The SEO value of a website or online business

Taking over a website or domain name can play an important role within an SEO strategy. In fact, taking over a strong domain in the same niche you operate in is a proven concept. To do this successfully, it is important that you have an idea of its SEO value. But how exactly do you determine the SEO value of an online business or website?

Let's preface by saying that there is no absolute truth when it comes to valuation. You often use profit and revenue figures and projections for the future. Valuation methods that (also) look to the future implicitly assume a certain number of visitors, organic and paid, and the revenue they represent. But besides the number of visitors, there are more SEO components that affect price. Those components are elaborated by Martijn Hoving in this article.

Component 1: stable amount of organic visits

The amount of organic visitors a website attracts is not subject to much change. This is different from visitors you attract through Google Ads, which are just gone when the money tap is turned off. Because of this stable nature, organic visits play an important role in value. Because even if nothing is improved on the website you want to take over, you know that organic visitors will continue to come and generate sales for months or even years to come.

For almost any online businesses or websites, you can find data in Google Analytics that shows whether there has been a stable amount of organic visitors over the past few years:

Practically every website or online business has a Google Analytics installation that often contains several years of data, which allows you to assess whether there has been a stable flow of organic visits:

Analytics webshopovername
(Organische bezoekers en de bijbehorende opbrengst in de afgelopen drie jaar)

 

You would do well to dive into the historical data so that you are not surprised by seasonality. Or a virus affecting the global economy on a large scale.

Expressing organic traffic in CPC value

The value of organic visitors can also be determined differently. By looking at what the same amount of traffic through Google Ads should cost. This not only provides a value, but also gives information about the amount of money keywords that the targeted domain scores on. Money keywords are search terms that have an average price per click in Google Ads. Should the amount of organic traffic cost relatively little in Google Ads, there is probably no superposition on the search terms that have high volume on them.

zoekverkeer waarde webshopovername

(Nearly $8 million in organic traffic!)

 

Component 2: How is the link profile?

Position in Google is greatly influenced by the link profile. In general, the more high-quality websites link to your website, the higher the position in search results. If the acquisition is part of a larger SEO strategy, then this is a very important part. This is because you are then taking over the high positions in the search results.

Link profile assessment

To assess the link profile, we look at, among other things:

  • The number of inbound links and domains they come from;
  • Some values from a tool that is good at assessing link profiles, such as domain rating from Ahrefs and trust flow & citation flow from Majestic.
  • The number of strange, weird or conspicuous websites in the link profile. After all, these pose a risk to a domain.
  • The same data from key competitors.

If there is a good and reliable link profile, then you have gold in your hands!

trustflow webshopovername

(he link profile of Corendon.nl)

 

A while ago, the NMA announced that Sunweb may acquire Corendon. It could be that Sunweb migrates the content of corendon.nl to sunweb.nl. Looking at the information from the screenshot above, we see that there are over 250,000 links from over 2,400 websites in the link profile, all pointing to Sunweb's website as of that time. The trust flow and citation flow, both 47/100, are also moving with them, which will also give another big boost. They will immediately take over the good positions of corendon.nl. In the long run, they also benefit from the extra links.

Component 3: What about content?

The content on a website also has SEO value. Think of good category texts, product texts, maybe even a blog and product videos. Determining this value is not only about the position in the search results and the traffic that comes with it, but also in the time and energy put into producing the content. If it is an online business with little content, you need to take into account that you still need to invest heavily in new texts. If the domain needs to be found well, of course.

Check for content

You can check whether a website is properly populated. This can be done in the following way:

  • Look at 30 random pages and check if they contain relevant text.
  • Use a crawling tool like ContentKing, Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl to see how many words are on each page. Also watch for duplicate content: it's worthless in general.

What the content is worth is also in the search terms people find your domain on. There are 2 ways to check this:

  • In Google Search Console under Performance, take a look at the number of rows under "Searches". That is the number of search terms you can be found on. It does have a limit of 1,000 rows, so this is only good to use with smaller websites.
  • Use a tool like Ahrefs to link domains to searches in Google. Just enter the domain and see how many search terms the domain is found on.

organische zoekwoorden webshopovername

 

Component 4: technology of website or online business

When migrating the new website or online business, the technical state doesn't matter much. But if you want to build further on the existing platform, be sure to look at the technique!

After all, the technical side of SEO is very important for findability. And while no domain scores 100%, certain issues can lower the value. Such as an online store that:

  • Is not mobile-friendly;
  • Loads slowly;
  • Uses a JavaScript framework and hasn't figured out how Google should handle it.

With an SEO audit from an SEO specialist, you can easily have the technology of a website or online business checked. A good specialist not only looks at the current state, but also knows whether the technology is future-proof.

About the author

Martijn Hoving is one of the SEO experts Businessforsale.eu likes to work with. He has his own SEO agency in Zwolle and can provide support in the area of Search Engine Optimization during a due diligence.