How I Audit a Site in Semrush Before a Redesign (So the Relaunch Does Not Kill Your Traffic)

Redesigns are where good rankings go to die, not because the new site is worse but because nobody inventoried what the old site earned. Before any redesign, I run this Semrush audit sequence, and it has caught enough future disasters that clients now expect it as a deliverable. The principle: you cannot preserve what you did not record.

Start with the current state, because it is the baseline you will be judged against. Run Site Audit on the full site and export everything, the errors, the warnings, and the pages with their core metrics. This snapshot matters twice: it tells the developers what structural debt exists so they do not rebuild it, and after launch it is your proof of what changed if traffic moves. Skipping the baseline means arguing with feelings in month two.

Next, the rankings inventory. Position Tracking on the domain, with the competitor set filled in honestly, then export the keywords where the site ranks in the top twenty with their landing pages. This document is the redesign's most important input, because every URL on it is an asset. The rule I hand to designers and developers: these landing pages keep their content substance, their URL where possible, and if a URL must change, it appears in the redirect map, no exceptions.

Then the backlink profile, which redesigns break in sneakier ways. Export the backlink report and identify the pages earning links, because a URL with forty referring domains that silently becomes a 404 is how you burn years of outreach in one launch. Those pages go on the protected list alongside the ranking pages, and the redirect map covers them even when the redesign plan says the content is merging.

The last step is a written handoff document, one page: baseline metrics, protected URLs, redirect requirements, and the top twenty keywords with their intended landing pages. Developers do not sabotage rankings on purpose; they work from what they are given. Two weeks after launch, rerun Site Audit and Position Tracking, diff against the baseline, and fix regressions while they are cheap. The audits I skipped early in my career are the reason this checklist exists.