I am working with 2 local businesses that are joining forces to create 1, new business.
Both individually hold consistent position 1 and 2 in Google for the majority of their chosen terms.
However, the merger will see a new brand name and therefore a fresh out of the box domain.
I have suggested setting up a partition on the hosting for both old URLS. All that will be hosted there would be .htaccess files with 301s to the like-for-like pages on the brand new domain / website. This will obviously also aid UX.
However, is this overkill? I personally think not... but would a domain level 301 redirect work just as well from preserving / passing on any authority to the new URL.