How to audit an external website (to buy or white label)

Pretty regularly, your market manager will send you an Asana task to audit a website. Please audit the website in the next 48 hours. If it's too short, see with other SEOs if they can help you.

Two scenarios : 1) we want to buy the whole website 2) we want to do a white label with them (ie: pay them to publish X articles/month)

White label audits are usually shorter than audits to buy websites. In both scenarios, we need to focus on some essentials points, that are the following :

Website editorial aspect:

• Website thematic ? (baseball news, football predictions, boxing stats etc)

• Rhythm of publication ? (Do they publish a lot or only from time to time)

• Type of articles ? Long, short ? Does it have a good value (= extensive and quality content, like a long analysis, or interesting infographics) ?

• do they already have banners ? Deals with bookmakers/competitors ? (ex: JohnnyBet link in the menu)

Traffic:

• What is the monthly traffic ? (use similarweb/check %age of SEO traf)

• Is the traffic stable ? Is it peaking ?

• Where does the traffic come from ?

• Is it mostly organic or direct traffic ?

• How did they react to Google updates ?

Keywords:

• On what keywords does the website rank? Are they competitive keywords ? Is it in the thematic of the website ?

• Do they already have betting-related keywords? (ie: pronostics, betting tips, promo codes articles etc)

• Top pages ? Top keywords ? Are these top pages well-optimized ?

Off-site SEO:

• Does the website have a lot of referring domains? Try to give a perspective if you can (ex : "this website has 200 RD. In comparison, Football Whispers has 1800 RD")

• Does it have good backlinks? What kind of websites? (private blogs, referrence websites in the same thematic, newspapers etc) ? Spammy ? Check the top anchors (SEObserver gives a good overview)

• When was the website created ? (archive.org/footer infos can give a clue)

A few tips and good practices:

• To quickly see if the website has already sold links → use the command site:example.com "betting" and see the results. Are they legit articles (ex : "BetMGM acquires LA Lakers to enter the gambling market") or low-quality guest posts ? (ex: "how to bet on NFL online ?")

→ use ahrefs → linked domains → filter by "casino"/"bet"

• Disable AdBlocker when auditing a website → having AdBlock (or any adblocker extension) can modify the visual aspect of a website and you might not see some ads or other rendering problems

• See if the website is featured in Google News → use the inurl:domain.com command in Google and go to news section

• ❌ Not a GG news ❌

✔️ GG news ✔️

• Check if content is not duplicated → copy and paste article sentences in Google using quotation marks to see if the content isn't duplicated on other websites (or the website publishes duplicated content).

• Write a short recap at the end of your analysis → in a few sentences, explain briefly why we should (or shouldn't buy this website). It will be helpful for your market manager and for yourself if you have to reopen a task after a few weeks and might have forgotten about it

• Different traffic data from different tools → more often than not, you will find big differences in traffic estimation between SEObserver, SimilarWeb and Ahrefs. In this case, take the average number and provide a rough estimation. Keep in mind that those numbers are only estimations. Also use geo-specific tools like https://be1.ru/ for Russia.

• Check if website has been DMCA-reported.

Site:domain.com ⇒ scroll to the very bottom of the first page

Bonus points for sites we buy:

👍 Website is a WordPress (easier to migrate)

👍 Current on-site SEO isn't good (room for improvement)

👍 Traffic is >300k month (= we can sell banners to bookmakers and/or cook users -ask Yann or Julien for more info on this-)

Malus : 👎 Website has sold links (could be penalized)

👎 Website ranks on weird keywords (not supposed to rank on that)

Where do you find all this info?

Traffic :

🟥 Ahrefs 🟥 SEObserver 🟥 SimilarWeb (only for bigger websites)

Backlinks :

🟩 Majestic 🟩 SEObserver 🟩 (Ahrefs)

Keywords :

🟦 Ahrefs (for more info on where to look precisely, ask one of the SEOs)

How to structure your audit doc:

Here is an example. This is an example, you can structure it the way you want

What are the next steps after the audit?

❌ Website isn't good : simply close the task

✅ Website is good : assign the task back to your market manager. You can put a comment in the title of the task, like "[GO] nameofthesite.com". From there, your market manager will order test articles to check the real potential of the website → Once those articles are live, please do the analysis of the rankings 7 days after the publication date

Congrats, you've just done your first audit at NSN 🚀

For more info, ping Jules or Samir on Skype if you need more details!

Examples of audits

https://app.asana.com/0/search/1202229007059198/1200658579851106 (estnn.com)

https://app.asana.com/0/1202133859492419/1200439702442438 (tennisworldlive.com)

https://app.asana.com/0/1112678730112225/1200458508156668 (realgm)