A free Shopify SEO audit should show evidence. Most show a score.
A number out of 100 tells you nothing you can act on. Here is what a useful audit contains, and how to run it yourself.
What to demand from any free audit
Four things: the exact URL checked, the exact string found (or missing), the consequence in plain language, and the fix location. If a tool gives you a score and a checklist of 'opportunities', it is measuring itself, not your store.
The five checks that catch most of the loss
Title length, meta description presence, one H1 per page, alt text on product images, and whether the price appears in the raw HTML. These are measurable on any page in seconds and they cover most of what a store loses before it ever buys an audit.
Why 'score 78/100' is worse than nothing
Scores average unrelated things. A store with perfect titles and no product markup will score similarly to one with broken titles and perfect markup, and the fix order is completely different. Ranks and evidence beat scores.
Where a paid report earns its price
Not on the five checks above — you can do those. It earns it on the site-wide pass: duplicate titles across collections, orphan products, thin category pages, and the ranking of fixes by revenue impact rather than by ease.
The ten-issue sample shows the exact format before you pay anything.
Run the free scan → See a sample report
Written by the team that runs SEO Scan Audit. The counts quoted above come from our own crawls of live storefronts; the fixes are the ones we write into paid reports.