A South African SEO audit that ends with a fix list, not a retainer.
Fixed-price technical SEO and Core Web Vitals audits, quoted in rands. I find the actual reasons your site isn't ranking or isn't fast, rank them by impact, and hand you something your developer can act on the same week. Nothing recurring, and no monthly reporting dashboard to sit through.
The same audit, without the agency markup.
| Who | Typical once-off audit | Commitment |
|---|---|---|
| SA agency, small business site | R8,000 to R12,500 | Usually leads into a retainer |
| SA agency, SME site | R12,500 to R25,000 | Usually leads into a retainer |
| SA agency, large or ecommerce | R25,000 to R40,000+ | Usually leads into a retainer |
| SiteAudits.dev | R3,500 or R9,800 | Once-off. Nothing recurring. |
Agency figures are drawn from two independent 2026 South African pricing guides, broken down in full in what an SEO audit actually costs in South Africa. Treat them as directional: agencies price on scope and competitiveness, not a fixed rate card. The gap isn't a discount on the work. It's the absence of account management, monthly reporting, and a sales pipeline to fund.
Root causes, ranked by what they're costing you.
Core Web Vitals, from field data
LCP, CLS, and INP measured against real Chrome user data for your site, not a single Lighthouse run on my laptop. Each failure traced to the code causing it.
Crawl and indexing
What Google can reach, what it is quietly skipping, and why. Redirect chains, orphaned pages, blocked resources, and duplicate URLs splitting your own signals.
On-page and structured data
Title and heading structure, thin or cannibalising pages, and schema markup validated rather than assumed. Including LocalBusiness markup if you trade from a physical address.
A prioritised fix list
Ordered by impact against effort, written so a developer can act on it directly. Plus a recorded walkthrough so you can hear the reasoning rather than decode a PDF.
What actually differs for a South African site.
- Offshore hosting adds latency your competitors may not carry. Plenty of SA sites sit on European or US infrastructure. Every request pays the round trip, which inflates server response time and pushes LCP up before a single image loads. It is one of the first things I check, and one of the cheapest to fix with a CDN or a regional edge.
- Your traffic is mobile, on networks that punish heavy pages. Core Web Vitals are assessed separately for mobile and desktop, and mobile is where nearly every site's numbers fall apart. An audit that only looks at desktop scores tells you almost nothing about what Google is actually grading.
- Rand pricing, fixed at quote. Quoted and invoiced in ZAR at a set figure, so you are not absorbing exchange-rate movement between the quote and the invoice.
- Map Pack and organic are separate problems. If you rank in the Map Pack but not organically, or the reverse, the fix is usually on one specific side of that split. Your Business Profile and your website do different jobs, and the audit says which one is holding you back.
Two fixed prices. Pick by site size.
Quick Wins Audit
Core Web Vitals snapshot across your key page types, on-page SEO review, Search Console error summary, and the top 10 fixes in priority order. Right for a brochure site or a small store that needs direction fast.
Full Site Audit
Everything above across all page types, plus a complete crawl analysis, structured data review, analytics verification, and a comprehensive fix list. Right for ecommerce, or any site where a ranking drop has real revenue attached.
Want the fixes done as well as found? Implementation is billed hourly at R850 and is entirely optional.
Prices in ZAR (South African Rand).
Common questions
How much does an SEO audit cost in South Africa?
SA agencies typically charge from about R8,000 for a small site up to R30,000 or more for a large or ecommerce site. Mine are fixed at R3,500 and R9,800. The full market breakdown, with sources, is in the pricing guide.
Do I have to sign a monthly retainer?
No. The audit is once-off and fixed-price. SA retainers commonly run from R3,500 a month up to R150,000 or more at the enterprise end, and most of them open by selling you an audit anyway. You can hand the fix list to your own developer and never speak to me again.
Do you only work with South African businesses?
No. Audits are delivered remotely and I work with clients worldwide. This page exists because SA businesses ask a specific set of questions: rand pricing, hosting latency to local visitors, and whether they can get the work done without a retainer.
How long does it take?
Quick Wins is typically 3 working days, Full Site Audit 5 to 7 depending on size. Everything is remote, so where you are in the country makes no difference.