Client has two domains for the same business

[Mrupp44]

My client does hardwood flooring AND concrete polishing. He has one domain for hardwood flooring and the other website is for concrete polishing. (separate domain)

Building traffic, links, authority for two sites is going to take MUCH longer for two separate domains than if they focused their effort on just ONE domain.

**Any suggestions on how best to handle this? **

One of the domains is 8 years old and has 736 links pointing to it (not many of them are very good).

The other one is much newer and it has 1,269 links pointing to it.

What doesn't help is the first domain specifically spells out "hardwoodflooring' and the other has 'concretepolishing' in it.

Keep em separate or forward them to a more universal sounding domain name? www.billybobsflooring.com for example?

Thank you for ANY suggestions!

Have a great Halloween everybody,

Matthew

[Mrupp44]

My clients sites aren't dominant (they ARE on the first page) and the market they are competing for isn't terribly competitive either. There is only a few competitors and none of them have ANY real internet presence.

Local search is huge for this client.

I just didn't want to water down my efforts at video marketing, social media, building links, etc.

Thank you VERY much for responding!

Matthew

[EGOL]

How are the rankings?  If these sites are dominant or highly competitive in their target niches then I would not merge the domains.

And, if this person is competing in local markets then local search can be as important as organic rankings.... I don't think that separate domains are a huge handicap there.

And, in PPC the separate domains might be a small advantage.

Now, if this site was competing for organic rankings in national SERPs then I might be more inclined to merge the domains.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Honestly it would be best to have one brand name and 301 both sites to that one domain. By doing this if the sites are currently ranking they would lose a bit of link juice from each site, however both sites combined is still more authority then having them separate.

My answer is to build www.billybobcontractor.com and 301 redirect the other sites here. I would 301 redirect every single page of the old sites to the new, in a logical manner so that I don't lose too much value.