When purchasing a website, you want to have free traffic from search engines (organic traffic). To see what kind of traffic that is, we want to determine what keywords the site ranks for. There are buying keywords and just research keywords. Having a nice mix of both is great, but the money is when people are looking to make a purchase (end of the purchase lifecycle).

A long time ago, Google Analytics gave us the keywords people used to find a website. You could just share the analytics accounts and be golden. Now that has moved into the search console, which is more of a private area. So how do we find the keywords a site ranks for without getting access to their accounts?

Backlinks are one of the highest ranking factors in Google and many other search engines. These are links to your site (or the website you are going to purchase) from an outside site. They often have anchor text, which is the part of the URL that explains what the link is. The better the site linking to you (in the eyes of the search engine), the better the boost/juice you get from them. You can check previous articles on how to research the domain name, or how to sell your online business.

What are the tools that we can use to check domain name information and its history? This is important so we can see where the domain has been, how many times it’s moved around (hosting companies) and how long it’s actually been in service. We can also research who owns it, and how many other sites they own that might be a conflict of interest.

The first tool we are going to use is “whois”. You can use this from a terminal (MacOS or Linux), or you can use an online one like:

Doing proper Due Diligence on a web site can be daunting. Don’t despair! The more you do this, the quicker and better you get at it. There are tools all over the internet that can drill  into where traffic comes from and what the site has been up to.

The main question we are trying to ask is: “Is the seller properly representing this business, and is this something I want to own and manage”. There are always going to be problems, you have to determine if your level of problem-solving and knowledge matches up with the business you are looking at. If not, can you easily outsource those missing parts? Many times a seller has custom programmed a business from scratch, and they say it’s easily taken over by someone else. That is rarely true, many are not good at documentation, so taking over someone else’s code is time consuming and expensive.

-We are not licensed attorneys, so please do not take this as Legal advice. Always consult council before signing anything you are not familiar with and do not completely understand.

An NDA is abbreviated as a Non Disclosure Agreement. They are typically sent by the seller (or seller’s broker) to a prospective buyer.

The idea is to give each party some comfort (these are always weighed more to the sellers interests, however). If the deal falls through, or never goes further, the seller needs some “insurance” that the buyer isn’t going to steal the information and duplicate the business (or improve their own similar business).