Two long established sites with similar audiences, what do we do?

[tinselworm]

Hi guys,

We operate two long established and reasonably well ranking sites — our company website which was built on a keyword domain: market-stalls.co.uk (approx 15 years online) and our online store which was established several years later on a different domain: tradersupplies.co.uk (approx 9 years online).

(At the bottom of this post I've attached real world traffic and turnover figures that demonstrate the issue we're facing)

The problem is...

• The above sites target very similar audiences and keywords and both rank fairly well but I know are likely competing against eachother
• We're a small company (8-10 employees) and we (or rather, I) don't have the time or resources to blog, build back links, manage opseo and all the social channels etc for both sites. I'm struggling to cope with one.

The question is...

• Do we abandon the original company site (market-stalls.co.uk) in favour of pooling all our resource in to improving rankings for our online store (tradersupplies.co.uk). All our social media presence relates to tradersupplies.co.uk. We don't have any social channels for market-stalls.co.uk. Ironically, the only blog we have is established on market-stalls.co.uk — set up a couple of years ago in the hope to pull ourselves back up the rankings — but it hasn't been updated in over a year due to time restraints.
• Or do we attempt to keep both sites operational, despite a lack of resource? That would likely include a fairly sizeable overhaul of market-stalls.co.uk to bring it up to date with modern design standards, establishing social media channels for market-stalls.co.uk, creating a blog on tradersupplies.co.uk, and regularly updating two blogs and two sets of social media channels with unique content. Sounds like a pretty huge job right!?

Obviously, had we been setting up our business in 2017 and having read the many community posts on the subject of multiple websites, we wouldn't be splitting our time between two websites and would be focussing solely on building one highly ranking site.

But unfortunately we're not in this position and we're in a quandary because we don't know whether or not we should let our original, highly ranking company site drop off the radar in favour of focussing on building traffic to our online store.

This situation arose out of a decision to establish our online store on a different domain to our company website.

1. Back in 2007 I rebuilt market-stalls.co.uk and spent a lot of time optimising it. The site blew up and we were ranking very well for all kinds of keywords related to market stalls
2. In 2009 we opened our online store tradersupplies.co.uk which sells all of the products advertised on market-stalls.co.uk and then some
3. By using "buy now" buttons on market-stalls.co.uk which redirected to tradersupplies.co.uk, our original site was driving a large amount of traffic and sales to tradersupplies.co.uk. At it's peak it was driving almost £6,000 GBP a month in sales. This has since dropped to around a third/quarter of this total.
4. As the business grew we began to run short of time to maintain market-stalls.co.uk and it has inevitably slipped down the rankings
5. This has also had a direct impact on the referral traffic and resulting sales on tradersupplies.co.uk. I've attached below the analytics which show the drop in referral traffic to tradersupplies.co.uk and the drop off in sales.

I have a feeling I know the answer to this debacle but I'm keen to hear the opinions of those that may have found themselves in this position before!

UPDATE: I've just had a call with our Magento developer halfway through writing this post ... he has suggested we transfer all content from market-stalls.co.uk over to CMS pages on our Magento powered online store, and create 301 redirects. Apparently this will carry the weight of market-stalls.co.uk over to tradersupplies.co.uk. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

turnover.jpg

[tinselworm]

Guys, thank you so much for this. A really reassuring and extremely useful answer. Fortunately, having hard coded market-stalls.co.uk from the ground up I know the site structure isn't very complex and there are unlikely to be any URLs I'm not aware of so it shouldn't take too long to map over. I'll check Google's index though. Thanks for the recommendation about Open Site Explorer too.

[WebElaine]

I would definitely get rid of market-stalls and redirect everything. First I'd map out all of the URLs from that site (both from your own sitemap and from Google's index, in case it has any weird URLs you're not even aware of). Then I'd map out appropriate redirects page by page and have a developer set up redirects for everything. Depending on how it's all set up, it might just be a few lines of code or it might be a drastic page-by-page redirect file. 301 redirects, when done properly, carry over most of the rankings with them. I think the loss in rankings will be recouped by having only 1 site to focus all your efforts on, especially since the other site is the one that's been plugged on social media.