To Increase Website Values we need to give a potential buyer what they want, namely.
| 1.Profit | 2.Traffic |
| 3.Rankings | 4.Backlinks |
| 5.Products | 6.Niche |
| 7. Website Age | 8.Domain Name |
9.Engineered Demand | |
Learning to build Website Value, is like learning to Develop and value Real Estate, or any other Asset.
As with Real Estate, you can’t just type an address into a Website and get a meaningful value back. To explain, lets continue with the Real Estate example because that is familiar to most people.
How much is a website worth?
If you are thinking of selling a house, you could call an Agent, tell them you have a 3 bedroom, two bath brick house on Smith Street and ask how much it is worth.
In reality, the Agent can’t do much for you over the phone. They could quickly check online to see which other properties have sold in your Street, and if they find one that sold for $300,000 recently, they will likely say yours is worth about $300,000 as well.
Is that helpful?… not really.
After all, your house could be twice the size, it could be at the other end of a very long street (in a much nicer neighborhood). It could have much better finishes, much nicer gardens, and it may face south (not north like the other one), and have commanding million-dollar views. You might have a pool etc, etc, etc.
In the end, your house is worth what someone else is will to pay you for it.
So how do you Increase website Values.
In a way the Website you would like to value is similar to the house. There are many aspects that decide it’s value.
Firstly, these days a website is a Business and the launch pad for many ways to make money online. From a simplistic standpoint, it’s value is based on the Income it generates. In the absence of any other information, your site is likely to be worth between 1-3 times annual income.
But there are numerous factors that can either increase or decrease that multiple. If you don’t have income you are selling the site based on opportunity, either way your site has a value determined by the following points:
Your website’s History
If the site has been regularly making income for years, it may be worth more, but if you only just started generating a decent profit that short track record can reduce the price.
It’s Income source
The way your site earns income will affect the value. If the “product” is timeless and you own it, the price may be higher. If it is based on a short term trendy market it will sell for less.
Rankings and Keywords
Having strong Google rankings for primary keywords, and a strong profile of incoming back-links is like having a website in the “Best Neighborhood” so the price might be higher.
Traffic coming to your site
A strong, stable flow of traffic to your site, creating revenue with little advertising, will also fetch a higher price.
In essence, your Website has a number of assets built into it, and depending on how strong and dependable each is the value will rise or fall.
Lets look at factors to increase website values.
It’s best to look at our key factors for Increasing Website Value in reverse order, building up to the top level factors
9. Domain Name Value
In the absence of all else, the site’s Domain name alone may be of value.
A highly targeted name like “DogTraining.com” is far more valuable to a buyer than a site called “todaysA-ZofDogtraining.UK
The shorter name is much more memorable and the .com suffix is still the most sort after extension, hence the value.
8. Website Age
If the site you are selling has been established for a number of years the value may be enhanced. An older website which has been continuously maintained, with decent content, is likely to have more incoming links.
These links add to Domain authority and possibly traffic. An older site that has just been left and is out of date is worth much less.
7. Choosing your Niche
This is a balancing act. Some niches are more valuable than others.
As a general rule, you can compare the raw value of a niche by comparing the Cost per Click for the main keywords. Generally, the higher the CPC, the more valuable the niche.
However, without exception, high cost Keywords are also an indicator of higher competition, So, choosing a niche where the income potential is strong, but where you can also compete is critical to overall site income and profitability.
6. Products and Income Generation
Whatever your site does to generate its income, a buyer will need to have proof that the rights to continue selling that “product” will transfer to them with the sale. If the transfer is not guaranteed the site is worthless to your buyer.
This even applies to an Amazon affiliate site. If the buyer has been blocked from having an Amazon account, your income generating Affiliate website is of no value to them. The same applies to Google Adsense sites.
One sure fire way to increase website value, is to increase the amount you earn from each sale. There are many ways to do this, from simply raising prices, to moving from low income affiliate programs (Adsense and Amazon), to products and programs with much higher commissions.
A very profitable option is to sell your own Digital products on the site.
5. Backlinks
Clean and healthy Backlink Profiles are critical in winning and keeping higher Rankings and higher Domain Authority.
Those two factors are important to a buyer because there is a direct link from them to income potential of the site.
