"that was something that was supposed to take your Google Analytics keyword referrer data and match it to your content and your rankings and your links and your competitors and basically help you spot keywords and content you can easily rank better for."
That doesn't sound very clear to me exactly - how?
Google Analytics ALREADY did match your rankings to your content - it showed which search terms ppl entered when they landed on a specific page.
GA showed you which keywords were driving traffic, correct. But they didn't ever tell you the position your content was ranking at.
So what if you have an article on your site that is ranking bottom of first page (~#10) for a keyword you didn't expect and with a little bit of on-page optimization and some on-site interlinking, you could boost that page to the top spot? That could cause a pretty big traffic boost with very little work.
All you would need to know is what keywords your page is getting traffic for and then you can scrape Google to find out the positions for each of those keywords and then you could use something like Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool (or mine, serpIQ) to find out which keywords would be easiest to rank higher for.
Before (not provided) this was a very good strategy to use. You basically identify promising keywords and make your existing content rank better for them. Now that (not provided) ruined the whole organic keyword data, you have to use something like SEMRush to find out which keywords your pages are ranking for, and they just simply will never have fully comprehensive (or up to date) data.
That doesn't sound very clear to me exactly - how?
Google Analytics ALREADY did match your rankings to your content - it showed which search terms ppl entered when they landed on a specific page.