Buying a website can help you reach a new audience, get a foothold in a new market, expand your business online, or earn “passive” income.
It’s a similar, yet simpler, process compared to merging or acquiring an existing business. But, just like with a business acquisition, not all website purchases come equal.
In this post, we share tips on everything you need to know to buy your first website with confidence, including:
- Where you can find available websites to buy
- The process for buying a website
- Essential due diligence tips to determine if a website is a good investment
- Common concerns and how to overcome them
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to buying a website or determining what a good investment will be. Following these steps will help you identify if a site is right for you or not.
If you want to expand your reach online, consider competing websites or those in adjacent spaces. For example, in 2016, a blog about car advice sold for over $35 million to an Australian news publication seeking to expand its online reach in the automotive industry, even though it already had an automotive media publication under its wing.
If you’d like to earn more passive income, look for websites already earning a stable monthly income. Marketplaces and brokerages show earning reports of websites available for sale and in some cases, you can also continue to work with the existing team so there’s less work on your shoulders with managing the asset.
Overall, the best investments are the ones you have the skills to grow and manage. For instance, don’t buy a media publication if you have little experience growing a blog. Likewise, if you’ve never worked in eCommerce, don’t go all in on an online store, dropshipping or any kind of website that deals with physical products.
You can typically find very low-cost websites for sale on marketplaces, making them a great place to start for micro-acquisitions. You can buy anything from low-risk starter sites for three figures to seasoned websites earning thousands per month in passive income.
However, it is entirely on your shoulders to do thorough due diligence and make sure you’re not buying a lemon since most marketplaces do very little verification on each listing.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Low-risk starter sites available | No verification from the marketplace |
| Many options to choose from | Little support available |
| Deal directly with the seller | Not all sellers are trustworthy |
Table of Contents
Brokerages
Brokerages offer a more boutique experience when buying a website and are a great place for beginners with some extra cash saved up due to the extra support you can receive.
Instead of listing every website available to buy, brokerages typically have curated lists of websites their internal teams have verified. For example, Empire Flippers and FE International are two brokerages selling different kinds of online businesses.
Typically brokerages deal with larger transactions and you will be hard-pressed to find available websites for sale in the three or four-figure ranges so it’s only advisable to search here if these deals are well within your financial means.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Receive direct support from your broker | Websites tend to be more costly |
| Tailored experience | You may need to pay a brokerage fee |
| Choose from verified websites |
Private deals
If you have some experience with negotiating business deals, you can put those skills to work and secure private website buying deals.
Arguably, the best sites to acquire are the ones people don’t want to sell. Plus, you don’t have to worry about outbidding others to acquire the site.
To find such websites, enter a well-known site in your niche into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and navigate to the Organic Competitors report. Here you’ll see up to 20 websites performing well in the niche:
Alternatively, if you don’t know any sites in your niche, try this method instead:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Enter a handful of keywords that represent your niche
- Go to the Traffic share by domain report
This will show you the websites getting the most estimated organic search traffic from those keywords.
Either way, you can then choose sites to investigate further based on metrics like how much traffic they’re getting or how much they’ve grown over a specific time period.
If you like any of them, reach out to them privately to negotiate a sale.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| No competition to outbid you | Requires existing negotiating skills |
| Find higher quality websites | Needs extra legwork to find great deals |
| Negotiate your terms more comfortably |
Look for any big drops in traffic or any unnatural-looking spikes in referring domains. Both of these can signal either declining performance overall or some shady things going on in the background.
For example, if you notice a lot of links added in a short period of time, the seller may have purchased links in bulk and there is a risk of the website receiving penalties from Google in future.
You can then take a closer look at a site’s link profile in the Backlinks report. Exclude “Best links” to hone in on potentially problematic links.
Paid links usually use the target keyword as the anchor text (the clickable part of the link) and come from poor content on low-quality sites, so look out for sites with lots of those.
