Acquiring Company; Want To Keep Their Rankings, How to maintain the rankings Company B had after Company A takes over Options

[flexiblefine]

Here's the scenario: I am the web guy for Company A, which is acquiring Company B. The two companies are in the same business, but serve different parts of the country. Company B's brick-and-mortar stores will become Company A locations, and Company B's web site will redirect (301) to a landing page on Company A's web site.

How do I try to maintain the rankings Company B has for some keyphrases that Company A does not rank well for? Company B's site doesn't have a lot of content, so I don't know what's actually "causing" those rankings. [removed rank checking software]

My boss's boss, the president of the company, has specifically asked me to try to retain Company B's rankings as well as I can, and I really should have some answers for him about how I'm going to do it.

[Betty]

It would be helpful if you knew why the other site was getting those rankings. Incoming links? On page content?

If incoming links, you could do a 301 and boost the first site. If it's on page content, you'd have incorporate that into the first site.

[flexiblefine]

It would be helpful if you knew why the other site was getting those rankings. Incoming links? On page content?

If incoming links, you could do a 301 and boost the first site. If it's on page content, you'd have incorporate that into the first site.

That's pretty much what I'm planning to do -- use a 301 to get customers to an appropriate starting point on Company A's site, and add content from Company B's site to Company A's site to keep supporting those rankings.

Company A already outranks Company B on lots of useful search phrases, but we want to keep good rankings where Company B has them and Company A doesn't. I was just wondering if I was missing any ideas or tactics that ought to be more obvious to me.

[SEOreports]

You will simply need to look at all on page and off page optimization and highlight all of the changes that are going to have to be done. Present it to the president and let him know that there are no guaranteees. This is not going to be an overnight process and their is no magic formula, as I am sure you know.

You may also suggest that they keep both sites up for a while until the new site is updated and modified to fit into the overall marketing plan. They may also want to consider a PPC campaign to start out with to make sure they get the traffic until things stabilize and only 1 website is visible.


Just a few thoughts.

Steve