Buying a competitors domain
I've a competitor who's exited this particular niche and I've got an option to buy their domain.
For lots of reasons I won't be purchasing their business or dealing with any existing customers - this is purely about their existing website/domain and any 'google juice' that can be extracted from it.
- How would you do this technology for maximum SEO value - guessing a 301 redirect back to my site?
- How would you go about trying to value this - tools for counting inbound links/estimates of traffic?
- Any things to watch out for - things like a risk of negative reputation either SEO wise or from existing customers who feel they have been abandoned etc?
Many people believe that 301 and 302 have similar SEO value, but typically 301 is used for permanent redirects and is more likely to give the most value.
You could add utms to 301 redirects to track direct traffic from the acquired domain.
You can somewhat accurately use Ahrefs to look up what keywords that domain currently ranks for and then multiply that by your average revenue per visitor to determine value.
You should definitely expect decay in its potency over time, but squeeze the juice it has on it currently.
How I've done it: We first put a message on the competitor's landing page that the competitor is now part of our service and encouraged them to migrate to our service. After a while, we added a 301 redirect with a url param that shows the same message on our landing page.
You can track traffic through any analytics service. Either add a specific param to the link or you can see the people that came from the competitor from referrals (traffic that arrives on your website through another source).
We had a big increase in traffic and didn't notice any issue with SEO. We had a few angry existing customers but I think that's to be expected with any service shutting down.
How did you go about attempting to estimate a value before buying it?
Honestly, it's really hard to evaluate since there are no guidelines to how much traffic is worth.
We simply asked them what they think a fair price is. We negotiated a bit, we explained that we don't have much money since we weren't profitable at that time and after that they gave us a lower price.
Depending on how much they ask and what you're willing to spend you can also offer them 1 to 5% of profits. If they like your service they might just take you up on that.