How a PE-Backed Vertical SaaS Roll-Up Consolidated Four Legacy Sites Into One Ranking Asset

Composite company profile

A private-equity-backed vertical SaaS platform formed by acquiring and merging four independent practice-management point solutions into a single product under one brand. Combined ARR around $34M at engagement start. Each of the four acquired companies still ran its own legacy marketing site, blog, and domain more than a year after the product merge. Marketing team of six, newly assembled from the four legacy teams, reporting to a CMO hired six months post-roll-up.

The problem

The four legacy domains were still live, still indexed, and in several cases still ranking against each other for the same commercial keywords. Nobody on the new combined team had full visibility into what existed across all four sites, backlink equity was scattered instead of consolidated onto the new unified brand, and prospects researching the category were landing on inconsistent pricing, product names, and messaging depending on which of the four domains Google happened to serve them.

• An Ahrefs pull across all four domains showed roughly a third of the combined keyword portfolio had two or more owned domains ranking against each other, with the practical effect that none of them held a top-3 position on those terms.
• Backlink profiles were fragmented four ways instead of consolidated, so the unified brand’s domain authority looked far weaker than the roll-up’s real market position.
• AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity) were citing conflicting descriptions of the company depending on which legacy domain got crawled most recently, since there was no single canonical entity.

What our team diagnosed

1. A naive redirect-everything-to-the-new-domain move would have caused a ranking cliff. Several legacy pages ranked for terms the new unified site had no equivalent page for; a flat domain-level 301 without page-level content mapping would have thrown that traffic away rather than transferred it.

2. The four legacy content libraries had real, salvageable overlap. Roughly 40% of the combined blog content covered the same buyer questions from four different angles — consolidatable into fewer, stronger pages rather than needing to be rewritten from zero.

Strategy MV3 shipped

1. Page-level redirect mapping. Audited all four legacy domains, matched each ranking URL to its best equivalent (or newly built equivalent) page on the unified domain before any redirect went live.
2. Phased consolidation in three waves instead of one flat cutover, migrating the lowest-risk domain first to validate the mapping approach before touching the two highest-traffic legacy sites.
3. Backlink outreach to the highest-authority referring domains linking to the legacy sites, requesting anchor updates to the unified domain post-migration.
4. Unified Organization schema and a single canonical brand entity across the new site, plus an updated llms.txt reference, so AI answer engines had one consistent source to cite going forward.

Implementation

Content-audited roughly 600 combined URLs across the four legacy domains, built the full redirect map, executed the three-wave 301 rollout over eight weeks with a ranking-monitoring checkpoint between each wave, and rebuilt the unified site’s information architecture around the merged product’s actual feature set rather than any one legacy product’s original structure.

Outcomes

• Combined organic sessions: up roughly 60% within five months of completing the migration, versus the pre-migration four-domain combined baseline.
• Ranking cannibalization: the keyword set with multiple owned domains competing dropped from roughly a third of the portfolio to near zero.
• Migration dip: a temporary combined-traffic dip of about 12% in the two weeks following each wave, fully recovered within four to six weeks per wave.
• AI citation consistency: ChatGPT and Perplexity responses referencing the company shifted from citing three different legacy brand names to consistently citing the unified brand within roughly ten weeks of the schema and llms.txt work going live.

Timeline

Roughly seven months from initial audit to full four-domain consolidation, including the three-wave migration and the recovery window after each wave.

Composite testimonial

“We knew we had four websites competing with each other, we just didn’t know how badly until MV3 mapped it out. The part that mattered most wasn’t the redirect work, it was that they built the map before we moved anything, so we didn’t torch the rankings we already had.”
Daniel, VP of Marketing

Services engaged

Scale AI retainer plus a custom domain-consolidation project (redirect mapping, backlink outreach, unified schema).

How this profile is built

This is a composite profile, assembled from patterns and outcomes we’ve seen across multiple real engagements in this space, not a single named client. Figures above are directionally representative of the scenario, not a verified result from one account.

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