[ Strategy ]
How Much Does a Website Audit Cost in Australia?
[ Strategy ]
A website audit in Australia costs anywhere from nothing to several thousand dollars, and the spread is not random. Free tools scan your code in seconds. A full audit of your whole online presence is $550. A page-by-page deep read of your website is $850. Agency-scale audits commonly start around $2,000, and most will not tell you the number until you book a call. This article lays out every lane, what each one buys, and the situations where you should keep your money.
One position to declare before the numbers: I sell two of the audits below. Every price on this page is published, so you can weigh me against the whole market with nothing hidden.
Price follows two things: how much of your presence gets checked, and how much judgement comes back with the findings. A scan checks your code. A full audit reads your business: whether your pages earn trust, whether your Google Business Profile agrees with your website, and whether ChatGPT and Gemini name you when customers ask. That wider check has a name, an online presence audit, and it is the version most small businesses actually need first. Scans are cheap because judgement is the expensive part, and judgement is the part that changes what you do next.
Four factors move a site audit quote in Australia, whoever you buy from:
You will also see audits sold in slices: a website speed audit, a technical SEO audit, a usability or UX audit, a website conversion audit. Slices make sense when you already know which part hurts. The wide and deep looks exist for when you do not, which is most of the time.
| The lane | What you pay | Turnaround | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tools | $0 | Seconds | Google's PageSpeed Insights scores speed and technical basics; my free Found Score checker scores findability in ten questions. No judgement, no priorities. |
| The Found Report | $550 flat | Five business days | The wide look: an online presence audit of ten individually run checks across your website, your Google Business Profile, your socials and live AI tests, scored out of 100 with a fix for every finding. |
| The Full Picture | $850 flat | One week | The deep look: every page of your website read one by one against Google's published guidance, with the verdict and the plan. Built for rebuild-or-fix decisions and agency second opinions. |
| Agency audit | Commonly $2,000 to $3,000+ | Varies | Breadth varies widely, and you usually sit through a discovery call before you learn the price. |
Between these lanes sit half-lanes worth knowing about: fixed-price mini audits around the $300 mark, freelancers by the hour, and audit software that agencies white-label and resell, which is why some expensive audits arrive looking suspiciously like a tool export. On dedicated SEO audit costs, the market runs wider still: Ahrefs' 2024 survey of 439 SEO providers found $2,501 to $5,000 US the most common per-project fee, with freelancers averaging about $72 US an hour and consultants $171. What most businesses actually pay sits lower: in WebFX's survey of 250 businesses, 43 percent paid between $101 and $750 US per audit. Against those numbers, a flat $550 or $850 with the scope published is not the premium option. It is the transparent one, sitting inside the band most businesses really pay.
Both Saltline reports are delivered online anywhere in Australia, and each ends with a straight recommendation, including, when the evidence says so, that you do not need my services yet.
The honest timeline runs on how much reading happens. An automated scan finishes before your coffee does, because nothing is being read, only measured. A full audit takes days: your report is worked on across up to five business days for the wide look, and up to one week for the page-by-page deep look, because your pages are opened and read the way a customer would read them, your profiles are checked against your website, and the AI assistants are asked about you live. If someone promises a full audit in an hour, you now know exactly what you would be buying.
Now for the part that costs me money to write. Skip the paid audit if your website gets almost no visitors and you already know why, for example, it is brand new; spend on visibility first. Skip it if you already have a specific, known problem, a broken form does not need an $850 diagnosis, it needs a fix at an hourly rate. And run the free lane first either way: a free website health audit in ten questions takes two minutes and tells many businesses most of what a paid audit would open with. Where the paid lanes earn their fee is the moment real money hangs on the answer.
Here is that moment in numbers. A custom redesign in Australia commonly lands between $3,000 and $8,000, and agency builds run well past $20,000. Put an $850 deep audit against a $15,000 rebuild and you are paying under six percent of the decision to find out, with evidence, whether the rebuild is even needed. If the answer is no, the audit just paid for itself seventeen times over. My guide to what website design should cost covers the rebuild side of that maths, and if your traffic is fine but nothing converts, start with the five leaks behind traffic but no sales, then the free AI visibility self-check, before spending anything.
What that looks like in practice. A recent Full Picture client, a family business handed from mother to daughter, was running on a WordPress site more than fifteen years old: seventy-seven pages, many of them near-duplicates or thin gateway pages of the kind Google's spam policies now target directly as doorway abuse. The audit read every one. Strictly, only twenty-three pages needed rebuilding, forty-seven could be fixed in place and seven merged, and a payment error was showing publicly on the busiest booking form. The new owner weighed that evidence and chose a full rebuild anyway: the brand was moving to her own idea of luxury, and fifteen-year-old foundations were not worth carrying into it. That is what the $850 actually buys. Not a verdict imposed on you, but every page judged and priced so a five-figure decision is made with open eyes, and a smaller, stronger site comes out the other side.
Founder & digital marketing specialist at Saltline Studio, Port Macquarie. Helping small businesses grow with custom websites and organic search.