John
I've done hundreds. I've also been audited myself many times.
Pros – Having a qualified SEO audit a site in an effort to determine site performance, completed works etc can be a good thing, and one that has landed me quite a few clients over the years. In most cases you'll find that either a) very little has been done b) f*ck all has been done c) shit work has been done
However to perform an audit accurately you MUST have access to all necessary information. How long the engagement has been, works completed, what the client is paying, keywords tracked, focus points, revenue, sales data, enquiries etc – the lot. If they've flicked someone a login and said "Go for it" and that's all you have, then your efforts are pretty much pointless. In order to perform an audit you must have all of the necessary information – including campaign objectives of course.
Cons – Most SEO users use this as an opportunity to land clients. Audits are EASY to stack in your favour. Anyone with any amount of SEO knowledge can make another SEO look bad. I've seen it happen. Its happened to me. its dishonest and incredibly deceitful.
I recall years ago being questioned by a client, who said during an end of month strategy call "John I had your work audited by someone else, and they've noted here in their report, that we don't have green lights on Yoast. They've marked this down as needing immediate actioning. I'm a bit concerned here because I'm paying you quite a lot of money". I was quite shocked and responded with "You can have green lights in Yoast, or we can continue to make $150,000 a month, which would you prefer?"
I ended up firing that client, for the simple reason they felt it necessary to have someone audit my work. I was also incredibly angry that someone else in our industry would push this sort of bullshit.
I've performed audits where I've said –
"This is shit, you're wasting your money"
"This is dangerous, you're going to end up being penalized"
"This is great work, keep going"
"The following things could be improved, but overall the quality is decent"
My advice is always honest. I'm not interested in lying in order to secure clients. If you've been given this opportunity then I would say go for it. BUT, make sure you're auditing the right things. There's no point telling them that they don't have any keyword meta tags or duplicate H1 tags because they might be getting a $200,000 return on their SEO investment.
Again, make sure you get all of the required information.

Cheung
No context = pointless exercise.
How many times have we provided clients with prioritized recommendations to have it not actioned? Plenty!
From small to enterprise, the struggle is the same. It's relatively easy to find problems if you're looking for them. Getting things implemented with a limited budget or lack of dev time or internal buy-in is our biggest challenge.

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