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You could possibly get away with it it if the topic of the new site was in some way related to the content on the old site (the closer the better). However, the further away the new site topic gets from the context surrounding the back links that were created for the old site, the less less value it's going to get from them.

Regardless of your domain name, it still takes effort to build solid links. Going through the exercise of getting good links makes the company a better company, a better competitor, and a better search result and will most likely give a better ROI than a bait and switch  tactic.

Start a new question and ask:

"Is there an seomoz Pro User Guide that comes with my subscription? Something like and  overview of all the tools and how a new user would employ them to begin optimizing their site?"

Well, that's a good question--There may be such a guide but I don't know of a current one on the site.  There is an seomoz pro guide that you can pay for over on scribd .  Not sure why it doesn't seem to be available here.

Additionally David, do your best to step out of the mindset that there may be some sort of shortcuts that you can use to get more traffic.  For the new website owner, building traffic is an exercise in being a solid business person.  You want to understand what you need to do to keep your shop in order (on-page seo), then learn all you can about your customers and competitors--who they are, where they are online what they like, and who they follow socially. Follow them, give them a reason to follow you by interacting with them and demonstrating to them why your company is the right one for their job..

Minimally, several hours per week, every week, spent on those activities will pay off for you and your one domain--and think about it, if that's what it takes to get one domain off the ground, would you have time for two?  What working person does?

Hi Mirco, SEOmoz has just the thing for you: The Beginner's Guide To SEO.  And you can translate it over here.

Remember, that was an opinion based on a very small amount of information.  Your mileage may vary.

Any chance you could copy and paste the letter here?  It could help inform us on how to answer.

Why don't you list your tags here and we can let you know which one's we'd toss?

Without knowing anything more that what you've describe, I have to ask if you've done any work on the site in the mean time. Off hand, it sounds like you may have come back into the rankings at approximately where Google thinks you should and it is time to get to work with some solid content and social outreach to begin building your rankings.

Ain't nothin' comfortable about that.  It's why you need to charge your local clients significant fee.  UBL (for example) takes care of the updating but you have to deal with dupes and untangling their shotgun approach to creating profiles and the overhead of figuring out their reporting.  Once you hit their professional level service ( I think they still call it that) things start getting weird for you as an agency.  Their basic service gets much of the distribution taken care of and then you can take are of dealing with the sites that require profiles and verification. Still, you gotta charge the client appropriately.

I haven't seen anything unusual with my clients--what vertical are you in? Sometimes that's the precursor to even greater change.  Anything you want to get off your chest at this point in the hopes that it might prevent the worst case scenario?    Sorry, couldn't resist asking.

Give this search a try press release web.  It's got most of the main ones.  Really, you only need one good release, though.  If you're really looking to make it big on a serious game that could catch on big-time, you may look to a company that specialized in writing press releases,  though.

Keith, my feeling is that the days of providing a profitable service of manually updating local search databases for client's local search are behind us.  Give UBL.org a look see.  They update to CitySearch and to Axiom and interface with Yext for even wider distribution and updateability.  You could do yourself a favor and increase your prices and outsource to those who have the whole thing down pat.  Just a thought.

Check out http://getlisted.org/resources/local_search_ecosystem.pdf

I'm guessing link rot or something to do with upstream links.  Majestic SEO may give you some insight into what back links may have disappeared prior to you losing traffic.

I thumbed you down ssaltman--your replies aren't making me feel very helpful.

To line your new site up with the existing baseline of the old site, I'd be looking more at your stats than at the keyword tool.  Go to your analytics and look to see which keywords were bringing you in the most traffic for each landing page and focus on those.

Is the drop in traffic happening for keywords across the board or for specific keywords?   From the graphs you gave, it looks like a change in your traffic pattern started in November and your decrease in traffic may have started as early as late that month, too.  Doesn't really look like a penalty, though.  What changes had your seo's been making prior to that time.

SSaltman,

If you're speaking specifically populating the keyword meta tag, you don't have to worry about it.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/meta-keywords-should-we-use-them-or-not

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/

Here's a link to some more reading: First link counts

I guess the safest, fastest, most gradual way to do it would go like this:

Go ahead and get your brand site up and running as a stand alone site on a different host with different registration info.  Work on creating content and a link profile as separate from the others as you can.  Set up a google+ profile verified for that domain and begin ramping up social media efforts for it.

Then, start pumping good content onto your emd's that gradually link out to numerous other quality resources, including, once in a while, the quality content you're putting on your brand domain.

With this method, you'll hope to get traction for your brand domain before your emd's lose value (if they do). But if the emd's do lose value before they can pass full 301 juice to your brand domain, your brand site is already building a solid base for itself.

On the other hand, the fastest way to deal with it would be to create your brand site and then to go ahead and 301 each page from your emd's to the appropriate page on your brand site and get the benefit of those two sites 301ing to the brand for as long as that benefit lasted.

With this method, you'd certainly expect to get traction for your brand domain before you emd's lose value (if, in fact, they did), but you'd lose out on the benefit of having those two emd's in the serps at the same time--for the period of time that they didn't actually loose value (if they did--but you'd never be able to actually determine that.)

As the executive decision maker, you get to make that call.

Does that make sense?