Redirects are always going to happen when sites build new pages, products are no longer being sold, there are quality links pointing to them, traffic is still reaching the content and its outdated, or because of new site structures. But redirecting a conversion page, especially in lead gen, to an article or content page is almost always a bad idea.
Conversion pages include:
- Product pages
- Pages with an intake form
- Strong sales pitches and CTA buttons
- Bundles or subscribe and save offers
The only situation I can think of where it would be a good idea is if you no longer sell a product or provide a service and are going to drive traffic to a shopping grid or listcicle where you use affiliate links for the same exact product or service with companies that offer it but don’t compete with you.
This could be a department store that had a credit card and decided to stop offering it. The department store now promotes other credit cards via a blog post for banks and alternatives lenders since they do not sell products and has a message that these are good alternatives to their brand’s cards letting users know why they are on the grid. In this situation their customers stay theirs, the company still makes money, and the UX is still reasonable.
In the one off situation above where you do need to redirect from a conversion experience to a content experience, you also need to do some homework first.
- Check analytics to see which channels are driving traffic to that page.
- Talk to the channel managers and ask:
- Has there been any pre-selling like an affiliate how to guide that already educated them?
- If the person has been to two or three other product pages and if this is remarketing?
- Look through your funnels and flows to see if this touch point does result in conversions.
If any of the above are true, bring the person to another conversion page instead or give the channel managers time to make their needed changes. Affiliates promoting the credit card offer will abandon your brand because you’re now taking their traffic and using your own affiliate links to replace theirs. You’re literally stealing their money.
PPC managers will be spending money to drive conversions and all of the sudden see no results. And if they’re remarketing off of the page, they’ll want to turn the remarketing off so people still trust their ads and they don’t waste budget.
Most important, if it has affiliate traffic in any situation, do not put the user into an educational experience. The consumer already knows what they want and the affiliate pre-sold why they should trust your brand to spend their money. Your job is to sell the consumer your product or service, not re-educate them. If you set the redirect to educational content, you’re damaging channels and your own company’s bottom line.
When you redirect a conversion page to an article, a couple things happen.
- You signal to the search engines you no longer offer this product or service (even if you do).
- Customers finding the page are going to go from shopping and converting to a bad experience. The intent is not informative which is an article experience, its commercial which needs a shopping or lead gen experience. You lose the customer after you spent time and money bringing them to a conversion page.
SEOs or web managers will normally put a request in for these redirects because they’re:
- Worried about duplicate content penalties.
- Removing a product or service that is no longer being offered.
- Building new pages that have better copy, but the content doesn’t make sense for the URL keywords.
- Changing the folder structure of the website.
- Hoping to clean up a bunch of old pages.
All of these are good reasons, but not enough of a reason to do damage to multiple channels. Just because there’s no SEO traffic or a competing “SEO page” does not mean affiliates aren’t driving visitors, the email team isn’t using it, PPC and social media may be retargeting from it as it was a sales page. SEO does not matter here, making sure the user continues to have a good experience and no other channel being impacted does.
You can have two pages optimize for the same keywords if the user experience and intent is different. That hasn’t been an issue for years. If you’re really worried about duplicate content, use canonical links and meta robots tags properly. This is how you address the issue without damaging SEO or other channels.
If you’re no longer going to sell a product or offer a service, 410 the page or redirect it to the main collection/category or homepage. If you sell similar or complementary products, this keeps your website visitors in the shopping process and you won’t lose the customer. It can also potentially pass authority if there were quality backlinks for a double win. If the person is already shopping, why stop them by putting them into an article?
When you have better pages but the content doesn’t match up wording wise, don’t link it to the closest blog post. You’re changing the user experience. The user is there to give you money, find the next best experience on an equal conversion page so it keeps the customer converting.
Changing folder structures can be a good time to clean house. If there is no need for the page anymore, it has no traffic coming to it, and all the backlinks are old, low quality, or outdated, 410 it. Not every page on your site needs to exist or redirect, sometimes they have served their purpose and can be retired.
Redirecting a conversion page to an article or content page is almost never a good idea. Look for the best conversion page as an alternative, or use your homepage. Even better, refresh the page with a similar or interchangeable product or service and try to convert the customer.
