The website that caught my eye was pregnancyworkoutdvd.com.
Why did this grab my attention? Quite simple really: my wife’s expecting
so I have pregnancy on the brain (if you’re reading this darling, no, you
look fine, you don’t need to workout!). The site was at the lower end of
the market in terms of price so it was a good way to dip my toe in to test
the waters.

Using the analogy of stocks, this type of purchase is a speculative
investment. The website is young, making no money, and will need time
spent on it creating more content, but it has a solid foundation and ticks
some important boxes.

What follows is the due diligence and domain analysis I did that led
me to my first website purchase.

This website is clearly targeted at people searching in Google for
the keyword phrase “pregnancy workout dvd”; so the first step is to find
out how many searches are being performed on this phrase. There are a
stack
of keyword research tools out there, for purchase or freely
available, but Google’s
Keyword Tool will do the trick (it’s free!), giving me a rough
indication of the number of searches being performed for this keyword
phrase.

Figure 1. Google’s Keyword Tool

As you can see in the above figure, Google’s Keyword Tool suggests
that “pregnancy workout dvd” receives 6,600 searches monthly. That’s 220
searches per day, which is reasonably healthy for a highly targeted niche
such as this. Google results are generally on the optimistic side, so
let’s round it down to 200. If I’m ranked #1 for this keyword, I might
expect to receive about 56% of the search traffic (according to a Cornell
University study); that’s about 120 visitors per day.

Next, we want to find out how competitive this niche is. Competition
analysis is an in-depth topic, so it’s worth checking out some of the
posts on sitepoint.com for
more details. For basic metrics, I use Firefox with the SEO Quake
Extension to display competition information, which will indicate
the degree of difficulty achieving a #1 ranking for this site. The current
#1 ranked site in Google’s results has the keywords in the title and a PR
(page rank) of 3, but the keyword phrase is excluded from the domain name,
another factor that can influence search rankings.

Figure 2. The SEO Quake Firefox Extension

Another simple metric I use to establish competition is to find out
how many other pages appear in Google for a phrase search. In this case
there are 8,040 other pages in Google’s index:

Figure 3. Competition research

A result of 8,040 is low. Anything under 100,000 results means that
the niche isn’t oversaturated. Try some other searches and you’ll see what
I mean.

I’m happy with this niche; there’s reasonable traffic available for
the keyword and I’m satisfied that despite the competition, I’ll still be
able to rank well for this search phrase. So how much should I pay for
this website?

In this particular case, the site isn’t generating revenue. The
Flippa.com stats, available to the right of the auction or through a quick
Whois
search, tells me that it’s less than a month old. There’s no data
available for the domain on SEMrush.com (another handy keyword
research tool), but a basic search for the core keyword phrase on Google
shows that the site is already ranking at position #8. That’s fairly good
for a site less than a month old; shows that the developers know their
stuff.

In a coming post, I’ll share some of the steps you need to take
after your bid has been accepted and you’re ready to take ownership of a
website.