What's the best strategy for acquisition?

[DannyHoodless]

Hi All,

Recently acquired a competitor company. This acquired company is small in size but is the exclusive UK distributor for a gigantic Swedish company. This is the way the current domain structure is divided.

• swedish-supplier.se (Not owned by us - swedish supplier )
• Swedish-supplier.co.uk (owned by us, operating as the swedish supplier in the UK)
• New-acquired-company.com (owned by us)

The supplier doesn't want us to have two websites as they keep getting confused customers. Because of this we have agreed to remove www.swedish-suplier.co.uk and solely sell the product at www.new-aqquired-company.com.

However,  because of the sheer size of the Swedish supplier, a lot of traffic comes through to swedish-supplier.co.uk.

My question is, how can we work together with the supplier to remove this domain and still maintain a good amount of UK traffic?

Should we point swedish-supplier.co.uk back to the suppliers original translated web site and have them pass enquiries onto us or should we point it to our website? & What's the best way to go about it?

Thanks,

Danny

[seanmccauley]

Danny,

I am not clear on relationship between these three or four domains? Is swedish-distributor.co.uk a fourth?

[DannyHoodless]

Hi Sean,

Sorry, I got mixed up when typing - swedish-distributor.co.uk and swedish-supplier.co.uk were meant to be the same domain. Edited the question!

[badgergravling]

So if you're wanting to remove the swedish-supplier.co.uk site and only use the new site, the logical thing would be to redirect the current swedish-supplier.co.uk site with 301 redirects.

That'll keep most of the authority you've accrued in the past, and transfer any current customers across.

The key task is to map out how it will work, because the homepage will be a straight swap, for example, but your old site may have content which isn't currently on the newly-acquired company domain, so you'll either need to direct those pages to the most suitable equivalent, or create new pages on the newly-acquired company domain to point the old stuff to.

Assuming no issues, you should see a pretty straight swap between authority and traffic as the redirects take effect. But if you're wondering about how to go about it, it's probably worth investing a small amount in getting an SEO professional/agency with experience in cross-domain redirects involved, even if you do the bulk of the work yourself and just get them to sanity check it.

You'll also probably want to check that the new domain is set-up correctly, and is registered with Google Search Console and the location is specified etc, plus it's also worth thinking about whether you want to continue using the same analytics account from the newly-acquired domain if it's got some installed, or from your swedish-supplier site, in which case, you need to copy across your existing code, remove it from the old site, and note the change in your GA account to be able to refer back to it...

[badgergravling]

Just another quick point - the downside of pointing towards the Swedish site is that it's on a .se domain, and is probably hosted etc in Sweden, so while that wouldn't stop it from ranking in UK searches, it won't help.

(Funnily enough I've resumed learning Swedish recently, as I have family ties there, but haven't got on to flooring yet!)

[dohertyjf]

Hey Danny, sounds like you have a big migration project ahead of you! As others have said, you're going to have to do mass 301 redirects to the site you want everything to live on moving forward. You should also engage with an international SEO consultant to help you out with this, because you're likely going to need country-specific subfolders and use HREFLANG to send the search crawlers for the right languages to the right pages and rank them accordingly.

Happy to recommend some if you'd like.