SEO- Considerations for a business takeover 

Today, organic findability in search engine results, also known as SEO, is still one of, if not THE, most important sources of traffic for an online business. An online business that is not found at all for searches related to its industry, topic or field, it is like a restaurant located in a soulless industrial park.

Many online businesses would therefore go out of business without "free" organic search traffic from Google. Free in quotes because SEO is basically free as you don't pay Google for this. But strong website optimization takes a lot of time and energy, and of course, at the end of the day, so does money.

Why is SEO traffic so important for online stores now? When we want to buy something, to solve a desire or a problem, we mainly turn to a search engine. In the Netherlands, that will be Google, which has the largest market share(source). Here we are already more or less trained to look at the organic search results or what you can also call the real search results. Above and below that are often ads, Google Ads. Laypeople indicate that they intuitively feel that the organic search results are of higher quality and that one feels that in the Google Ads just anyone can get in who pays enough to Google. An online store that is virtually untraceable in Google also comes across as unreliable to most searchers: something must be wrong then. A top 3 ranking in the Google search results can be seen as a recommendation. They are, as it were, the best 3 online business within a niche recommended by search engine giant Google. You couldn't wish for a better recommendation. Because people trust Google. It is so intertwined in our lives, provides cool free services like Gmail, Drive and YouTube. And google is even an official verb.

Anyway, I think it has become clear by now how important SEO traffic is for online stores. So when looking to acquire an online bu siness, you want to select one where the previous owner has already laid a solid foundation. In this article I will touch on some of the most important considerations.

Can the online business (continue to) hold its own against the superpowers?

It will not have escaped anyone's notice that for many e-commerce searches a row of names keeps popping up, the usual suspects you could call them. If you search for technology, you will most likely come across Coolblue. In the fashion world, you often have to deal with Zalando. Then there are also general superpowers such as a Bol.com or soon Amazon NL. And if there is even a little intention from the searcher for second-hand, Google will anyway keep one or more spots in the top 3 free for the Dutch second-hand marketplace 'Marktplaats'. This is the reality of today's SEO NL landscape.

So what you want to avoid is adopting an online business that will snow under against all this violence. But how can an SME online business guard against these kinds of parties that have deep pockets and an national and sometimes even international fame?

Google has traditionally looked for diverse search results. Just general Internet superpowers, search results where the entire top five consist only of Bol.com, Marktplaats and Beslist, that's not what searchers, and therefore Google, want. It wants to provide a diverse selection for searchers so they can quickly find what they are looking for. In fact, a significant portion of searchers want to avoid these types of large websites. Perhaps because they are looking for something unique or very specific. For that reason, Google actually always clears a spot for a true specialist. A party that has bitten into a particular product or service. With the largest (qualitative) offering. With the most knowledge, and therefore service, on the subject.

What I personally don't see in this are SME online businesses trying to become a second Bol.com or a second Zalando. A general online products department store or a clothing or interior design generalist therefore has little chance of survival in my opinion, unless it has the deep pockets of the aforementioned parties. In my opinion, the only way to make a stand now and certainly for the future is to specialize in a very specific product and become the best at it. The reason why these types of websites are able to take the edge off the proverbial bread in organic search results compared to the superpowers is because they specialize in one product type.

I don't mean to say that generalists can never be a good acquisition. One does not necessarily have to be a specialist in a particular product. For example, one can also be a specialist in price. If one can have lower prices than everyone else, this is also a strong weapon against the superpowers. Dutch web consumers are price conscious. In most cases looking for the lowest price, and they are willing to do a lot of research on this. When they finally stumble upon the online business in question and stop searching. This is a quality signal for Google, apparently this online business satisfies the searcher's desire. In jargon, we also call this a user signal, and this is difficult to impossible to fake.

In terms of payment method and delivery, the superpowers will always be able to do it more favorably. Another possible weapon is a unique product or service that is exclusive to the online business and that the superpowers simply cannot or should not offer.

In short, there are still plenty of opportunities to take on Amazon and co. But it is important to consider, what are the so-called unique selling points of an online business compared to these types of parties. If those are not already there, and if you cannot bring them after the acquisition, it may not be a wise acquisition.

Has a solid link profile been established?

Besides the quality of the offer, and the user signals just touched upon, links, or referrals from third-party websites still play an extremely important role in compiling search results today.

This is what has made Google what it is, the No. 1 search engine. It was the first to be able to compile search results based on the prestige of websites. As a result, search results were so much better than other search engines that Internet users really only wanted to use Google.

So links are an important aspect, for Google to assess the reliability and reputation of the online business. You can never have too many relevant and qualitative links. With the emphasis on relevant and qualitative. Since links play such an important role in the composition of rankings and thus the turnover of online businesses, we unfortunately see a lot of manipulation with this by online business owners.