For example, look at this link to a page about sleep apnea:
Based on this data, we can see that it:
- Comes from a low authority site that nobody’s ever heard of
- Comes from a page with zero estimated traffic
- Has exact-match anchor text (“sleep apnea”)
If we look at the referring page itself, we can also see that the content is extremely low quality. The site is plastered in ads and although it’s not visible in the screenshot below (because of all the ads!), it has lots of suspicious outlinks too.
Conclusion? This is almost certainly a paid link. If a large percentage of the links to the site you’re considering look like this, that’s a major red flag.
Another of my favorite checks to do at this stage is to look at the Site Structure report to get a feel for the information architecture of the website and the traffic distribution across the content.
Poorly structured websites with decent performance are my favorite kind to work on. Generally, they’re run by people who aren’t the most SEO savvy, but they have built a genuine audience who like what they’re putting out there. Implementing some quick and easy SEO best practices can often see major gains on sites like this in a relatively small timeframe.
- Steady markets are great for consistent, recurring revenue and tend to form the bread and butter foundation of a website’s performance.
- Seasonal markets are great for growing your audience and short injections of new revenue but offer inconsistent income.
- New and growing markets typically have lower competition levels and offer a great opportunity to become the market leader.
- Declining markets offer a great opportunity to revolutionize an outdated way of doing things and to absorb an existing, knowledgeable audience.
In short, there are opportunities in every kind of market, though the best ones for you depend on your goals.
In addition to understanding the market, you’ll need to also scope out existing competitors in the space and how the website you’re looking at is positioned against them.
The Organic Competitors report in Site Explorer will show you the top websites competing for similar keywords and how much bigger or smaller they are compared to the website available for sale.
Having bigger competitors is not a bad thing. In fact, it could be a sign that the market is lucrative and worth investing in.
However, if the website you’re looking at is currently not very competitive, it will also require more skills and technical knowledge to improve it.
Other sellers are not so forthcoming which is why scopipng out the backlink profile in Ahrefs is critical. Poor quality paid links can have very nasty consequences for websites.
How was your content created and how often do you upload new content?
With the latest move towards helpful content and combatingcombatting the rise of AI content, it can be a big boon to know exactly how the seller went about content creation.
- Did they create everything themselves?
- Do they work with subject matter experts?
- Did they use AI?
Content creation is the number one activity you can do from day one after you buy a website to help it reach new heights or to improve its performance if it’sits a bit of a fixer-upper.
If you’re comfortable creating all the content, great! If not, it really helps to know what relationships the seller had with writers, editors and subject matter experts that you can leverage.
It also helps to know how frequently they were publishing content so you can maintain a similar cadence. You can increase the cadence, but be wary of going too fast too quicklyquick. Big jumps in content production can be a sign the seller started using AI content.
You can use Ahrefs to spot mass AI-generated content in the Top Pages report and verify the information the seller has shared with you about their process:
Publishing 14k pages in a matter of a few weeks.
How long before the “Wrath of Google” kicks in?
Make your bets, ladies & gentlemen. pic.twitter.com/Nf4lQZcj9K
— Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 (@timsoulo) December 14, 2023
What do you see as the low-hanging fruit for a buyer?
Many sellers and website brokers will be happy to share the low-hanging fruit opportunities for continuing to grow the website. Asking questions along this line of thought will help you uncover opportunities you may not have become aware of during your research.
About 90% of the time, the best opportunities will come from things like:
- Targeting additional keywords
- Updating content
- Closing content gaps
- Building more or better links
- Exploring additional channels like paid or social platforms
How are traffic and profits diversified?
In our book, this is the most important question to consider if the reason you’re buying a website is to establish a passive income stream.
Ask the seller about the history of profit distribution across their top pages or products. You can also assess this yourself in the website’s analytics.
Look at the top three pages or products and see if any are pulling in more than 20% of the traffic or profits. It could be a sign that the website is not very well diversified.
Sometimes this is ok and could be used as an opportunity, but other times it may be a major risk that is a deal breaker for you.
