Sometimes organizations come to us looking to acquire a website or web-based business when they already know that the website in question has significant problems. Then the question posed to us becomes, “What is it going to take to get this site back to health?” The process we follow is very similar. The objective, however, is to determine the level of effort necessary to fix the website. We have looked at situations like this where we advised clients on a path to success. We have looked at others where our recommendation was that it was too far gone and the expense to fix the site would probably make a reasonable ROI impossible.
Let’s face it, the reason why you are considering buying a site is the upside, or opportunities for quick improvement. Nothing is sweeter than finding out that simple SEO changes will result in fast increases in organic search traffic. We will find these opportunities for you and help you map out what you need to do to take advantage of them, as well as estimate just how much upside they may represent.
- An architectural assessment to make sure that search engines can easily crawl and understand the site
- A content assessment looking for thin and/or duplicate content issues that may have caused, or may in the future cause, penalties to be assessed that would negatively impact organic search traffic
- A review of Google Webmaster Tools to make sure no manual actions have been assessed against a site
- A review of a site’s backlink profile to see if it is at risk for Penguin or link-related manual actions