Some examples are (that Google absolutely does not like):

Paying for links

E.g. an interior design store explicitly pays an interior design magazine for links to the store. Often the magazine will indicate this as 'sponsored content' or 'advertorial'. This is allowed in principle, but the links must be made NoFollow. This means that Google is told that the links are paid and therefore should not pass on any link value.  So you don't want to take over an online business that owes its high placement in Google search results to "bribing" other websites, because sooner or later these kinds of online business are going to run into trouble anyway.

Barter deals, giveaways, sweepstakes

Strictly speaking, no money is involved, but one gives away free products in exchange for a link. Google does not like this either when there is no NoFollow tag (source). 
Actually, one should just never enter into "quid pro quo" relationships. So I give you money or a product or a service, in exchange for a link, that is not allowed.

Artificial links

In the SEO industry, unfortunately, there are dubious parties who create all kinds of fake websites, in slang they also call them PBNs. That stands for private blog network. Those are websites that actually have SEO link manipulation as their sole raison d'être. So the SEO parties offer links there for their clients or commit so-called link exchanges with them. That is absolutely not the intention. Another thorny issue here is that there are reports of SEO parties threatening to remove all these links again after you cancel your cooperation with them. With SEO, you would actually be building something long-term, something that is organic, and permanent as opposed to ads. But so these types of parties use these links as hostage to prevent a client from canceling or switching to another SEO service provider. So this is also something that should be considered when studying a link profile of an online store you would like to acquire. You do not want to take over an online store, where after transfer, suddenly half the link profile is gone, because it was decided not to continue with the SEO party behind it.

As a layman, how can you somewhat assess this? There are so-called link checker tools. These are tools that provide insight into a website's link profile. Well-known names are Moz, Ahrefs and SEMrush. Unfortunately, subscriptions to these tools are not exactly cheap. However, they all do have a free or trial account available for a very small amount so you can take a moment to create an account before the link profile analysis. Moz's Link Explorer works on the freemium model, and can be used for free to a certain extent. But personally I would recommend getting a trial account from Ahrefs. Ahrefs finds most of the links to my hands-on experience. Anyway, check out some of the links these tools find manually. What kind of websites are these? Are these real live websites? If it doesn't feel right, it often doesn't.

And what about link statistics from these kinds of tools? Should this be a guide as far as an online business takeover is concerned? In my opinion, absolutely not. So these tools have a metric to estimate the link profile authority of a website. In the case of Moz, this is Domain Authority (DA). And Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating (DR), Majestic has Trust Flow. But basically all those numbers are easy to artificially influence. So as an SEO specialist, I can't say "If you buy an online store with a DR above 50 then you're fine." It doesn't work that way. Although of course a higher score is better, assuming all other circumstances equal. I'd rather have an online business with a DR of 50 than one of 30. But it's only an estimate and should always be taken with a grain of salt. What you should pay more attention to in my opinion is the amount of monthly organic search traffic reported by such tools. If a website receives 10,000 organic visitors from Google every month, you can assume that this is a website that Google trusts and is in good standing apparently with the search engine. Of course, the amount of organic search traffic does vary greatly by industry, e.g., an interior design online business will typically receive significantly more search traffic than an online business dealing in obscure Japanese manga comic books, so this must be kept in perspective. High rankings for individual keywords that are competitive and have high search volume can also be a good sign. For example, if an online business ranks No. 1 for a term like "buy sofa set," then you can assume that Google thinks this is a fine website, because Google only places websites in the lead for that type of term that they trust thoroughly.

Google sanctions

So Google is against link manipulation and this is clearly stated in their so-called Terms of Service. An online store that manipulates with links (or in other ways) can suffer adverse consequences in two ways. First, there are manual actions. This is a penalty personally imposed by a Google employee who unexpectedly came across the website, or perhaps it was reported by one of its competitors. The "nice thing" about manual actions, as they are called, is that they are clearly communicated by the search engine giant. It's just that you need to know where. The free service Google Search Console should be installed, or preferably already set up by the previous owner of the Web store. There you will find a report called "manual actions.

If you see the checkmark with green background here, do not rejoice too soon. Because the Web is impossibly large, and it's hard for Google to play policeman. Just like the IRS can't immediately uncover and punish all tax fraud. So there may be a problem that hasn't yet come to light. Only now you know that at the time of checking there is no problem in any case.

In addition to manual actions, then, there are algorithmic penalties. These are impersonal penalties imposed by the search engine algorithm. Google will not communicate this to you, nor do they have support that can clarify this.

So how do you identify algorithmic problems? You can look at the graph of organic search traffic over the past few years in a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs.

