Analysing your content with Semrush before a migration

Semrush is a paid online suite of SEO tools, widely used by agencies. Before a migration, it complements your own site's data: which keywords each page seems to hold, which competitors rank for the same queries, which technical issues to fix before the switch, which external links point to your pages.

This article presents the Semrush tools useful for this analysis. The audit method, from inventory to action plan, is in our article on the step-by-step content audit; how to decide each page's fate from its positions, in analysing the content that ranks before a migration.

The Organic Research tool lists, for a domain or a URL, the keywords Semrush sees it ranking for, with position, estimated search volume and estimated share of traffic. Filtered by page, it gives a first idea of the queries each piece of content holds, including for competing sites.

These are estimates, drawn from Semrush's keyword database: they do not replace Google Search Console, which gives your site's real queries, impressions and clicks. Use both: Search Console to decide, Semrush to compare with competitors and spot queries you are not targeting yet.

Site Audit crawls your site and sorts issues into errors, warnings and notices: pages returning errors, redirect chains, missing or duplicate title tags, duplicate content, broken internal links, slow pages. Before a migration, run it on the old site so as not to carry its flaws over, then on the staging site to check that the new site does not create new ones. It can be scheduled at regular intervals.

The keyword research tool (Keyword Magic Tool) suggests variants and questions around a topic, useful for reworking a page on the edge of the first page. On Page SEO Checker compares a page with the best-ranked pages for its query and suggests improvements. SEO Writing Assistant, available for Google Docs and WordPress among others, evaluates a text being written against its competitors in the results.

These suggestions are a starting point: they are based on what competing pages do, not on what your readers expect from you.

Position Tracking follows the daily positions of a chosen list of keywords. Started a few weeks before the migration, it gives a baseline; after going live, it quickly shows the queries that drop, often the sign of a missing or poorly targeted redirect.

Backlink Analytics lists the external links pointing to a domain or a URL. Before a migration, it helps find the pages that receive links and whose redirect must not be missed. Link databases differ from one tool to another: cross-check with Ahrefs, Majestic and the Search Console "Links" report. See also the importance of backlinks during a migration.

Semrush analyses a site, but does not connect the old one to the new one: it does not tell you which new page each old URL should redirect to. That is the job of the redirect plan. Swan imports Search Console URLs and your URL lists (a Semrush export, for example), crawls the old site and the staging site, suggests for each old page the new page closest in content, then checks and exports the redirects.

Ahrefs, SEObserver and Google Search Console to track the URLs to redirect.