SEOs have a lot to offer companies during the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. They can help identify acquisition targets, perform due diligence and assist with risk assessment and identification, identify future opportunities, work with teams on website migrations, monitor migration progress, and train new teams on the best practices.
Acquisitions can have a dramatic impact on the visibility of your search. A long time ago, one of the main competitors of an engineering company I worked with closed its doors. I asked if I could purchase their website and was able to get it for a few hundred dollars. Needless to say, thanks to the merger of the two websites, this has led to a significant amount of new leads and business growth.
Another time I managed to snag the expired domain of what was the number one HVAC company in my local market. They were consolidating several service companies into a new brand and let the domain lapse. I redirected it to a client’s website that was fairly new to the market and saw top rankings for many of their top terms practically overnight.
While this type of acquisition is not common for small companies, it is common for larger companies. If you have been involved in enterprise SEO, you may have contributed to some of these mergers and acquisitions.
Big companies acquire many other companies. Many companies have dedicated Wikipedia pages chronicling all their acquisitions. For example, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has a list of 257 acquired companies.
Let’s take a look at how SEOs can help with mergers and acquisitions.
Identification of acquisition objectives
SEOs can help identify acquisition targets. While businesses generally look at the bigger picture, organic search traffic is often a major component of revenue for businesses, and SEOs have the data to see the competitive landscape.
If you know one or two major players in the market, you can start with Organic Competitor Report in Site Explorer. You can also compare two dates to see how the market is evolving.
If you’re not sure who the major players are, what you can do is paste a list of terms into Keyword Explorer and check the Traffic Share by Domain report. This will give you an organic search entry share for the terms you entered.
The SEO team will also be able to see how the content and targeting of different acquisition targets fits into your current content strategy. They may have targeted terms or markets that they want to enter and acquiring a property that is already rated for those things or in that market is an easy way to position themselves for those things.
There are checks that SEOs can perform before they get to the due diligence process to decide who they might want to move forward with. SEOs can see if traffic is declining or if a website has a history of problems with search engine updates. This involves substantial risks that could impact the valuation. See our post on diagnosing traffic drops for more details.
Additionally, SEOs can predict future traffic performance for each of these sites to see who might have the most potential. See my post on SEO predictions to see how to do this.
You can also check the connection profile of possible acquisition targets. Good links can help you rank better, while bad links pose a risk. From a link building perspective, an acquisition can be a relatively inexpensive source of links. You can review links to a site in the Backlinks report.
Due diligence and evaluation
Once you enter a period of exclusivity, where companies now simply negotiate with each other, it’s time to take a deeper look and do your due diligence.
SEOs will evaluate the target company’s online presence and SEO strategies. Many of the things we looked at before, such as traffic, ranking, backlinks, forecasting, etc., will all be looked at. You can note any positive or negative elements to help determine the value, potential and risks of a website.
An additional report you may want to look at is the Opportunities report. You can look into it to see what kind of potential a website has to rank better.
Businesses may have more than one domain, so you may need to check a few different websites during this process.
The choice to merge domains usually depends on whether you want multiple listings or one listing that potentially ranks higher. This can depend a lot on your current rankings and the resources you have available to maintain your web presence. Or you may have a company policy that says you need to merge.
Many news sites choose to run their websites on separate domains. Both sites may appear in Google News and organic search results multiple times for the same stories or affiliate content targeting the same terms.
Companies often operate websites separately for a time, but eventually tend to merge them. You may see this happen in stages:
- The acquired company adds the “a xxx company” tag to the current domain.
- The acquired domain is migrated to the parent company’s domain with the same branding.
- The acquired company is rebranded and more closely integrated with the parent company’s product or offering.
Check out ours website migration guide to see what it takes to successfully migrate a site.
Some of the main things that can cause traffic loss during migrations are the inability to perform redirects and deletion of content. I’ll show you how to control them in the next section.
You also need to make sure you support older brand names in some way. Sometimes these terms are still used by people in the market for many years and you don’t want to miss out on this valuable search traffic to another website that may be ranking instead of yours!
You will also need to make sure that your TLS certificate (what allows HTTP to work) works on all domains. Otherwise, users may receive an error and not be redirected to the new site, even if a redirect is active.
The easiest way to check for any major drops is to create a Portfolio with the old domain and the new site location or pages. Then you can use Site Explorer’s Overview report to look for any major traffic drops, and use the comparison mode in any of the other reports, such as organic keywords, to spot where traffic may have been lost.
Depending on your setup, you may be able to simply add the old domain as a competitor in the overview report to see how the migration went.
We recommend checking your old URLs to make sure the redirects were done and all content was migrated correctly.
To get a list of URLs with the most links, you can use the Top by Links report in Site Explorer.
You can upload the list as a custom list in Site Audit under the URL Sources tab. Alternatively, you can simply select Backlink as your source in this tab. I would remove any other scan sources for this use case.
Next we will crawl all URLs with links. In Page Explorer, you can customize the table to include items like Redirect URL, Redirect Status Code, Final Redirect URL, and Final Redirect Status Code to get an easy view of all ongoing redirects.
Make sure your redirects are 301 or 308 rather than 302 or 307 status codes if you are making a permanent move and want the URLs to be indexed on the new website instead of the old one.
You should also monitor the renewal of old domains. You don’t want a competitor to register them or the site to be repurposed into something more nefarious.
SEOs can also help with the transfer of knowledge and best practices between companies. There are many different ways they can facilitate this. See this section for some ideas.
Final thoughts
Even if you weren’t involved in the original migration process, you should probably check out some of the major company acquisitions to see if there’s any value left on the table. Look for failed redirects, unmigrated content, etc. In my experience, there is a lot of value to be gained by cleaning up after these old acquisitions.
If you have any questions, send me a message X or LinkedIn.