7 Checklist To Check Before Buying Any Website in 2024

A few months back, I wrote a post about the platform from where you can buy/sell websites.

The website-flipping is a growing business model in 2024, and a lot of established bloggers and webmasters realize that the end game of a website or a blog is to sell it to someone else. And it does make sense as you can focus on your new passion while someone can continue working on your years or months of efforts and get into a win-win situation with you.

Buying a website is a very serious decision.

It’s an investment. When you invest, you need to see all of the pros and cons.

With websites, a pro would be a good Domain Authority; a con would be a site that is banned by AdSense or penalized by Google algorithm,

Here are five things to look at before you purchase a site.

Parameters To Look At Before Buying A Website:

1. Ai Written content

If you are buying a new website from a flipping platform, make sure you check if the content of that website is written by a human being or using an AI Writing tool.

There are a few good AI content detector tools in the market, such as Originality.ai, that let you check how much percentage of the website is original and how much of it is written by a machine.

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2. Domain Authority

Domain Authority matters a lot, especially if you want to get a sponsored review or some high-paying advertisement. Moreover, finding a high DA site tells you that the site is well-optimized and got high-quality backlinks from various sources.

A site with a high Domain Authority is probably a high-quality site.

Also, the higher the domain authority, the price of the website will be higher.

3. Keyword Ranking

A website can rank for the wrong keyword and drive a lot of traffic, but these wrong-ranking keywords will never help you make money online. If your website is ranking for a correct and targeted keyword, you can convert visitors into sales.

Make sure you check out the Google Analytics data to analyze the landing pages and most popular pages.

Also, use SEMrush to check out the keyword profile attached to the domain.

4. Website Design (UI and UX)

This may not be a deal breaker for many of you, and in fact, I often see this as an opportunity.

A website that is listed to be sold with a crappy interface and design but with high-quality content is an opportunity that you should not miss. The reason for this is; the owner might be selling it for cheap, and this could be a quick flip opportunity for you.

5. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube

If I combine all of the social media traffic for ShoutMeLoud, it contributes to about 10% of our total traffic.

When a site has good content, people won’t hesitate to share that content.

If a website is not popular on Twitter and Facebook, chances are high that it’s missing that community touch because the content is not good. You need to make sure the content is high-quality, relatable, and shareable.

It is a good idea to check how much traffic a website is getting and what are the top traffic sources.

Often a webmaster who is selling a website will reveal the data, but you should also use 3rd party independent tools to analyze website traffic.

Check out:

6. Traffic Demographics

Demographics
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When you create a website/blog, you typically have a target audience in mind.

Example: If you are planning to make an e-commerce gadget blog, your target is probably tech-savvy young people. You also want to make sure those people can buy things without parental guidance (i.e. 18+).

You need to study the demographics of the website you’re buying and make sure there is a clear, well-defined target.

7. Check for SEO penalties before buying a website

Last but most important, do check if the website is ever penalized by Google algorithm updates and if it has recovered or still struggling.

There are tools like –

  1. Semrush (Works for any website)
  2. SEO testing (Works when you have search console access)

that will help you check if a domain is penalized, and if yes, which algorithm update has penalized.

One important thing which you should check before buying a website is for a Panda or Penguin penalty. The Google Panda and Penguin updates penalized many sites for using black-hat SEO and other “unnatural” SEO methods.

While it’s not impossible to rescue a site that has been the victim of sketchy SEO, you may not want to spend the time, effort, and money to do so.

You can use tools like SEMrush or PenguinTool to find if a website has been penalized.

These are straightforward points, but a lot of people don’t consider them when purchasing an existing website.

So tell me: What do you look for when purchasing a website online? Let me know in the comments below.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

5 thoughts on “7 Checklist To Check Before Buying Any Website in 2024”

  1. Samir

    I would suggest a few more points. Search on Google for the name of the website and use {-“url of the domain”} (without the { } ) to see what others have to say about the website. The number of mentions of the website are in my opinion more important than links in comments! Also, look at the incoming and outbound links. You don’t want your website to end up in a bad neighborhood, in Google’s terms. Also, instead of just the present Page Rank and Alexa Data look at the trending of the parameters. Hope these points are helpful to anyone purchasing a website.

  2. Rajkumar.R

    I wonder that you get only 10% of traffic from twitter and FB. This post is really helpful. This is the first place i am getting to know about Demographics. Thank you harsh.

  3. Dev | Technshare

    Hey Harsh,
    Nice post dude. Well, PageRank seriously doesn’t matters to me much now… 😀 .!! Btw.. I think Keyword Ranking is the most important before buying any website.
    Thanks for sharing this great post.

    1. Samir

      I totally agree with you. Unless of course you are buying a website just to sell “High PR backlinks” 😛

  4. Murlu

    Excellent suggestions Harsh.

    Flippa has really changed the game in buying websites, it’s now becoming something we can all try out without a huge investment.

    These tips are really important because you want to make sure you buy a blog which has potential but also gives you enough room to improve. By buying a website that is on its tipping point of success, you can pick it up for a small amount, flip it and turn it into a massive blog after a few adjustments.

    Thanks for sharing!

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