On the flip side, a site with decent search engine rankings might be getting those results in the short term with support from some dodgy (blackhat), link building methods.
Because Google will eventually find these and demote your site, a experienced buyer will examine incoming links closely, and consider the value and risk accordingly. So keep your profile clean for the best price.
4. Search Engine Rankings
The most important thing to remember here is that Google ranks individual pages from your Website, not the site as a whole. So getting individual posts to rank highly is a sure way to increase website values.
Quality articles naturally rank higher, because they allow Google to deliver a highly relevant answer to a Search query. So, targeting valuable keywords with high quality articles is one of the main ways that a Website gets traffic. This is especially true if the Article attracts strong incoming links.
So even if you have not monetized your site yet, your quality content is of value to a buyer because creating it takes time, and costs money.
Conversely, poor quality content like, poorly written articles, Duplicate content (copied from another site), short under-developed posts, Adult content, poor or unlicensed images, all reduce the value of any website.
Domain Authority score is an indication of the overall strength of the site. But, a site with a low D.A, can be valuable if it gets good rankings and traffic for individual articles, leading to a steady flow of sales or commissions.
3. Traffic volume and Quality
In the absence of Income, the next most “saleable” item is Traffic that can be validated. Google Analytics is the accurate measure here.
Goggle Analytics allows you to validate traffic volume, traffic origin, visitor engagement and much more. For most savvy buyers the absence of Google Analytics simply means no sale.
Traffic is not all equal, visitors from some countries are more valuable than others, visitors drawn to some keywords in specific niches are more valuable than others, as are visitors who engage heavily with the site
Depending on your buyer’s intended use of the site, they may be willing to place a value on your traffic. This could be based on the number of clicks each of the main keywords get, multiplied by the pay-per-click value of each keyword.
The risk is that your buyer may have a very profitable “intended use” for your traffic but is under no obligation to disclose it. A lack of income on your site makes it easy for them to offer a low-ball price based on traffic alone, and buy your traffic for a song.
2. Profit
As we mentioned at the start, in most cases what a buyer will pay depends on the sustained Profit a site makes. So, the most reliable way to increase website values is to Increase the profit the site makes.
This is usually achieved by increasing one or more of the following:
1.Traffic
2 Average value of a sale
3 The conversion rate of the site.
Most of which can be done by putting focus on the points outline above
1. The Secret to Increase Website Values
Our real wild card, just like a house auction, is where more than one buyer really wants your site. The price is likely to go much higher.
This fortunate situation can happen just by blind luck, or in the case of a really smart website builder it can be by design.
So how do you engineer Demand?
Here is an example.
A guy we know started a Car review site almost by accident. Because he was honest, and entertaining in his reviews his site quickly gained traction. He became the person all the big car companies turned to for evaluation of their new cars, and they paid handsomely to advertise on his site as well.
Realizing that his main two competitors were owned by massive publicly listed Media Companies, both with deep pockets and each out to beat the other.
He knew he could not compete with them and become number. So he intentionally designed his site for private sale. At the right moment he approached both competitors, knowing that whoever could add his site, to their existing one would control the market.
Now his site was profitable, had massive traffic, great rankings, a brilliant backlink profile, fantastic relationships with manufacturers and advertisers etc, all adding value to the site. Even so, there is no way that fundamentals alone added up to a sale price in excess of $65 million dollars for that site.
As we said at the top, in the end your site is worth whatever someone is willing to pay you for it.
What’s my Website Worth?
There is no substitute for knowledge. You can learn how to properly assess a website, or to set a site up for success right from the start, (like the Car site did). This way, you can develop a portfolio of website assets for a future payout.
If you want to increase website value, I recommend you start here with this FREE 90 minute training from EBusiness Institute.
And to see what it’s really like to work with them, (as we did), try reading our full review of EBusiness Institute trainings. Compared to the future income you can generate this training from EBusiness Institute is very good value.
Selling your Website-The Acid Test
To start getting an understanding of what websites are selling for sign up to Flippa.com (it’s free). You can investigate sites being sold, and follow the auctions to see what they sell for. You can also look back at past auctions of sites just like yours and see how they went. Just be sure to compare sites that really are like yours.
To save sometime, just click this banner and let Flippa guide you with a FREE and realistic valuation based on their knowledge of the market and the history in their database. There is no obligation.
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