How to Determine your Website Value [Guest Post]

If you own a website, then you’re probably curious as to what is its value. Many people own a website that is connected to their business. As such, their sites won’t be for sale. However, there are also a lot of website owners that are dreaming of selling their sites one day and earning a lot of money in the process. Before doing that, however, it’s important to know what the value of your website is. That way, you won’t get tricked into selling for what is less than the site’s actual worth. Read on to learn how to determine your website value.

Online calculators are not as reliable as one would hope

First of all, it’s worth noting that there are a lot of calculators online that can calculate your website value. However, these calculators are not entirely reliable, due to some shortcuts and generalizations that they rely on. That’s why it’s a good idea to calculate your website value by yourself. If you’re a website owner, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do that on your own.

Recognizing the factors that influence your website value

The first thing to do is to learn what are the factors influencing the value of your website. Later on, you’ll be able to calculate its value based on these factors.

Revenue

One such factor is the amount of revenue that your site is earning every month. For your website to generate revenue, you’ll first need to monetize it. You probably already know how to monetize your website but, nevertheless, we’ll mention several ways to do so, just in case. The first way is to create a revenue through advertising, by using Google AdSense, affiliate advertising, and so on. The second way is to use a subscription-based, pay-to-read method. Finally, some sites also earn money by selling merchandise.

Whatever you do, it’s important to remember that the quality of the site will greatly influence the revenue, and not just in terms of content, but when it comes to design as well. So don’t forget to think about details, because even a logo could make a strong impression on the consumer’s mind.

Other factors

Apart from revenue, there are four other factors that have an effect on your website value.

• The second factor has to do with how old your site is. More precisely, with the amount of backlinks that your site has received. The older your site is, the more backlinks it has, making it more valuable.
• Then, there’s the amount of content that’s present on your website. The more unique content you have – the better, especially if that content is highly ranked on search engines such as Google. In some cases, having high-quality content is vital even before launching your website.
• Similarly, the more page views and unique visitors you have, the more your website is worth.
• Finally, the domain name can also be extremely important. For example, if you happen to own a domain “music.com”, that will greatly increase your website value.

Calculating your website value

Now it’s time to calculate your website value according to these factors.

Revenue value

Calculating your revenue value is easy. Firstly you’ll need to add all the figures that you’re earning from advertising, merchandise and subscriptions. If we agree that a reasonable payback period amounts to, more or less, three years, then you’ll need to multiply that figure by three. If you’re earning 20,000 dollars per year, multiply that by 3, and you’ll arrive at the figure of 60,000 dollars over a period of three years.

Backlinks value

Like we said, each backlink increases the value of your website. The total value in terms of this factor is calculated by multiplying the number of backlinks with 50. Charges for every link can be very expensive when dealing with professional link-building services. However, 50 dollars is a safe, conservative number when we’re talking about calculating the value of your backlinks. So, if you have 300 hundred inbound links, you’ll get a figure of 15,000 dollars per month.

However, the age of your backlinks also determines their value. If the ratio between new and old links is 70:30, and you’ve had your site for five years, the formula is as follows: 15,000 x 5 x 0.7 = 52,500.

Content value

One way to determine the value of your website’s content is to consider the money one would have to invest in order to hire content writers. Say that a 1000-word article is paid 50 dollars. If you have fifty 1000-word articles on your site, you can easily calculate that your content is worth 50,000 dollars. Of course, the quality of your content should also come in play, so use your best judgment when determining the site’s content value. Still, keep in mind the amount of money that one would have to pay the content writers before being able to boast with having so much content.

Another thing to have in mind is how high is your content ranked on search engines. The better the rank, the larger the value. One way to increase your visibility on search engines is to work with a specialized company such as Movers Development. What’s more, having a better search engine visibility will also increase the value of most (if not all) of these aspects. So, if you can, you should certainly be actively trying to improve your visibility.

Page views value

As most CPM (cost per thousand) models are based on page views, we can determine that page views are more important than unique visitors. Another conservative number that we’ll use is 10, as that is the overall average CPM. The value of your website in terms of page views is thus calculated by multiplying the number of page views by 10. Simple, right?

The domain-name value

Finally, calculating your domain-name value can be hard if you’re looking for specific numbers. Still, there are ways to determine if the name of your domain is valuable or not. Here’s what to look for:

• .com domains have a much higher value. They’re so much more valuable, in fact, that the .com domain is worth five to ten times more than the same domain name with another extension!
• Hyphenated names generally reduce the domain value.
• Obviously, the same is true for names that are spelled incorrectly.
• The name should be as short as possible. Still, you shouldn’t insert numbers to try to make the name shorter. To use an example based on the title of a famous motion picture – seven.com will have a larger value than se7en.com.
• The last but not the least, try to avoid using suffixes and prefixes. While that may sometimes be necessary, suffixes and prefixes will usually only lower the website value.

To conclude

Of course, getting the exact website value is impossible. However, by combining the values of these five website aspects, you’ll learn the approximate value of your website. That way, you’ll know where you stand and, if you’re selling your website, you’ll be able to negotiate a good deal. Good luck!