Merging two existing company sites into one

[BradNichol]

Hi Moz community,

I have recently started a new job for a Fire & Security company in the UK to help with their non existent SEO efforts.

Currently they have two separate websites. One of the websites is for their services and the other website is for their eCommerce store selling fire alarm equipment etc.

The eCommerce store is higher up in the SERPs and overall has a lot more links. It also uses a better branded domain name.

As I have never attempted such a project I have a few questions.

The current eCommerce store is hosted and maintained by another web company which uses their bespoke CMS. What I want to do is take the service website and merge it with the ecommerce domain, however the service site runs on wordpress, which I want to continue for its flexibility.

The service page wants to be the new homepage with a link on it to go to the store. I just cant get my head around the whole operation so if anyone could give me some advice to point me in the right direction that would be great.

Thanks

[NBGnetworks]

Howdy,

Why not just make the store store.fireCompany.com and the main landing page just fireCompany.com.  You could keep the bespoke CMS if you don't want to tackle changing the store that way and use wordpress or whatever you prefer for the corporate/service page. 301 the old pages in your .htaccess file to the new address.  Basically you'd just be moving the store content from AwesomeFireDomain to store.AwesomeFireDomain and the less popular service stuff over to AwesomeFireDomain.  You'd have to make sure not to duplicate names with the whole 301 deal.  And your homepage on AwesomeFireDomain might lose some juice temporarily because the content may be less SEO friendly than what was there.

You could also go the other way with this which is even easier by doing corporate.AwesomeFireDomain.com and just leaving the store alone.  I'm always weary of mucking around with a domain and site that is producing.

That's just how I would handle it.  I'm sure some SEO pro will have a quicker, easier answer for you!

-Nick

[BradNichol]

Thanks for the help Nick.