A little back story. My mother in law had a business. Three years ago we brand off and created a sister company with a similar name knowing that we would basically absorb her business and they would roll into one when she retires. That time has come.
What is the best way to do this without damaging SEO? Her domain is livingtowers.com. Ours is livingtowersflkeys.com. I’ll setup redirects from and to the corresponding pages, I’m just not sure what domain it is best to keep as our main and active domain.
I see that the domain livingtowersflkeys.com has a growing traffic curve, so I will advise you to keep this domain and redirect livingtowers.com to the new domain.
Moreover, the domain name livingtowers.com doesn’t look secure (the site is http) which has a negative impact for SEO : it seems to me that it’s easier for you to migrate to the domain livingtowersflkeys.com.
Otherwise, you can keep the old one, but you’ll have to review the implementation on the host side because you don’t have an SSL certificate.
Concerning the migration, you have to list all the URLs of the domain you want to migrate, and prepare a 301 redirection plan to redirect these URLs to those that will replace them on the new domain at the time of migration.
This will require some upfront organization to ensure that every page on the livingtowers.com site has an equivalent on the new one. To limit the SEO impact, you may need to create new pages on livingtowersflkeys.com to handle the migration.