SEO Due Diligence for M&A and Website Acquisitions

No single data source is taken as evidence. Every claim about the target's organic performance is confirmed across independent systems before it enters the report.

• Cross-source reconciliation. Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush, and a full crawl each measure differently. Where they disagree is usually where the findings are, so I reconcile them rather than average them.
• Measurement audit. Tracking implementation, property configuration, filter history, channel groupings, bot exclusion, and whether any of it changed during the period presented. A mid-period tracking change can create a growth trend that never happened.
• Brand, non-brand, and paid separation. Branded search reflects demand the business already created. Paid overlap can inflate organic numbers with spend that stops at close. I report the non-brand organic figure as the basis for any traffic-driven valuation.
• Three to five years of history. Enough to separate real growth from a competitor's decline, identify which algorithm updates the site survived, and show the normal range the asset operates in.

Output: verified non-brand organic traffic, with a stated range of confidence.

• Algorithm exposure and manual actions. I check for manual actions, then map traffic against past algorithm updates. How a site behaved through past updates is the best available predictor of the next one.
• Technical debt and infrastructure. A full crawl, a second crawl of canonical targets to catch loops a standard crawl reports as healthy, crawl statistics, and indexation against what the site publishes. Each issue carries a remediation cost.
• Concentration. Revenue share from top queries and URLs, single-page dependency, seasonality, and reliance on one referring domain or content category.
• Backlink risk. Authority distribution, anchor patterns, acquisition velocity, and the share of the profile that is manipulative or dead. Large profiles are analyzed in BigQuery with Majestic data.

Output: each risk rated for likelihood and cost. First-year technical debt is treated as a price adjustment, not a post-close task.

• Content contribution. Which sections earn, which are inert, which dilute the site, and which hold value the current owner hasn't worked. A library of 4,000 articles where 200 produce the traffic needs a different post-close plan from one where value is spread evenly.
• Link equity. Which parts of the profile are defensible, and whether the equity sits on pages you plan to keep. Equity on URLs a replatform will retire is lost unless it is mapped.
• Competitive position. Benchmarked against the closest competitors on visibility, content depth, authority, and technical health: a leader, a challenger, or an incumbent being overtaken.
• What transfers. Founder-held relationships, personal authorship, and brand recognition tied to one person are identified explicitly, as are proprietary systems only one person can run.

Queries that can be answered in a paragraph increasingly resolve without a click. Queries that need a destination, a transaction, or a comparison still send one. The exposure depends on where the target's traffic sits.

• Query vulnerability. The share of organic value behind queries AI answers are likely to absorb.
• