SEO Due Diligence for M&A and Website Acquisitions
When you acquire a website, you are buying a stream of demand that arrives for reasons the seller may not fully understand and cannot fully control. SEO due diligence establishes whether that demand is durable, what it is actually worth, and what it will cost you to keep it after the deal closes.
Most acquisition models treat organic traffic as a stable line item. It rarely is. A target can show three years of clean growth in its analytics and still be carrying risk that surfaces the quarter after close. This engagement exists to find that risk while you can still price it.
Request a Confidential Consultation Scoped to your LOI and close dates
- Built for
- Private equity deal teams, corporate development groups, and portfolio buyers acquiring content and affiliate assets.
- Delivered as
- A written report presented as a PDF deck, followed by a working session with your deal team and advisors.
- Worked by
- One senior practitioner, start to finish. No junior analyst drafts, no handoff after the engagement letter.
Financial diligence tells you what the asset earned. Not whether it can keep earning it.
That question lives in the target's search infrastructure, and answering it requires someone who can read a crawl, a log file, and a link graph with the same seriousness your accountants bring to a general ledger.
Two content businesses can report identical revenue and identical organic sessions, and be worth materially different amounts. A site earning most of its sessions from branded searches is selling you a brand, and that brand may not transfer cleanly. A site earning most of its sessions from a dozen head terms is selling you a position that a single algorithm update can take back. A site whose growth curve tracks a competitor's decline rather than its own improvement is selling you someone else's misfortune. None of these distinctions appear in a sessions chart. All of them belong in a valuation.
Analytics that measure the wrong thing
Misconfigured property filters, unfiltered internal and bot traffic, channel groupings that quietly classify paid or referral sessions as organic. The reported number is real; the label on it is wrong.
Rankings held together by technical accidents
Canonical tags pointing at redirects, indexation that depends on a legacy configuration nobody documented, crawl patterns that will change the moment the site moves infrastructure.
Link equity that cannot survive scrutiny
Portfolios assembled through practices that no longer work, or through relationships that end with the founder's departure.
Concentration nobody quantified
The share of revenue depending on a handful of URLs, a single query cluster, or one seasonal window.
Migration cost treated as an afterthought
The integration plan is written after close, by which point the decisions that determine whether traffic survives have already been made.
Exposure that history cannot show
AI-generated answers are absorbing the queries that resolve in a paragraph. On most targets that decline has not happened yet, so no amount of historical analytics will reveal it.
Six workstreams, one conclusion your committee can act on
Each workstream produces findings written as decisions rather than observations. Every material issue carries a severity, an estimated remediation cost, and a plain statement of what it should mean for your offer.
Traffic Validation
Verify the seller's organic performance across independent systems, and isolate the non-brand organic figure any traffic-driven valuation should rest on.
Read the detail 02Search Risk Assessment
Algorithm exposure, manual actions, technical debt, traffic concentration, and backlink portfolio risk — each with a probability and a cost.
Read the detail 03Content & Link Assets
What you are actually buying: which content earns, which is inert, where authority sits, and how the target stands against its closest competitors.
Read the detail 04AI Search Visibility
The forward-looking exposure historical data cannot show: which queries AI answers are likely to absorb, and how much of the asset sits behind them.
Read the detail 05Valuation Impact
Findings translated into terms your model absorbs: revenue at risk, horizon, remediation cost, and the adjustment you can defend in negotiation.
Read the detail 06Integration Planning
Migration risk mapped before you commit to it, and a sequenced plan for the first hundred days — where most acquired search value is actually lost.
Read the detailTraffic Validation and Verification
I do not accept a single data source as evidence of anything. Every claim about a target's organic performance gets confirmed across independent systems before it enters the report, because the most common cause of a wrong conclusion in this work is an artifact in one tool being mistaken for a fact about the business.
Cross-source verification
Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush, and a full site crawl each measure different things through different methods, and the places where they disagree are usually where the interesting findings are. A gap between Search Console impressions and analytics sessions points somewhere specific. So does a gap between what a crawler can reach and what is actually indexed. I reconcile these systematically rather than averaging them.
Analytics integrity and measurement audit
Before the traffic data can support a valuation, it has to be trustworthy. That means examining tracking implementation, property and view configuration, filter history, channel grouping definitions, bot exclusion settings, and whether the measurement setup changed at any point during the period being presented. A tracking change mid-period can manufacture a growth trend out of nothing.
Brand, non-brand, and paid attribution
The single most valuable number in a website acquisition audit is the share of organic traffic that is genuinely non-brand and genuinely organic. Branded search reflects demand the business has already created. Where paid and organic overlap, reported organic performance can be inflated by spend that will stop the day you take over. I separate these and report the non-brand organic figure as the basis for any traffic-driven valuation.
Three to five years of history, not a snapshot
Current-state analysis is where most SEO due diligence stops, and it is the least informative view available. I reconstruct performance across three to five years where the data supports it — so the report can distinguish a business that grew from one that was carried by a competitor's decline, identify which algorithm updates the site survived, separate seasonality from trend, and show the volatility band the asset actually operates in.
The output of this workstream is a single defensible figure: verified non-brand organic traffic, and the confidence interval around it.
Search Risk Assessment
Risk in a digital asset is not a general condition. It is a specific set of dependencies, each with a probability and a cost. The report treats them that way.
Algorithm exposure and manual actions
I check for outstanding manual actions, then map the target's historical traffic against the record of algorithm updates to see how it has behaved through past volatility. A site that has absorbed several major updates without disruption is telling you something structural about its quality. A site that has lost ground at each one is telling you something too, and the pattern usually predicts the next.
Technical debt and infrastructure risk
This is the part of the audit that thinks like Googlebot rather than like a reporting dashboard. I crawl the site, then crawl its own canonical destinations to surface loops and contradictions a standard crawl reports as healthy. I read crawl statistics for response-time trends and distribution anomalies, examine indexation coverage against what the site actually publishes, and assess whether the platform can carry the roadmap you intend to run on it. Every issue found carries an estimated remediation cost.
Traffic concentration and volatility
I quantify how much of the asset's value rests on how little: the revenue share attributable to the top queries and top URLs, dependency on single high-performing pages, seasonal concentration, and the degree to which one referring domain or one content category holds up the rest. Concentration is not automatically a problem, but an undisclosed concentration always is.
Backlink portfolio risk
Link analysis at acquisition scale is a data problem before it is an SEO problem. I assess authority distribution, anchor text patterns, acquisition velocity over time, and the proportion of the profile that is manipulative, dead, or otherwise unlikely to survive review — working in BigQuery with Majestic trust and citation metrics when portfolio size demands it. The output is a clear position on which links carry equity, which carry risk, and what cleanup would involve.
Technical debt that has to be paid down in the first year is a real adjustment to the purchase price, and it should be argued as one.
Content and Link Asset Evaluation
In a content acquisition, the content is the asset. It is also the thing most often waved through on a page count. A library of 4,000 articles where 200 produce the traffic is a different purchase from one where the value is distributed, and the two require entirely different post-close plans.
Content inventory and contribution
I inventory the content estate and attribute performance to it, so you can see which sections earn, which are inert, which are actively diluting the site, and which represent recoverable value the current owner has not worked. Where the target competes on topics it does not adequately cover, that gap is quantified as post-acquisition upside rather than left as a generality.
Link equity assessment
Separate from the risk view, this is the asset view: which parts of the link profile are genuinely defensible, how concentrated authority is across the site, and whether the equity sits on pages you intend to keep. Link equity attached to URLs that a replatform will retire is equity you are about to spend, and the integration plan needs to account for it.
Competitive position
A target's numbers only mean something relative to the market it operates in. I benchmark the site against its closest competitors across visibility, content depth, link authority, and technical health — so the report can say whether you are buying a leader with a defensible position, a challenger with room to grow, or an incumbent being overtaken while its own analytics still look acceptable.
What transfers and what does not
Some of what produces the target's performance is attached to the business and some of it is attached to the people leaving with the proceeds. Founder-held relationships, personal authorship signals, and brand recognition tied to an individual are identified explicitly, because they are the assets most likely to walk out the door on the day of close.
AI Search Visibility: the exposure historical data cannot show
Search results are being rebuilt around generated answers, and the effect is not distributed evenly. Queries that can be resolved in a paragraph are increasingly resolved without a click. Queries that require a destination still send one. Any content asset acquired today carries an exposure proportional to how much of its traffic sits in the first category — and no amount of historical analytics will reveal it, because on most of those pages the decline has not happened yet.
Query vulnerability profiling
What share of the target's organic value sits behind queries that AI answers are likely to absorb, versus queries that require a destination, a transaction, or a comparison.
Citation presence
Whether the target's content is being drawn on as a source in AI answers within its category, or merely ranking beneath them. These are different positions with different futures.
Entity strength
Whether the business is a recognized entity that models can attribute and reference, and how much of that recognition attaches to the brand rather than to a founder who is leaving.
Click-share divergence
Where ranking positions have held steady while actual clicks have thinned — an early signal that is visible in the data if you look for the gap, and invisible if you only track rank.
For acquisitions where the thesis rests on informational content, this analysis frequently matters more to the five-year model than anything in the technical audit.
Valuation Impact and Deal Pricing
Findings that do not connect to the model are trivia. The report closes the loop between what the audit found and what you should do about it at the negotiating table.
How findings translate to price
Each material finding is expressed in terms your model can absorb: the portion of current organic revenue that is at risk and over what horizon, the capital and time required to remediate, and the resulting adjustment you can defend in negotiation. Where a finding supports the seller's position rather than undermining it, that goes in the report too — an audit that only ever produces reasons to pay less is not diligence, it is a negotiating prop, and sophisticated sellers recognise the difference.
Valuing the organic channel
Where it is useful, I value the verified non-brand organic traffic against paid-equivalent acquisition cost for the same queries, which gives you a defensible floor for what the channel is worth and what it would cost to replace if it degraded. This is a sanity check on the multiple rather than a substitute for your own valuation work, and I present it as one.
Upside, not only downside
A target with correctable technical problems and an unworked content opportunity may be a better acquisition at the asking price than a clean asset with nothing left to gain. Where I find recoverable value, it is quantified with the same rigor as the risks, because knowing what you can add after close is as material to the decision as knowing what you might lose.
Price adjustment versus post-close budget
Debt that must be cleared simply to hold the traffic your valuation assumes is a cost of acquiring the asset as described, and belongs in the price discussion. Work that would take the asset beyond its current performance is investment, and belongs in your post-close plan. The report separates the two explicitly, because conflating them is how buyers end up paying twice.
Post-Acquisition Integration Planning
More acquired search value is destroyed in the ninety days after close than in any diligence failure. The deal completes, the site is folded into an existing estate or moved onto a new platform, and the traffic that justified the purchase price leaves with the URL structure. This is the most preventable loss in the entire transaction, and the one most reliably left until it is too late.
Migration risk
If the plan involves a domain move, a rebrand, a replatform, or consolidation into an existing property, the report identifies what that will cost in search terms before you commit to it: URL-level redirect mapping, preservation of the pages carrying link equity, handling of content that overlaps with properties you already own, and the specific failure modes — wildcard redirects, wholesale consolidation onto category pages, sequential redirect chains — that have turned routine migrations into significant traffic losses at well-resourced companies.
The first hundred days
Where the engagement extends past the audit, the deliverable includes a sequenced plan for the post-close period: which technical debt to clear first, which quick wins to take, what to leave alone during the transition, and the monitoring thresholds that should trigger intervention. Sequencing matters here more than completeness — the wrong order can cause the loss the plan was written to avoid.
A document your committee can approve from, and your advisors can interrogate
The deliverable is a written report, presented as a PDF deck, followed by a working session where we go through it together. I would rather spend an hour answering your team's questions directly than hand over a document and let it be interpreted without me.
- An investment-committee summary The first pages stand alone: the position, the material findings, and the recommended pricing response.
- Findings written as decisions Each material issue carries a severity, an estimated remediation cost or effort, and a plain statement of what it should mean for your offer.
- Evidence appendices The crawl data, reconciliation tables, and link analysis your technical advisors will want to check the conclusions against.
- A working session A live review with your deal team, and a standing offer to take questions from your other advisors as the process continues.
Scoped to your deal calendar, not sold as a package
What a buyer needs before submitting an LOI is not what they need before closing. Depth, access, and timeline are agreed at the outset and worked backward from your close date. Most buyers benefit from two passes rather than one deep review late in the process.
External assessment
Built entirely without access to the target's systems, which keeps it discreet and gives you enough to decide whether to proceed and at roughly what price. Covers crawl and technical health, link profile, ranking history, competitive position, content estate, and AI search exposure.
No target contact required
Full diligence
Adds analytics and Search Console access, deeper historical reconstruction, verification of the seller's own reporting, and the valuation impact analysis that supports final pricing. This is the work that produces a defensible position at the negotiating table.
Requires data-room access
Integration support
Where a migration or integration follows and you would rather not hand the plan to a team that was not part of writing it, continued involvement is available and agreed separately. The audit itself ends with the report and review session.
Optional, scoped separately
The terms that matter in a live transaction
Confidentiality
Nearly all of my work is covered by non-disclosure agreements, which is why you will not find client names or deal specifics anywhere on this site. I work under your NDA as a matter of course, and I do not publish, reuse, or reference engagement details afterwards. Discretion during a live transaction is not a courtesy in this work; it is a condition of doing it at all.
Working with your existing advisors
I am one specialist input into a wider process, and the report is built to sit alongside financial, legal, and technology diligence rather than duplicate them. I am comfortable presenting to an investment committee, taking questions from a technical advisor, or working directly with the analyst maintaining the model — whichever is most useful to you.
Sell-side preparation
The same analysis run before a sale is a different exercise with the same mechanics. If you are preparing a digital asset for exit, the work identifies what a competent buy-side reviewer will find, what is worth remediating in the time available, and how to document and defend the organic performance you are asking a buyer to pay for. I do not take both sides of the same transaction.
Roll-ups and portfolios
Roll-ups introduce a risk single acquisitions do not: the properties you acquire may compete with each other and with assets you already hold. A portfolio review assesses each target individually and then examines overlap across the group — where consolidation would concentrate authority productively, and where it would simply retire pages that were earning.
One practitioner, accountable for every finding in the report
John McAlpin — Enterprise SEO Consultant
I am an independent SEO consultant with more than eleven years in enterprise search and over twenty years in web development before that. My client work has been with Fortune 100 enterprise teams across media, healthcare, and energy — organisations where a search mistake is measured in millions and where the analysis has to survive contact with engineering, legal, and finance.
That development background is not incidental to this service. Assessing whether a target's infrastructure can carry your plans, or what a migration will genuinely cost, requires having built and moved sites rather than only audited them. Much of my analysis runs on tooling I have written myself, because the questions that matter in an acquisition are rarely the ones off-the-shelf software is designed to answer.
My methodology is evidence-first and deliberately slow to conclude: every finding is verified across independent sources before it reaches you, because in a transaction the cost of a confident wrong answer is considerably higher than the cost of another day's analysis.
You work with me directly. There is no team behind this, no junior analyst producing the first draft, and no handoff after the engagement letter is signed.
Trusted By Fortune 100 Enterprise Teams
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know the seller's organic traffic claims are accurate?
By not taking any single source at face value. I reconcile the seller's analytics against Search Console, third-party estimates, and a direct crawl of the site, then examine the measurement configuration itself for filters, bot exclusion, and channel grouping decisions that change what the reported number means. Where those sources disagree, the disagreement is the finding. I also separate branded from non-brand organic traffic, which frequently changes the picture more than any technical issue does.
What level of detail do I need before an LOI versus before closing?
Before an LOI you generally need enough to decide whether to proceed and at roughly what price, which an external assessment can provide without alerting the target or requiring system access. Before closing you need the detail that supports final pricing and the integration plan, which requires analytics and Search Console access and takes meaningfully longer. Most buyers benefit from doing both rather than one deep review late in the process.
Can you work without access to the target's analytics?
Yes, and early in a process that is usually preferable. A great deal can be established externally — crawl and technical health, link profile, ranking history, competitive position, content estate, AI search exposure. What external analysis cannot do is verify the seller's own reporting, which is why full diligence needs access once you are far enough along to ask for it.
How much should I adjust my offer based on your findings?
That is your decision and your model, but the report is written to support it rather than leave you to translate. Each material finding carries an estimate of the organic revenue at risk, the horizon over which it would materialise, and the cost to remediate. Those three figures are what an adjustment gets argued from. I will tell you what I would want reflected in the price and why; I will not present a single number as though it were arithmetic.
Should remediation costs come out of the purchase price or the post-close budget?
It depends on whether the work is required to sustain current performance or to improve it. Debt that must be cleared simply to hold the traffic the valuation assumes is a cost of acquiring the asset as described and belongs in the price discussion. Work that would take the asset beyond its current performance is investment and belongs in your post-close plan. The report separates the two explicitly, because conflating them is how buyers end up paying twice.
We are doing a roll-up. How does this work across multiple targets?
Roll-ups introduce a risk single acquisitions do not: the properties you acquire may compete with each other and with assets you already hold. A portfolio review assesses each target individually and then examines overlap across the group — where consolidation would concentrate authority productively, and where it would simply retire pages that were earning. That second analysis is the one most often skipped, and it is usually where the integration risk is concentrated.
How do you handle a target with significant international traffic?
International sites carry their own risks: language and region targeting that breaks silently under migration, market-specific authority that does not transfer with a domain change, and performance concentrated in territories where your post-close operations may not extend. Where a target has material international traffic, that traffic is assessed by market rather than in aggregate, since a global total can conceal both dependency and opportunity.
What if we plan to migrate the site onto our existing domain?
Then the diligence should be treated as the first stage of the migration rather than a separate exercise, and it changes what matters in the audit. The questions become which URLs carry the equity, how content overlaps with what you already publish, and whether the receiving platform can support the acquired content properly. Consolidation is where acquired search value is most often lost, and it is entirely avoidable with the mapping done in advance.
Why is there no pricing on this page?
Because the work is scoped to the transaction. A pre-LOI external read on a single content site and full diligence on a multi-domain portfolio with an integration plan are different engagements, and quoting either as a package price would misrepresent the other. Scope, timeline, and fee are agreed before any work starts, and I will tell you early if I think the engagement is not worth running.
Why are there no case studies?
Nearly all of my work is under NDA, and transaction work especially so. I am not willing to publish anonymised deal details that a motivated reader could reconnect to a real transaction, and the sanitised versions that survive that test are not worth reading. I am glad to talk through methodology in as much depth as you want on a call, and to discuss references directly where a client has agreed to act as one.
Validate the Asset Before You Price It
Independent verification tells you whether the organic traffic you are paying for is durable or borrowed. Risk assessment puts a cost and a horizon on what could erode after close. Integration planning protects what you have bought through the transition that most often destroys it.
If you have a target under consideration, the most useful next step is a conversation about the asset and your timeline.
Request a Confidential Consultation Covered by your NDA. No proposal unless there is clear alignment.