auditor who does not know that will optimise for traffic.
Send the URLs that already matter. Homepage, money services, location or category templates, and any page the sales team already uses. Missing pages are a brief item too. Do not ask for rankings on a query that has no URL.
Send constraints. CMS lock, developer window, legal limits, languages, and whether prices can be published. Constraints change recommendations. They should not appear after the PDF is done.
Send history. Redesign dates, prior retainers, known drops, link campaigns, and anything already tried. The auditor should not discover your last agency by accident in a backlink export.
Send access, or say clearly that you cannot. Then agree what the audit can and cannot claim.
SEO audit services should start from that brief, not from a generic crawl preset. If the vendor cannot change the work after reading your note, you are buying their template at your fee.
How To Tell The Quote Matches The Site
Ask how they will sample the site. Homepage plus a handful of templates is enough for a small brochure. It is not enough for faceted ecommerce.
Ask whether Search Console is in scope, and what happens if you cannot grant it.
Ask what the written output looks like. Request a redacted sample if they have one. Look for URLs and sequence, not for length.
Ask who does the work. A senior specialist writing the findings is a different product from a junior filling a checklist that a salesperson will present.
Ask what is out of scope. Content writing, link outreach, and implementation may be separate. That is fine. Mixing them into the audit fee without hours attached is how the diagnosis gets thinner.
If two quotes both sit inside 20,000 to 60,000 PHP, pick the one whose method matches your templates and your constraints. The cheaper of the two is not automatically the worse artefact, and the dearer is not automatically deeper. The sample and the brief decide.
After you have the file, give it a job. Tickets, a 90 day plan, or a decision not to spend yet. An audit that sits in email has the same commercial value as no audit. The fee was for a decision, not for a PDF.
If you want a private diagnosis of the current site rather than a template labelled as an audit, send the URL and the commercial target. The reply should say whether a one-off look is enough, what access is required, and which blockers would have to be named before anyone should sell you a year of work.
