Best way to go about merging 2 sites with significant search volume?

[wilcoxcm]

Hi everyone!

A client of ours ('Company A') recently acquired another company ('Company B') - both brands carry weight within their industry.  Company A's brand name currently registers over 6,500 searches per month, while Company B's brand name draws about 2,500 searches per month.  While Company B is smaller, their search volume isn't insignificant.  The powers that be plan to discontinue Company B's site at an unspecified date in the future, but it's on the backburner.

We'd obviously like to transfer as much of their current ranking as possible, but we also don't want to confuse users.  There's additional search volume for term variations such as 'Company B jobs' & 'Company B locations' that we'd like to capture for as long as there's still volume there.  Would a microsite with Company B's look & feel (to make it easier to house pages built to capture careers/locations searches) justify its inherent cost, or would it be just as valuable to build a series of landing pages on Company A's site?  (Obviously assuming that valid redirects would be in place once Company B's site is taken down.)

Thanks in advance!

[EGOL]

Merging two healthy sites with substantial traffic is a decision that requires a lot of analysis.  In my opinion, "How to do it?" is a less important question than "If I should do it?".  It can often be much more profitable to have two sites in the SERPs than one site in the SERPs.  Each of these sites can be pulling in the sales, they can operate on different value propositions and their competition with one another can displace competitors.   It might be hard on the egos of company directors to buy a competitor and then "run their site"... but that can be the more profitable decision.

The "How to merge them?" and "If to merge them?" analysis  should consider many things...

--  traffic overlap

--  product overlap

--  backlink overlap

--  content overlap

--  keyword overlap

It could be possible to merge two sites with 100% overlap of the above and make very little gain in the resulting site  --  yet loose all of the benefit of the site that was merged.  So be careful here.  Do deep analysis.  Map out the opportunity of gain before blindly redirecting.  Don't squander one site thinking that the merger is going to be a bonanza.

Also keep in mind that DA is more logarithmic than linear.  You might merge a DA 60 site with a DA 50 site and that will only move your DA 60 up to a DA 61 or 62.   No kidding.