What should I use to compare technical SEO audits before and after a migration?

To compare technical SEO audits before and after a migration, use a structured audit framework with the same checklist, same crawl settings, and the same data sources on both sides.

Best approach

Use a combination of:

1. A crawl tool
   Examples: Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, JetOctopus, Deepcrawl/Lumar
   Use it to compare:

   • indexability
   • status codes
   • redirects
   • canonicals
   • metadata
   • internal links
   • duplicate content
   • hreflang
   • sitemap coverage

2. Google Search Console data Compare:

   • indexed pages
   • coverage/indexing errors
   • page-level performance
   • crawl stats
   • sitemaps
   • manual actions/security issues

3. Analytics / log files To spot:

   • traffic drops
   • crawl behavior changes
   • bot access to old vs new URLs

4. A before/after issue tracker or spreadsheet This is the most important part for comparison. Track each issue with columns like:

   • issue type
   • affected URL count
   • severity
   • pre-migration status
   • post-migration status
   • notes / fix applied

What to compare

Make sure both audits evaluate the same things:

• crawlability
• indexability
• redirect mapping
• canonical correctness
• robots.txt rules
• XML sitemap validity
• internal linking depth
• page speed / Core Web Vitals
• structured data
• hreflang
• duplicate titles/meta
• orphan pages

Recommended method

If you want the cleanest comparison, use:

• Screaming Frog exports before and after
• then compare in Excel/Google Sheets
• or use a dashboard in Looker Studio / Power BI if you want ongoing reporting

Simple rule

Don’t compare two audits done with different tools or different crawl settings—that will make the results unreliable.

If you want, I can give you a migration SEO audit comparison template you can use in Sheets.