How to buy a website in 2019 and not to fail

There is a huge number of different exchanges, shops, and forums where you can buy or sell a website. Below are a few of the most popular ones.

The first thing you should pay attention to when choosing is your goal. Why do you need a website? Of what subject? With or without an income? What is the number of key queries and what is the website position in the search?

Moreover, the uniqueness of the website and the quality of the content on it are important for any purpose. Be sure to check the website texts for uniqueness and informational value. Pay attention to the design of the website and its appearance, if it matters in terms of your purposes.

Do not forget about the website age; the older the resource, the better. This rule is universal. The number of visitors may depend on this.

If you are thinking about buying a website with a history, you should check its past, that is, whether the website was always dedicated to one subject and whether it violated the rules of search engines. You can do this using the web archive. Website mirrors or website gluing are other important selection criteria. Before buying a website, be sure to check if the domain is glued to another.

When buying a website with income, it is important to pay attention to the ways of monetizing the website and the domain information. Check the quality of incoming and outcoming links to avoid search engine filters.

Analyzing the monetization of the project, check the location of ad blocks, the use of traffic acquisition channels and forecast your traffic after buying the website. You can find out all these indicators on special websites; you can conduct an SEO audit using Serpstat, check the uniqueness of texts using Plagium.com, and explore traffic sources via Similarweb.

To check website traffic, we will need special analytics services, for example, the abovementioned Similarweb or Serpstat. They will provide approximate traffic information. You can view the exact numbers in Google Analytics if you have access to them.

Pay attention not only to monthly or annual traffic but also to the graphs. Are there any sharp changes in traffic? In some cases, such changes are explained by seasonal demand or the launch of advertising campaigns, but sometimes this may indicate the use of prohibited methods of SEO which will soon become the reason for imposing filters.

The website price depends on many factors that we considered above and varies greatly depending on its goals. A good website can cost anywhere from $200 to $5 million.

The website price is determined based on five main factors:

These criteria allow you to compare prices and quality. You need to determine the purpose of the transaction and the subject of the project to determine how much money you need to buy a website since there are particular prices in every industry.

Buying a website directly is usually more profitable than ordering development from scratch in a web studio, but there are many drawbacks to this. The seller's price will be lower, but you take full responsibility for the website, so it's worth checking the person well, and only then concluding an agreement with them.

Also, do not forget that the website requires constant maintenance. Optimization and advertising expenditures are still in force, both when creating and when buying a ready-made website.

Before buying a website, you need to check the seller or the company that owns it, and find out all the details. Check the website for filters, indexing, ranking in search results, and determine the list of necessary improvements.

You will also need to analyze your goals and opportunities when buying and remember that any website will require additional efforts and investments in advertising and optimization in order to yield maximum profit.