To consolidate or not to consolidate?

[ghostcitytours]

First off, thank you for any help or advice. I appreciate it.

I own a large tour company that operates tours in Savannah Georgia and New Orleans Louisiana. Savannah is where we started and I purchased the domain ghosttoursinsavannah.com when I started. It ranks very well for all relevant search terms my customers are searching for. Very often either #1 or #2.

In New Orleans, I have ghosttoursinneworleans.com. Since it is a relatively new website, around 10 months old, it doesn't rank as well, but we are in the top 7 results for many search terms that are relevant.

Now, my company is called Ghost City Tours and I also have a website at www.GhostCityTours.com. For almost a year now I have been thinking about consolidating all of my websites under my brand website, www.GhostCityTours.com. So, the homepage for www.ghosttoursinsavannah.com would be copied over and 301'd to my Savannah subpage at www.GhostCityTours.com. All blog posts would be redirected, etc. Same for New Orleans.

Understandably, I am nervous to do this as my 'city' websites rank very well. I know how I would do it, consolidating them, but I am curious on everyone's thoughts. For example, I am assuming I would see a traffic drop and probably a drop in the serps too. Best guess, how long would the recovery take, so I could regain my search positions? Any tips or pointers would be greatly appreciated. OR, should I even consolidate (I really want to).

[BeanstalkIM]

Great great question.

From my experience you'll be looking at a roughly 2 to 8 week hit in rankings.  I know that's a wide margin but it depends on more than just the single redirection of your homepage on the city domains to the city page on the global domain but also includes the content and of course the internal links. You'll want to insure that you move any content that's attracting traffic, social signals or links and also redirect the pages with links or traffic to the appropriate page on the new domain.

Past that it's really just a matter of waiting and trying not to chew your nails off.

I wish you luck, that's a hard call to make but I think you're making the right one.

Regards.

Dave