If you’re considering selling your business, you want it to fetch top-dollar, right?
Of course, you do!
Well, you’ve got to start by boosting the value of your website.
In the digital world, your website is your brand’s primary asset. Not only does it offer the information new leads need about your company, but it gives them a way to make purchases, contact your office, or sign up for services, as well.
Think of it this way:
A website is like a house. It builds equity over time. In many cases, websites are much more valuable in the years after their development than they are brand-new.
Today, a strong website should be part of any online business owner’s exit strategy.
If you don’t already know how to value a website for sale, now is a good time to start. After all, a high-value site could add several zeros to the bottom line of your company’s sale.
Fortunately, learning how to value a website domain name (and improve the value of said domain name) is simple.
By hiring SEO services NOW, you can make your website stronger in the long run.
That’s what I’m here to teach you today.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use SEO and Local SEO services to help your website generate consistent leads and ensure that potential customers convert. This, in turn, makes your website more valuable to prospective buyers and helps you fetch the highest possible price for it.
Let’s get started.
What Is My Website Worth? How do I value my website?
Figuring out how much your website is worth is a deeply individual process. Often, you’re not aiming for a specific value so much as you are a value range. This range takes into account dozens of factors, including the potential of the site and its current performance.
While websites that offer subscriptions or recurring memberships fetch top dollar, content-based sites might sell for less. I tell my clients to think of it this way: businesses with more risk are valued lower than their minimally risky counterparts.
Here are a few other factors that influence the value of your site:
- The net profit of the site
- Growth trends
- Age of the business
- The site’s link profile
- The business model
- The niche of the business
- Competitors
- The site’s average traffic numbers
Still confused? Here’s something a bit more tangible:
The current rule of thumb for valuing websites is that they’re worth about 24-36x their monthly revenue.
This means a site that makes about $3,000 monthly could be worth as much as $72,000-$108,000 in a sale.
Want to figure out a more exact price for your site? Two of the smartest options are to hire a website broker to work with you. These professionals are highly trained in valuing and improving websites and will be able to put a dollar amount on your business website.
SEO and Traffic Valuation
One of the most common methods for valuing a website for sale is called “Traffic valuation,” and SEO services (specifically keyword research and inclusion) dovetail with it nicely.
During traffic valuation, a specialist (often an SEO expert) will research the phrases that drive the most traffic to a site. From there, they’ll identify the CPC value of each keyword.
In the case of a website with two keywords that account for 90% of its organic traffic, the specialist will research the Google Adwords CPC, then multiply each phrase by the number of customers who come to the website from that search term. This provides a baseline value measurement.
When you enlist SEO services to help you rank for more keywords, your site drives more traffic, thus increasing its valuation.
4 Ways to Improve the Value of Your Website With SEO Services
If you’re going to sell a car, you have it detailed first. If you’re going to sell a house, you fix the loose floorboard.
The same goes for websites:
Before you sell your site, you want it to be in its best possible shape. A highly visible site will make more sales and earn more traffic. This is essential for anyone considering selling their business.
Wondering how to do it? Here’s the deal:
Hire an SEO expert to do things like optimize meta content, place keywords throughout your pages, blogs, and posts, and improve the overall structure of your site.
Think you can do this on your own? You can, but…
Google currently uses more than 200 ranking factors to decide which pages appear first in the SERPs, and hiring an expert to optimize your site is one of the only ways to target as many of them as possible (unless you’ve got hours and hours of freetime to become an SEO master!).
Here’s how SEO services can help you with that:
1. Improve Your On-Page SEO
Wondering how to improve your site’s rank?
On page SEO plays a prominent role in improving the value of your site. Would-be buyers and website brokers will look at metrics like your site’s ranking and visibility when determining its value.
By improving your on page SEO through great content, appropriate meta tags, a better site structure, sitemap, etc., an SEO team can improve the ranking of your site and make it more attractive to would-be buyers.
Wondering if all this really matters?
Remember:
Sites with top positions in Google earn about 33% of all search traffic. What buyer wouldn’t want that?
2. Enhance Your Backlink Profile
According to Moz, “The importance of building high-quality links has never been higher.”
Unless you’ve got an extensive background in SEO, though, the idea of link building is probably beyond you.
Don’t worry – you’re not the only one with this problem.
One of the biggest things I recommend to my clients who are trying to improve the value of their sites is to strengthen their link profiles.
In order to assess whether a backlink is valuable for your website, it’s important to look at factors such as the website’s trust/citation flow, topical relevancy, etc – not just the common metric Domain Authority which states that good backlinks have a high DA while “bad” backlinks have a low DA.
Again, a reputable digital marketing agency can help with this. Here are a few things they will do to improve your link profile:
- Research your target audience
- Compile a list of websites that your target audience visits
- Create high-converting content
- Reach out to influencers to obtain backlinks
- Boost your link profile through social media
While these activities are simple enough on their own, they’re very powerful together. When you improve your backlink profile, it makes your site more visible, valuable, and high-ranking, in both the short- and long-term.
3. Optimize Your Site for Conversions
Before you sell your website, spend some time growing your company’s revenue.
According to Digital Exits, companies with high revenues enjoy larger price multiples, and those numbers are only going up.
For example, in 2016, a business website making between $2 million-$10 million sold for about three times that amount.
If you want to boost your sales before you sell your site, an online marketing expert with knowledge of conversion optimization best practices can help. By making your site’s checkout process more intuitive and user-friendly and ensuring people can find what they’re looking for as they browse your site, you will turn your site into a sales machine.
4. Rank for Local Searches
If you run a service-based company with a brick-and-mortar location, ranking in local search is essential.
Right now, about 50% of consumers who use their mobile phone to conduct a local search will visit a store within 24 hours.
This means that a local website that ranks well in local search will be much more profitable than one that doesn’t.
Your local SEO expert can help you optimize your website for local keywords, build location-specific pages, optimize for semantic and voice search, and take other steps to ensure that your site appears when local consumers look for a business near them.
A Sale-Ready Website Starts With a Solid Online Presence
If you’re looking for a way to improve the value of your website before you sell it, start by hiring an online marketing expert.
By enhancing the structure and functionality of your website, a reputable digital marketing agency can help you build a valuable company site that fetches top-dollar when you sell it.
This, in turn, gives you the freedom to make your next business move and the peace of mind that comes with knowing you sold a truly quality site.
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