I manage the marketing and website operations for a company that owns and operates 5 separate retail locations with different physical locations, each with its own branding and physical inventory, and separate website - though all shops ‘share’ inventory when necessary since they’re all under the same ownership and all shops sell the same types of products. This was a result of company acquisitions over the years. We’re about to make a decision on migrating to a new e-commerce platform. Having 5 separate companies with their own branding can be tough when it comes to managing separate marketing campaigns and branding, as well as online identity, website management and maintenance/upgrades, online reputation, social media efforts, etc. Migrating 5 websites can also be a pain. The other option being considered is to consolidate the branding into one company with 5 locations and one website. We’ve been discussing the advantages of both options and are struggling to decide which is the better route to take.
Keeping the shops separately branded means they can compete against each other for business and SEO rankings - we have a few more hooks in the water for the fish to choose from so to speak, which can be a good thing most of the time. The customer could potentially contact more than one of our shops for pricing and we could end up getting the order through one of them. It essentially increases our odds having multiple entry points. But running multiple identities online stretches us a little thin when it comes to resources for each shop, making the marketing efforts for each a little less effective, and causing headaches when it comes to maintenance and technical upgrades. Though if we were to consolidate the brands and the websites into one, we are then able to focus all of our resources into that one brand/website, with the hopes of being more efficient and effective in our marketing and lead generation efforts, and drastically cutting down on the maintenance efforts. The big question is, which one makes the most business sense? Will consolidating the brands end up having more benefits that make up for the potential loss of multiple entry points for the customer?
I have a tough time coming to a decision on what should be done with the websites. Remove the content from all sites but one and redirect the top level domains to the main site, losing any SEO rankings the other sites had? They don’t have great ranking, but each of them does seem to rank pretty good for a certain things. Or, do we leave them all up as is with a “formerly known as” branding message and keep accepting online orders through all the sites (which obviously negates some of the benefits of consolidating brands)? Or, do we put the sites on auto pilot with all of the content intact and just forward all the product pages to the main website - this would allow them to retain SEO rankings but would alleviate some of the website maintenance and order processing, though not all of it, especially if there are any vulnerabilities that arise for the scripts those sites are running, which will definitely happen at some point. What is the smartest path to take? My initial thought was leaving all the sites up for a while after we migrate the main site and focus all of our marketing efforts on that site and all the local SEO directory listings and social media efforts, and putting up a branding change message on all the sites. Then, once we see the payoff from our single-site marketing focus we can take the next step of forwarding the domains to the main site with the hope that whatever we lose from dropping the sites/redirecting the domains is less than what we gain from consolidating our focus into one site.
Has anyone here gone through this? What would you push for if you were in my shoes?