Somebody sends you a forty page PDF with two hundred issues in it, ranked by a colour, and nothing changes. That is a report. An audit is a decision about what to fix first.
Can the page be reached and stored. Is it about something clear. Is anything on the site competing with it. And is it worth being about that at all. Everything in a good audit is evidence for one of those four.
A crawler will report every missing alt attribute on the site and count each as an issue. That inflates the report and hides the two things that actually matter, which are usually one blocked path and one wrong canonical.
"Improve internal linking" is not actionable. "Add a link from this page, which has traffic, to this page, which has none" is. The difference is whether somebody can do it on Monday without asking a question.
An audit tells you what is broken. It cannot tell you what you will rank for, because that depends on competitors you do not control and on a system nobody outside Google can see. Anyone promising a position is selling something else.
This is teaching material and our own reading of standard practice, not advice for your specific site. Check anything important with your own specialist.
Run the free check, then tell us what it found. We reply with what to fix first and why. No call, no pitch.
If a word here is unfamiliar it is defined in the SEO glossary. Two public penalties and one problem we found on our own network are pulled apart in the case studies, and the longer pieces live in the library.