Boost Your Ecommerce Game: Mastering the Ultimate Content Audit in 6 Simple Steps (2025) – Shopify Reveals All!

High-quality, up-to-date website content is important for all businesses. It’s particularly critical in the ecommerce space, where it functions as a storefront, greeter, sales team, and customer service desk. Strong site content can also support your digital marketing strategy by improving your performance in search results and encouraging your target audience to convert.

Ecommerce businesses use something known as a content audit to organize and manage existing content and optimize their content strategy. Here’s what content audits are, why they matter, and how to run a comprehensive content audit for your ecommerce store.

What is a content audit?

A content audit is the process of gathering and analyzing your business’s content to evaluate its performance and gauge alignment with your business goals. Successful audits provide a complete picture of all the content on your website. They’re a key part of any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and can help you ensure brand consistency across content assets. Content audits help you identify content to retain, remove, improve, and repurpose so you can improve your site’s overall performance—and usefulness.

Why is a content audit important to ecommerce?

Content audits provide insights into the effectiveness of your content strategy and improve your understanding of your target audiences. SEO content audits, which focus on website content, aim to improve your site’s search engine visibility and increase your volume of relevant web traffic. SEO content audits can help you do the following:

• Evaluate content quality. Content audits identify high- and low-performing content, enabling data-driven decisions about your content marketing efforts.

• Identify opportunities to improve page performance. They also help you find and fix broken links and uncover any technical issues relevant to search engine performance.

• Optimize existing content. Content audits address on-page SEO, evaluating a page’s structure and keyword use to identify opportunities for improvement.

• Understand audience needs. An audit can reveal how your audiences interact with different subjects and content types, helping you focus your efforts on the content that drives engagement and conversions.

How often should businesses run content audits?

Best practices include performing content audits on a set schedule, such as quarterly. Annual site audits are typically considered the bare minimum. You might also consider a content audit in any of the following situations:

• Your content marketing efforts aren’t yielding results.

• You’re significantly changing your content marketing or brand strategy.

• You feel your site content is disorganized, or you’re unsure where new content belongs in your existing structure.

• You’re updating your content management system (CMS) or redesigning your site.

How to perform a content audit

1. Set goals and define the scope
2. Create a content inventory
3. Add performance metrics
4. Analyze content
5. Create an action plan
6. Implement changes and evaluate results

Comprehensive audits require time and resources, but they’re a critical element of any content strategy. Here’s how to set audit criteria, collect data, analyze findings, and use the results to meet your business goals:

1. Set goals and define the scope

An effective content audit process starts with defined objectives. Identify the end goal of your content audit process—or the results you’d like to see after you complete the audit. Examples include increased site traffic, improved conversion rates, or lower bounce rates.

Use the SMART goal framework (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) to structure your goals. If one of your goals is boosting brand engagement, for example, your SMART goal might be to increase average session length by 20% by the end of the fiscal year.

Your larger content audit goal can also help you define the scope of your project. A comprehensive content audit can address every page and asset on your site. A more focused content audit might zero in on a specific content format or asset type, such as blog posts, product descriptions, landing pages, or videos. SEO content audits typically address an entire site and analyze content at the page level, meaning that they evaluate all the content on a given page through SEO metrics like search rankings.

2. Create a content inventory

A content inventory is an organized list (typically a spreadsheet) of every piece of content on your website. Content audit spreadsheets include the following details:

• Content title (or H1)

• URL

• Focus keyword

• Topic, pillar, or content or product category

• Meta title

• Meta description

• Content type (e.g. blog post, product description, case study)

• Content format (e.g. long-form or short-form text, video, infographic, etc.)

• Date last modified

• Call to action (CTA)

Use free content audit templates and digital tools like Screaming Frog or Google Analytics to jumpstart the process. These tools inventory your entire website, eliminating the need to manually pull web page URLs and ensuring that you don’t miss any hidden or unlinked content. Some tools can also pull other page details. Screaming Frog, for example, fills in URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and focus keywords.

3. Add performance metrics

Use your audit goals to identify the performance metrics you need. A business that wants to increase brand awareness might use Google Analytics to measure traffic volumes and search rankings for each page, for example. SEO software tools like Semrush and Moz can also provide advanced metrics like keyword optimization and domain authority scores.

Add a spreadsheet column for each performance metric relevant to your goal. Here’s a list of common metrics:

• Organic traffic volume

• Keyword rankings

• Keyword optimization score

• Domain authority score

• Average time on page

• Number of backlinks

• Bounce rate

If you’re performing a qualitative brand audit, add categories like accuracy, relevance, and brand consistency. That said, resist trying to include too many performance metrics at once, as too much data can disguise relevant trends and distract you from your goal. If your primary goal is to boost engagement, revisit your brand audit goal later and add categories relevant to a different objective. Again, it’s all about establishing a scope that you can accomplish in a reasonable amount of time.

4. Analyze content

Next, analyze your content. The exact steps you take will depend on the goal of your content audit, but here are a few common actions:

• Identify high- and low-performing content. Sort a relevant performance metric column (like organic traffic volumes or keyword ranking) numerically, and look for trends among high- and low-performing pages, considering categories like topic, word count, page type, and format.

• Identify content gaps. Sort your content audit spreadsheet by topic and evaluate content distribution across areas. Does it align with your content strategy? Do you see any meaningful performance trends? Then, cross-reference your distribution with the latest relevant search volumes to see if your content distribution aligns with audience needs.

• Review on-page SEO. If you’re using advanced SEO software, use your keyword optimization score to validate on-page SEO performance. If you aren’t, check the page content for best practices like effective primary keyword use, appropriate title, header, meta tags, and an optimized URL slug, and add a column for your findings. To keep your spreadsheet manageable, use a numerical score or a simple yes/no binary to indicate on-page optimization.

• Check for technical SEO issues. Broken internal links, missing SSL certificates, slow page speeds, and duplicate content can also hurt your SEO performance. Review each page for technical SEO issues and create a column that notes the number of technical SEO issues on each page.

5. Create an action plan

Create an action column in your audit spreadsheet with four options: retain, remove, improve, and repurpose. Here’s what each one means and when to use it:

• Remove. If a page isn’t performing well, is outdated or inaccurate, or doesn’t align with your content strategy, you might decide that your site is better off without it.

• Improve. Sometimes underperforming content is high-quality and accurate, and inaccurate or outdated content can perform surprisingly well. In these cases, you might decide to retain the page and improve existing content or address relevant technical issues.

• Retain. If a page is meeting your goals and doesn’t have any obvious technical or SEO issues, great. Leave the page as-is.

• Repurpose. Sometimes, the problem with a page isn’t the content—it’s how or where it’s used. Consider two underperforming blog posts with similar focus keywords: Could combining or restructuring the posts improve SEO performance by boosting keyword rankings or better aligning with search intent? Use this category for content that fits your content strategy and provides value to readers but has performance issues not answerable by technical fixes.

Use your content audit spreadsheet as a to-do list and track your progress in it, but keep in mind that any content gaps you identified won’t show up on your list of existing pages. Add new subjects in the topic column and fill in planned page titles as you build out your content strategy.

6. Implement changes and evaluate results

Implement your planned changes, updating your spreadsheet to keep track of your progress. When you’re ready to measure your results, you’ll re-run your performance metrics and look for changes, but remember to give it time. It will typically take three to four months for the results of an SEO content audit to appear in your site performance metrics.