Opinions Needed: To Merge or Not to Merge Local Marina Websites

[Shelly]

In the past, determining whether to merge 2 websites during an overhaul has been fairly straightforward to research and determine. I'm really torn on this one and need opinions from others in the field.

• Marinas are located on 2 different lakes in close proximity to one another (15-20 min drive) that share the same name other than one word (Upper and Lower)
  • Lower [name] Lake
  • Upper [name] Lake
• Similarly, the marina names follow suit
  • [name] Lake Marina
  • Upper [name] Marina
• 2 different logos (though very similar with the only difference being the acronym associated)
• Officially 2 different businesses (I need to separate my invoices for the same owner)
• Both currently rank for the same high-value rental keywords, helping to dominate the search results since they currently have 2 full results for the 2 different websites
• Fairly low competition in the area makes the 2 sites stand out more
• Almost all duplicate content except both rent boats for camping at different campgrounds on or near the respective lake.
• Looking at SEMrush, there is a point last July when Upper had a bump in organic traffic (probably with the July Cor Update) and Lower saw a respective drop. This tells me that one is impacting the other, but both still rank high, with Lower maintaining top positions over Upper.
• Lower has been around for a while. Upper was acquired and rebranded/named about 2 years ago.
• Both have a decent number of links yet fairly low authority. Lower Lake has higher metrics for both.

I am leaning one way from my research but I'm still hesitant and looking for expert opinions.

 

[Professor M]

if it is working and they are 2 different businesses, I would leave it as it is ("don't break what is working").
Probably, I would change some of the duplicate content.

As they belong to the same owner, it may be worth creating a simple 3rd website for the group, mirroring the corporate structure. Similar to malls and mall owners (each mall has a website and the mall owner has its own website with all the properties)

hope it helps