How to Leverage Old Local Websites to Boost Our Main Site’s SEO?

Maximizing SEO Through Strategic Use of Legacy Local Websites: A Guide for Small Businesses

In today’s competitive digital landscape, small businesses often face the challenge of balancing limited resources with the need to enhance online visibility. If your company has recently expanded through acquisitions, you might find yourself managing multiple local websites, each with its own history and local search presence. In this article, we’ll explore effective, budget-friendly strategies to leverage existing legacy websites to bolster your main site’s SEO performance.

Understanding Your Current Situation

Suppose you operate a pet grooming business with a single primary website that caters to nine locations, including detailed services and contact information. Recently, you’ve acquired five new locations, each possessing its own established legacy website that ranks well in local Google searches. Due to budget constraints, maintaining and optimizing all these sites individually isn’t feasible. Instead, your goal is to harness the authority of these legacy domains to improve the SEO of your main website.

Strategies to Leverage Legacy Websites for Main Site SEO

1. Interlinking Through Backlinks

2. Action: Establish backlinks from each legacy website to your main site. This can be as simple as adding contextual links within existing content or creating dedicated resource pages.

3. Benefit: Search engines recognize backlinks as signals of authority, helping your main website gain credibility and improve rankings.

4. Publishing Contextual Blog Content

5. Action: Use the legacy sites to publish relevant, keyword-optimized blog posts that naturally link back to your main site.

6. Benefit: This not only drives referral traffic but also reinforces the main site’s relevance for targeted keywords. It also helps search engines understand the relationship between the sites.

7. Utilizing Legacy Domains Through Redirects (Caution Advised)

8. Action: Consider redirecting the legacy domains to your main website or specific location pages.

9. Caveats: Always evaluate whether this aligns with your long-term SEO strategy. Proper 301 redirects can transfer some link equity, but abrupt redirects might impact local rankings if not implemented carefully.

10. Coordinated Content Strategy

11. Action: Develop a unified content approach where each legacy site maintains some unique, locally relevant content but references the main site for broader service information.

12. Benefit: Maintaining localized content supports local SEO, while linking to the main site consolidates authority.

13. Local Citations and Directory Listings

14. Action: Ensure all legacy and main websites are listed consistently across local directories and citation sites.

15. Benefit: Consistent citations reinforce local SEO signals across platforms.

Additional Tips and Considerations

• Focus

---