Identifying Roadblocks In Switching To Megento

[HCGDiet]

We own hgcdiet.com and are in the process of having the platform built in Megento and should be ready to launch Wednesday of this week. We currently have amazing rankings for all the major terms in the industry such as "HCG" #1 "HCG diet" #1 and I am super worried about losing ground. I want to identify the road blocks for the transition and figure out what I need to do as far as SEO. If you have done this transition before and have some red flags I would love to hear about them. I am stressed to the max about moving this site.

[RDK]

Without going into the detailed components of any website transition, expect the usual drop in rank temporarily.  The new structure and content will have to be indexed again. To minimize the impact, remember why you're doing this in the first place.  If you're tidying up your SEO through the transition (and it would be silly not to), you'll be in a better position a few weeks out of the gate.

Secondly, for those businesses relying on new visitors for the lion's share of revenue, you have to rely on secondary channels.  If you haven't developed a great Adwords campaign yet, now's your opportunity.  It is almost customary for me to triple Adwords spend the first few weeks out of a transition when a client has enough history to justify a highly-targeted and tracked Adwords spend.  A series of emails to our client list is also done in concert with the 'new look'. Knowing nearly zilch about your business, mitigating the fallout is going to be tough because it necessarily relies on your alternative channels.

If your question is geared toward the details of a transition, there are tons of articles already here on SEOMoz and elsewhere on this subject.  As you probably already know from doing your research, your efforts should be focused on polishing your on-page SEO, making sure your 301 redirects are ready and functional, and doing what you can get a jumpstart on any indexing issues that Googlebot might find.