2 Websites with Same Business Name

[elcappy]

I have a client that wanted a new website and we set it up and did some on page SEO to get it off the ground. Well turns out they already had a website elsewhere and the domain is their business name as opposed to a generic domain they used with us.

I can't get them to rank well at all and their other site is ranking page 2 to page 7 for different keywords.

This isn't the first time that this issue has come up, this is about the 3rd to 4th customer that we've found to have another website with the same business name, phone, address etc and we can't rank the site they have with us.

Could this be why we are having issues? This is for car dealers, so they usually have the same inventory on both sites.

 

[Techxan]

The duplicate NAP is a large part of your problem.

 

[CWonker]

The duplicate NAP is a large part of your problem.

I personally did a test on this about 18 months ago. I had two domains abc.com and abc.org different sites different content but both targeting the same niche keywords. They ranked decently but after i redirected one to a new site i was working on the other shot up from pg 3 to pg 1 on Google for its main term. I think this may fall under keyword cannibalization but its the only test I did so I can't say for certain.