Been freelancing about a year, mostly small ecommerce and local service businesses. I’ve been charging a flat fee for audits, but a 200-page site and a 20k-page store take completely different amounts of time.
Last audit took me 26 hours for what I quoted as roughly 10. Lesson learned.
How do you scope before quoting? Do you run a quick crawl first, charge by URL count, cap the deliverable, or just price by hours?
Always crawl before quoting. I do a free 20-minute look (crawl plus GSC access if they’ll give it) and then quote a fixed price with a written scope, number of templates reviewed, not number of pages. Anything outside the scope goes into a separate quote. Also stop doing implementation guidance for free inside the audit, that’s where my hours used to disappear.
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