What you don't want to see:

This website ran into trouble around May of 2019, and it has not been doing well at all since then. This is a sweeping sign. This is going to be a lot of work to correct. By the way, this example is from the website infowars.com. This is an American website that spreads conspiracy theories. So a sanction does not always have to do with links; it can also have to do with the content of the Web site. If it is misleading, incorrect or has an intention to scam, it can also be penalized by Google. You do not want to get into such a boat.

Pro tip: So Ahrefs and SEMrush are paid tools as indicated earlier. However, there is a free alternative that is Panguin. This is a contraction of the two most infamous Google penalties namely Panda (quality content) and Penguin (links). What this tool does is take a graph from Google Analytics (provided it is installed), and over it it places annotations regarding known Google updates. If you click on the annotation you can read more about what exactly this Google algorithm update means. This tool is free and non-binding to use. Although you must receive permission to use the seller's Google Analytics account. If you do not yet have access to this for privacy reasons, you better consult SEMrush because there are no privacy issues involved.

Technical foundation: online business software CMS

Very important to consider for an acquisition is the online business system it runs on. There are many roads that lead to Rome in this area, but some roads are a bit longer, and some are dead ends unfortunately. What do I mean to say?

One of the reasons why you might want to take over an online business is because it can scale by expanding abroad. The Netherlands will soon be too small anyway, and the large German market beckons, and why not Flanders right away?

The problem is that international SEO success is not as simple as simply registering a .de domain name and cloning the store there.

In terms of technology, hreflang tags are vital. This is a special code created by Google in December 2011. It tells the search engine which page is meant for which language and/or country. Especially when it comes to the same language, e.g. speaking Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium, this is extremely crucial. Indeed, in the absence or incorrectly set hreflang tags, Google is going to see one of the pages as plagiarism or duplicate. As a result, one will be virtually untraceable for a certain search term in Google.nl or in Google.be (the effect of this differs, it depends on which Google will see as original, in my practical experience this is almost arbitrary). If hreflang tags are missing, one of these two pages is bound to end up in the lower regions of Google.

Between different languages, e.g. English and Dutch, the sheet of clean hreflang tags is usually not such a big problem. But it is far from tidy and cannot be called a best practice.

Unfortunately, some SaaS web store software providers in the Netherlands have not yet taken into account the international ambitions of customers. And do not support this correctly. When I raised this with the support there, both the undersigned and the customer only received political answers and the issue was trivialized. This creates a significant, almost insurmountable obstacle to our desires to expand across the border.

I do understand, hreflang tags is one of the most troublesome aspects of SEO. This still goes wrong very often in practice. SEO specialists wake up sweating in the night because of it, so to speak. It is very difficult for online business software providers to program this exactly according to Google regulations. This will cost them a lot of money, because the programmers would have to put in many hours to do so. This is presumably why the hreflang tag capabilities of most SaaS solutions are so lousy.

What does this mean practically for you as a merchant with international ambitions who wants to acquire an online business? If it is a SaaS platform, I will not name names in this post, but actually it applies to almost all known solutions here in the Netherlands, research, consult the support of the online business system what is the support they offer for hreflang tags? If you do not receive a satisfactory answer, then you can assume that international expansion, is going to be a difficult story.

With open source systems such as WordPress (Woocommerce) and Magento, clean hreflang tags are actually almost always possible. Only, you may have to hire a web designer/web developer for this to create the solution. This may incur some costs, but you should not be in the rough.

Hreflang tags are the most pressing technical flaw I have encountered in online business software solutions. But there were also other pain points that I have observed over the years. For example, the lack of self-referencing canonical tags, a redirect module that by default provides 302 (temporary) redirects instead of 301 (permanent) and vague URL structures, is by no means SEO friendly. Many online business systems talk about how SEO friendly they are. But in practice, this is often not so bad. If you bring up problems such as redirects, they will act accordingly. But when things get tricky, like hreflang tags for example, then you have a limitation here.

So research well in advance, the system the online business you have in mind is running on. A move of online business software after acquisition is possible, but has a lot of complications, as it takes a lot of time, energy and budget. Time, energy and budget that you would rather invest in the marketing and growth of the business instead of the technical foundation.

A second opinion is never a bad idea

As you have read in this article, there is quite a bit involved in an SEO due diligence for an online business acquisition. In this article, unfortunately, I cannot discuss everything. Years of practical experience is the key. For that reason, it is actually indispensable to employ an SEO scan. In any case, a second opinion is never wrong when substantial sums are invested.

The undersigned has no financial interest and shares his experience as an independent specialist.

This guest article was written by Romano Groenewoud. He runs location independently as a digital nomad running his own SEO agency under the alias 'SEO Geek'.