SMX Advanced 2008:Tips on Buying Sites for SEO

The session covering 'Tips on Buying Sites for SEO' at SMX Chicago 2008 reviewed the process of purchasing expired domains, contacting site owners, valuating sites and closing a site purchase!


Gab Goldenberg, Owner of SEO ROI; Todd Malicoat, Internet Marketing Consultant with Stuntdubl; Jeremy Schoemaker, CEO of Shoemoney Media Groupd and Jeremy Wright, CEO of B5Media all touched key points regarding the "How To's" of buying sites for SEO.

Jeremy Schoemaker presented us with a video presentation. He reviewed the importance of finding domains that are expired but are also linked to from .edu and .gov sites. In his presentation he also highlighted the importance of dedicating a spider specifically for finding these sites and checking their value. Also, use caution when 301ing purchased domain names to your site; wait and space them out to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Jeremy Wright illustrated their metrics for buying sites! Capturing value is key when purchasing sites, therefore he says to keep in mind:

• We buy for eventual revenue purposes
• Potential, specifically unrealized potential is what we're looking for
• Core metrics: existing traffic, uniques, revenue, feed subscribers, Google PageRank
• Secondary metrics: age of site, "stability", age of domain, amount of content, existing SEO metrics, "staleness"
• Tertiary questions: Is it/can it be a blog? Does it cover a unique area? Does it add non-core value we can put a number to? Does it have a real rand name in its industry?
• Blog Valuation Calculator (internal tool, but built of our blog Modeling tool, which is public @ ensight.org)
• Compete.com (for uniques/traffic number historically)
• comScore (internal tool, measures our secondary criteria and puts a "multiple" we can run against our Blog Valuation Calculator valuation)

Jeremy also advises not to deviate from your playbook. If you are going to buy alot of sites, create a playbook to follow and don't deviate from it. Buy early, buy often and admit failure quickly. Lastly he reviews the importance of creating networks to compound value!

Gab Goldenberg, owner of SEO ROI summarized the principles, tursts and shared a brief case study for buying sites for SEO. Gab reviewed the importance of a sites footprint and how to identify/locate them. For example if a blog makes a post slightly off topic and ranks for those off topic terms then you know its high quality, learn how to check for blogs/sites footprints to ensure you get the most out of your purchase.

Internet Marketing Consultant, Todd Malicoat with Stuntdubl recapped the process of buying old sites.

• Contact site owners- be credible, brief and lucky
• Valuating a site - Check the domain, age, links, theme, traffic and revenue
• Negotiating & Closing a Site Purchase - Lowball (but don't offend), Get a price, Counter, Agree, Sign Agreement, Escrow Service and remember the Transfers (Files and WHOIS)

This post is based on notes sent by Dante Monteverde who attended SMX Advanced 2008 in Seattle.

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