Advice for complicated rebranding

[Maxine]

Hi everyone. I appreciate you reading this and offering any suggestions/experience you might have. This is the scenario:

New client has a busines with 2 locations, but since they acquired the second location by buying out a competitor (2 years ago) and didn't change the GBP name, they ended up with 2 locations with different names. Let's call the locations cityA and cityB.

It is the same business with two locations. They are driving distance apart and share the same staff and inventory.

MORE COMPLICATIONS:

• They have two websites: ABC.com and XYZ.com but BOTH websites promote BOTH locations
• They have two GBPs with different names, but both point to ABC.com for the website
  • cityA's GBP: NameA = 197 reviews and points to ABC.com
  • cityB's GBP: NameB = 98 reviews and also points to ABC.com
• There is also a rogue GBP on the same street as cityB, but with NameA. It has 1 review and points to ABC.com as well

THE GOAL is to build one brand instead of two:

1. Use NameB as the brand for everything
2. Build XYZ.com as the primary website for both loations
3. Have two GBPs (one for each location) with NameB, and hopefully keeping all the reviews from the existing NameA and NameB gbps (and getting the rogue GBP removed)
   
   

HOW TO PULL THIS OFF WITH THE LEAST DAMAGE?

• We can't risk losing traffic from the ABC.com website or cityA's GBP.
• We want to rebrand cityA's GBP to match cityB's GBP name and brand
• We want both GBP's to point to XYZ.com (not the current ABC.com)

TWO PARTS TO THE PUZZLE:

1. Convert all existing visitors to XYZ.com from ABC.com
   1. Redirects? Fixes the direct visitors but may hurt SEO rankings?
      Although all rankings pretty much come from Maps/GBPs, so I'm not sure how much damage this would do.
   2. Keep both websites but point the GBPs to XYZ.com, and slowly transition ABC.com to XYZ.com as we build up the SEO for XYZ.com?
2. GBPs
   1. Try to rename both GBPs to NameB AND change websites to XYZ..com?
      (reverification shouldn't be a problem, they are both legit locations)
   2. ???????

AND WHAT ORDER TO DO IT ALL IN???

 

[Maxine]

Correction to the GBP information:

• They have two websites: ABC.com and XYZ.com but BOTH websites promote BOTH locations
• They have two GBPs with different names, but both point to ABC.com for the website
  • cityA's GBP: NameA = 200 reviews and points to ABC.com
  • cityB's GBP: NameB = 98 reviews and also points to XYZ.com
• There is also a rogue GBP at the exact location of cityA but with NameB and XYZ.com on it. Sadly it has one review and it is a one-star review too.

I wondered... if I can't change the cityA's GBP to a new name and URL, is there a possibiility of melding cityA's into the rogue GBP (it already has the correct name/address/location) but that would only work if it brought the cityA GBP reviews with it so it isn't stuck with a single and negative review.