Cons:

May lose some of the link juice from the 301 redirect from the old URL's (between 1 and 10% is the usual quoted figure)

Initial (usually short term) drop in rankings and potentially traffic of weaker site pages

www.weakersite.com is a "nicer" looking URL for offline marketing than www.strongersite.com/weakersite

Pro's:-

If on Subfolder rather than sub directory pages will benefit from domain authority and links to domain of stronger site.

Can focus future link building and on-page SEO efforts on one site rather than 2, potentially doubling the amount you can get done

If building from scratch and choice of 2 sites or 1 I would say go for one. As two already exist there is more of a call to be made.

Hi Atul

If users are searching on a term, for example Amy Winehouse the results prior to her death would have probably been Youtube videos, Lyrics, her official site (if she has one) etc

Immediately after her death users will be wanting to find out what happened, the latest update. As such the CTR for the existing SERP would probably be lower as the user doesn't want the Youtube video or lyrics etc. They want the QDF results to kick in and show the latest news item(s) at the top.

Hope that explains it.

Testing different titles to see if you can improve your rankings for specific keywords or to focus on different keywords may be worthwhile but changing them for the sake of making a change is pointless.

Unless the company is a well known brand, which isn't likely as you have said they are a local business then the volume of searches will be higher for the location & business type as a keyphrase. Currently that type of domain name will have an SEO benefit. More traffic and higher rankings are the positives.

A lack of branding and the fact that the position regarding keyword matched domain names could change are downsides.

The final decision should rest with the business owner but I would present the positives and negatives too them as I have had some success with keyword matched domains. Aware of the potential changes in the future I will be stepping up the link building on the sites to try to protect them from any changes.

The meta description tag doesn't influence SERP's.

As you know search engines often use it as the description for your page in search results.As such a relevant, unique, compelling meta description can have a positive influence on how many clicks you get on your search listing.

The general line is that we should design for the user and not the search engine so if a meta description is compelling and attracts users then that would be exactly what you are doing.

If you believe that putting the price will increase the click through then I would go for it.

Had some advice from Will Critchlow when I asked about the use of the £ symbol in meta descriptions and he said that we should "use HTML encoding (£ rather than £). We tend to advise going for ASCII only as character encoding opens you up to a world of pain, but HTML entities should generally be fine"

Hi Ben

Any links, which are a key component of SEO could be split between the two sites rather than bolstering the single site.

Also would the content on this seperate site be unique from the original site? If not then the search engines may look at the new page and decided that it is not worthy of inclusion.

It is possible to rank for the same term with multiple pages on your site so for example the home page, about us and offers page could rank 1, 2 and 3 for a term. Aiming for this may be a better use of your time and efforts as seeing multiple listings for a site at the top of the rankings increases credibility for that site in the users eyes.