If you run a business with a website, sooner or later you will get an e-mail with a "free audit". Some are useful; some are a generated list of green and red dots meant to scare you enough to call back. Before you pay for an audit or start changing your site from someone else's report, check whether that report says anything about your sales at all.
01 Every problem comes with evidence
The sentence "you have SEO problems" is worthless. A good audit shows exactly where each problem is: a list of addresses, measured values, a line from the DNS record. That way a developer can start right away, and you can check whether it is true.
Evidence also protects you from false alarms. We once received an automated report that declared "no DKIM" on our domain. The DKIM keys were there, just under names the tool did not check. One error like that is enough for a technical reader to stop trusting the whole report.
02 Priorities, not a hundred-point list
A report in which a missing image description weighs as much as noindex on an offer page does not help. Every finding should carry an impact rating (on traffic, conversion or risk) and an effort estimate, and the whole should end with an order: what to do in the first month, what in the second and third, and how to tell a fix has worked.
03 Traffic and competitor data
Technique matters, but business decisions are made on numbers: how many visits Google brings, what they would cost as ads, which keywords the site is just off the podium for, and which keywords the competitors serve. This data comes from paid tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush, whose subscriptions cost several hundred dollars a month. An audit without it says what is broken, but not what it costs.
04 Speed from real users
A single PageSpeed test is a lab sample, and the score can jump by several points or more between runs. A good audit also shows Chrome field data (Core Web Vitals from real visitors, when the site has enough traffic) and measures several templates, not just the home page.
05 Warning signs
- AFear instead of facts: "your site's doors are open to hackers" without saying which doors.
- BLetter grades or percentages with no explanation of where they come from.
- CGeneric advice that fits any site: "add more content", "improve your SEO".
- DNo data on traffic, keywords or competitors.
- EA promise of first place in Google by a given date.
06 Questions to ask before you order
- AWill I get a list of addresses or measured values for every problem?
- BWhere do the traffic, keyword and link figures come from, and for what period?
- CDoes the audit check the phone version and real-user data, not just one test?
- DWill I get an order of fixes with an impact and effort rating?
- EHow will I know a fix worked, and can the result be compared in a month?
07 What a website audit costs
An automated report costs from nothing to a few tens of zloty and shows the technical state and SEO tool data in 2 to 5 minutes. A manual agency audit usually runs from about 1,500 PLN to well over ten thousand, depending on the size and scope of the site, and makes sense for large stores, migrations or traffic drops whose cause is not visible.
Our audit combines the two. The free version checks 50 pages and shows the score, the issues with evidence, Ahrefs data and a 90-day plan. The full report for 49.99 PLN covers up to 500 pages, 50 keywords and 10 competitors, ready structured data code, a content review, briefs for new pages, a PDF and a .md task file you can hand to a developer or give to an AI agent.
A good audit can be checked: every sentence has evidence, every fix has a measure, and the whole ends with what to do first.