It's an understandable assumption. It's also where a lot of acquisition value quietly leaks away.
PwC found that 48% of deals perform below expectations1. The reason? Because the the integration didn't deliver what the model predicted. Websites and digital assets are typically a small line in the deal, but it's the one that can be devalued the fastest with the wrong approach.
Yes, the principles of a domain migration apply. But an acquisition adds two things that a normal domain migration doesn't have - a second brand with its own equity and a customer base wary of change.
Start with an audit.
The instinct is to plan the migration. The better first move is to find out what you've actually bought.
Marketing and sales teams tend to arrive late in the due diligence process. Deals are confidential until they aren't, and by the time you're briefed, the timeline is already compressed. That's exactly why the audit needs to be a standing process rather than something you improvise per deal.
Five things worth knowing before anyone changes anything:
- The pages doing the work. Which content and landing pages are driving conversions? These are the assets you rebrand and migrate; everything else is a judgement call.
- Search visibility and authority. Top keywords, ranking pages, and the backlink profile. Inbound links are the hardest asset to rebuild and the easiest to lose in a careless migration.
- Topic overlap. Does their content complement your clusters or compete with them? Two sites ranking against each other for the same terms is a common and avoidable outcome.
- Site performance and UX. Speed and usability often decide whether a site is worth integrating at all, or whether it's cheaper to migrate the content and retire the platform.
- Market position. What's growing in their sector, and what does the acquisition give you that you didn't have before?
Migrate, optimise and review.
The technical work isn't complicated. It's just unforgiving of shortcuts.
Migrate. Move the high-value content, refresh it into your brand and tone, archive the duplicate and outdated pages rather than dragging them along, and keep the old site on staging so you can refer back to it after go-live.
Optimise. Build the 301 redirect strategy page by page - not a blanket redirect to the homepage, which throws away most of the equity you just paid for. Keep the landing pages that convert, or send that traffic somewhere genuinely equivalent. Fix the internal links. Tell Google what you've done through Search Console rather than leaving it to work it out.
Review. Baseline your metrics before the switch so you can prove what happened afterwards. Then watch indexing, rankings and conversions daily for the first fortnight, not monthly. Most migration problems are cheap to fix in week one and expensive in month three.
Then simplify the stack
An integration is the best excuse you'll get to clear out technical debt. Two CRMs, two email platforms, two analytics setups and an ATS nobody likes are a cost and a data problem, and the case for consolidation is never easier to make than in the weeks after a deal closes.
The real advantage is doing it again
One acquisition is a project. A buy-and-build strategy is a process - and the second integration should cost a fraction of the first.
That's mostly a platform question. If every landing page, redirect rule and brand change on your site needs a developer and a two-week queue, integration will always be the slow part of the deal. If your marketing team can build and launch those things themselves, you're measuring integration in days.
Get the full guide
Our M&A guide, Unlocking acquisition value with successful website integrations, sets out the whole framework. If buy and build is a key part of your company's growth strategy, get in touch to learn how we can help you integrate faster and more effectively.
1 PWC, 2023 - Time to go further, faster: Transacting to create value and accelerate transformation
