Acquiring an Existing Website

This is one of the most underrated and least covered SEO techniques of all. Whenever people think about website acquisition they assume you have to be spending vast amounts of cash, but this just isn't the case. I've picked up sites for as little as $2,500, which is about how much you'd spend on one month within a modest SEO campaign.

When done right, the long-term return on investment of website acquisition is huge.

The major benefits of acquiring an existing website and migrating it into your own site are:

1. You'll absorb all of the traffic of the existing site.
2. You will bring in all of the links that the website had.
3. There will be a huge influx of new content to your website.
4. Their keyword rankings will now be your keyword rankings.
5. In some cases you can take over their social media accounts and mailing list subscribers.
6. You'll see a site-wide lift in your organic traffic.

These all sound pretty good right? I actually wrote a case study of doing this with my own blog a couple of years ago that shows the effect.

How Much is a Website Worth?

The value of a website is often judged by the amount of revenue it generates on a monthly/annual basis. There are a lot of different ways to reach a fair selling price; one common valuation model is 2x net annual income. So let's say the website makes a net monthly income of $250; a rough valuation for the site could then be $6,000.

There are a lot of other factors that come into play here but this is a good starting point. If a mailing list is also being discussed then an additional 'per subscriber' fee could be bolted on. The same could be said with social media accounts.

The ideal purchase for a site in the region of $5-10k is going to have hyper-relevant content (the more specific to your buyer persona the better), will have between 10-20k monthly visitors and roughly 200-500 linking root domains. If the site is making little or no revenue then you're onto a winner.

Here's a really good interview with Thomas Smale of FE International, a company that specialises in website sales. Within the interview, Thomas answers some common questions surrounding website sales, and I'd strongly recommend reading it if you're interested in learning more.

How to Find Acquisition Targets

This could be a whole blog post in itself, but here's a brief overview of the steps that I take to find acquisition targets. The ideal target for me is as follows:

1. The site has a sizeable amount of original content that's relevant to my buyer persona.
2. There is a good ratio of backlinks to linking root domains (I try to find sites with a max 20:1 ratio).
3. There is a good volume of linking root domains (this really depends on how many you're looking for).
4. The site currently brings in a steady flow of organic traffic each month (minimum 10,000 unique visitors).
5. There hasn't been any content published on the site in the past few months (which shows that the owner may be more open to selling).
6. There aren't a lot of ads on the site and there's nothing being directly sold from the site (this brings the value down).

Blogs are always a primary target for me because they often have relatively low levels of income and large volumes of content. This means that the owner is much more open to selling for a reasonable fee, and I will get a load of extra content that would have cost me a ton to create and even more to promote.

I tend to start by looking for some core keywords that I'm aiming to rank for. I'll check out sites ranking on the first two pages and then bring up their site in Ahref's Position Explorer Tool.

You can go through and check out some of the keywords that their site ranks for as well as getting a rough idea of their monthly organic traffic.

This helps you to understand the potential of the website. If you combine this with the data that SEMrush and SimilarWeb has, you'll be able to get a well-rounded view of the website's overall performance.

Another tip I have is to check out the list of "Top 10 Competitors" to find a load of other relevant websites that rank for similar keywords.

What to Do Once You've Acquired a Website

Once you've acquired a website, the next step is to port all of their content into your existing website and then 301 redirect everything over.

All of the backlinks will be passed through to you and Google should reindex the new pages over the following few weeks.

For a more detailed look at the technical process involved, check out my guide here.