Traffic

It’s better to target no-seasonal websites as it’s easier to manage and probably less competitive.

Use the Historical Analysis module of Website Due Diligence to check this point.

Assessing the average time passed on the website allows you to detect a potential issue with the content or too much traffic from robots.

Also, it can be interesting to assess the evolution of the traffic source: last 7 days, last 30 days, last year, etc. Doing so, you may detect if the recent traffic is artificial to fool the buyers during the selling process.

The source of traffic can be checked with Google Analytics, in the “Acquisition/Channels” section.

Stability or growing traffic for the last months should be preferred over a sudden recent drop, even if it came back to normal after the drop. You need to ensure that there was no recent drop to avoid any surprise.

Check the recent traffic for the last 1, 3, 6 and 12 months to detect traffic drops. You can try to determine the reason for the drop: some backlinks? An update of the Google algorithm?

If a site has been impacted by a Google update in the last three months, you may walk away as you cannot be sure it will recover.

If a site has been impacted by a Google update and failed to recover fully, you will need to adjust the listing price to consider the new number of visits rather than the average of the last 12 months.

Depending on your goals, you will need to check that the real traffic of the website is mainly coming from the countries you want to target.

This control can be checked with Google Analytics.

If at least 80% of the traffic comes from the country you target, you are good to go.

The traffic - and therefore your revenues - should be diversified across the top web pages of the site you want to buy. Otherwise, it may be a single point of failure for your whole business. If only one page generates your revenue, a competitor can beat you, or a change in the Google ranking may drastically impact your revenues.

Check with Google Analytics the top pages. If you find one absorbing more than 20% of the traffic, you might want to walk away, so rate it low.