As Director of SEO&SEM for a leading travel website, I was responsible for the strategy to convert existing websites to new platforms, launch a new domain and rebrand websites all at the same time! Search Strategists don’t typically work in a vacuum and have to answer to C level executives and sometimes the Board. Here is what we did for one of the sites that was in a very special situation.

During early 2005 there were conflicting opinions on whether 301’s or 302’s were better for launching a new platform or migrating a site to a new domain. This was before Big Daddy which has pretty much put the topic to rest and 301’s are widely considered the best and only tactic for migrating or re-launching websites. However there are some very special situations where a 302 redirect may be necessary during a website re-launch.

Here is what I experienced as we re-launched a large website with a new look and platform:

The challenges for launching this site on a new platform were:

1.       Maintain traffic and conversions

2.       Flat site architecture to dynamic search driven platform.

3.       Startup staff in development and customer service

4.       Loyal customers were familiar with old navigation.

5.       Change in site content.

The SEO / SEM plan:

Document pre-launch rankings, traffic and conversions to effectively measure post-launch results. Use 302 redirects to get the site through peak traffic / conversion season so that the old pages would still be found in the SERP’s while we worked to build rankings for the new pages. This tactic by and large worked for this particular situation. The old pages slowly drifted down in the SERP’s while we worked like mad to get the new pages to index and rank well. When the new pages began to challenge the old pages, which took about three months, we changed the 302’s to 301 redirects and focused completely on the new pages. Site traffic sank during the launch but didn’t take a deep dive during a critical traffic period. We used the ppc campaigns to bolster traffic/conversions in locations that were not performing as well as they had the previous year. Additionally email campaigns were launched targeting troubled areas to support the level of conversions necessary.

To make the most of our ppc spend, we did extensive keyword research, built out ppc campaigns maxing out the number of adgroups/keywords allowed precisely targeted to what the searchers were looking for.  We grouped the paid ads to maximize conversions and spend. We also engaged efrontier, a bid management company to manage the portfolio. Through their intelligent tools we were able to assign a value to our conversion events which proved to be more efficient and more scalable than we could do manually.

This tactic might work for your website re-launch IF the new pages content is significantly different than the old pages and you are entering or in a peak traffic/conversion period or you cannot afford to buy the traffic to fill the traffic lost when your site re-launches. However based on experience I wouldn’t use 302 redirects unless it’s absolutely necessary to get through a few weeks of a peak traffic period.

After every site that was re-launched we did an extensive review of results and determined as best we could the cause….took our lessons and applied them to the succesive site re-launches with increasingly better results. 

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