Consolidating Two Enterprise Websites After a Company Merger

This case study is based on work completed through an agency engagement. Company and project details have been generalized to protect client confidentiality.

The Challenge

Following a merger, two established enterprise technology companies needed to bring their websites together.

The companies served related markets, but their products, terminology, and content had developed independently. One side of the business focused heavily on fraud, compliance, and financial-crime workflows. The other had built its presence around transaction visibility, payment flows, message tracking, and operational monitoring.

The new website had to make those offerings feel like parts of one company.

At the same time, both existing sites contained years of content, indexed URLs, backlinks, and search history. Simply moving everything into a new website would have created a different problem: overlapping pages, confusing navigation, outdated material, and a larger site that reflected two legacy organizations rather than one clear business.

The project therefore started with a more basic question:

What was actually worth bringing forward?

Deciding What Should Make the Move

We reviewed roughly 110 pages on the primary site, along with another 41 legacy pages being considered for the consolidated website.

The goal was not to preserve every page simply because it existed.

Each piece of content was considered in the context of the new site: what it covered, whether it was still useful, whether another page already addressed the same subject, whether it had existing search or backlink value, and where it fit within the combined company story.

That led to several different outcomes.

Some pages could move with relatively minor changes. Others were better combined with stronger existing content. Some needed to be rewritten or repositioned. And some no longer served a useful purpose on the new site.

This avoided a common migration problem: carrying years of accumulated content into a new website without first asking whether all of it still belongs there.

Creating a Structure That Made Sense for the Combined Business

The merger also exposed differences in how the two companies talked about related products and customer problems.

If those differences had simply been carried into the new site, visitors could have encountered overlapping topics described in different ways depending on which legacy company the content came from.

We helped map that material into a more coherent structure.

That included identifying where product and solution content belonged, how related subjects could be grouped, and where internal links could connect complementary information.

In some cases, the challenge was not missing content. It was bringing together content that had previously lived in separate places.

That gave the new website an opportunity to reflect the combined business rather than preserve the organizational boundaries that existed before the merger.

Protecting Existing Search Value During the Migration

The legacy websites also contained URLs that could continue receiving visits long after the new site launched.

People might reach them through Google, bookmarks, links from other websites, old sales materials, or previously shared content.

Those URLs needed somewhere sensible to go.

We developed page-level redirect recommendations that matched old pages with the most relevant destination on the consolidated site.

Where a clear replacement existed, the redirect could point directly to it. Where several pieces of content were being combined, the destination needed to be the page that best continued the original topic.

That is a small but important distinction.

Sending every retired page to the homepage technically removes a broken link, but it often creates a poor experience for the person who expected something specific. A well-planned redirect should take that visitor somewhere that still makes sense.

Backlinks and existing search activity were also considered when determining which legacy pages deserved particular attention during the transition.

Cleaning Up SEO Issues Rather Than Migrating Them

A major website consolidation is also a useful time to decide what not to carry into the new site.

As part of the review, we identified recommendations involving metadata, indexability, internal linking, overlapping content, and pages that did not need to remain independently available in search.

Copied or syndicated news content required particular attention because multiple versions of the same material could remain indexed without adding much value.

Depending on the page, the better answer could be consolidation, a canonical reference, or keeping the content out of the search index altogether.

The objective was not to reproduce the old websites as accurately as possible.

It was to give the consolidated site a cleaner starting point.

The Result

The project gave the agency and web team a detailed plan for bringing two substantial websites together while accounting for content, search visibility, and the structure of the newly combined company.

The work included:

• An audit of the existing website
• Page-level analysis of legacy content
• Recommendations for retaining, combining, rewriting, or retiring pages
• A proposed structure for the combined content
• Page-level redirect planning
• Internal-linking recommendations
• Technical SEO and indexability guidance
• Recommendations for overlapping and syndicated content
• Transition and post-launch considerations

We don’t have validated post-launch traffic or ranking data for this project, so there’s no claim of a specific SEO increase or percentage of traffic retained. However we do know that several keyword phrases and page traffic from the old sites cleanly carried over to the new one.

What the project does demonstrate is that combining websites is not primarily a matter of moving files from one domain to another.

The difficult decisions happen before launch. There is deciding what remains valuable, what has become redundant, where existing content belongs in the new organization, and how people and search engines should get from the old site to the new one.

For companies going through a merger, acquisition, rebrand, or major restructuring, getting those decisions right can determine whether the new website starts with years of accumulated value—or years of accumulated clutter.

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