Your Site Doesn't Need an SEO Audit
Every agency leads with an audit. It's their foot in the door. But that 50-page PDF won't fix your real problem: you have nothing worth ranking for.
"Let us do a free SEO audit of your site."
If I had a dollar for every time an agency led with this pitch, I could retire to a modest villa somewhere in the Italian countryside and never think about search engines again, because this is, without question, the most common sales tactic in the entire industry, deployed by agencies large and small, boutique and enterprise, against prospects who don't know any better, and it's almost always a complete waste of time.
The Audit Playbook
Here's how it works: the agency runs your site through Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Semrush, which takes all of about fifteen minutes, and then they export every single warning, error, and "opportunity" the tool can possibly find, regardless of whether any of it matters, and then they compile all of this into a terrifying 50-page PDF full of red icons and urgent-sounding language, the kind of document designed to make you feel like your digital house is actively on fire, and then they present it to you with great solemnity, saying things like "you have 347 issues and this is urgent," before finally quoting you somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars a month to fix these supposedly critical problems, most of which, I should mention, don't matter at all, because the entire exercise is fear-based selling dressed up in the language of technical expertise.
What Audits Find
Ninety-nine percent of SEO audits flag the exact same things, and I mean the exact same things, a kind of greatest hits of technical trivia that every tool surfaces because tools need to surface something to justify their subscription fees: missing alt tags, which you can fix if you want but which won't change your rankings in any measurable way; duplicate meta descriptions, which are annoying in the sense that they clutter up your reports but are not actually a problem that affects anything a human being would care about; pages without H1 tags, which you can add in about five minutes if it makes you feel better; slow page speed, which is usually not actually slow but merely fails to meet the insane, practically unattainable standards that PageSpeed Insights has decided to impose upon the world (technical SEO is mostly a distraction, by the way); and redirect chains, which are technically imperfect in the way that a picture hanging slightly crooked is technically imperfect, which is to say that nobody except you will ever notice or care.
None of this is why your site isn't ranking, not even a little bit, and the fact that agencies lead with these issues tells you everything you need to know about what they're actually selling, which is complexity, not solutions.
Why Sites Actually Don't Rank
Your site doesn't rank because your content doesn't answer the query better than your competitors do, which is not a technical issue, or because nobody links to you, which is also not a technical issue, or because you have no topical authority in your space, which is definitely not a technical issue, or because your business simply isn't known and people don't search for you by name, which is, you will notice a theme here, not a technical issue either.
An audit won't find any of this, because tools cannot measure whether your content is actually good, whether real human beings find it useful, whether it deserves to rank based on the fundamental quality of what you've created, and this is the great unspeakable truth of the SEO audit industry: the things that actually matter cannot be crawled, cannot be exported to a spreadsheet, cannot be rendered in red and yellow and green, and so they are conveniently ignored in favor of things that can be.
When Audits Matter
Audits are useful in exactly one scenario, which is when something is actually, genuinely, catastrophically broken, the kind of broken where your site has disappeared from search entirely and you wake up to discover your traffic has fallen off a cliff overnight: accidental noindex tags that someone deployed to production without realizing what they'd done, a blocked robots.txt that's telling Google to go away, major crawl errors that are preventing the site from being indexed at all.
For everything else, you should skip the audit entirely, because you already know what to do, because you have always known what to do, because the answer has never changed and will never change: make better content, build genuine authority, help real people solve real problems, and don't let anyone convince you that a 50-page PDF full of red icons is a substitute for the hard, unglamorous work of actually being good at what you do. (And when bloated indexes are actually a problem, here's how to fix it.)
SEO audits diagnose symptoms, not diseases. The disease is usually: you haven't created anything worth ranking.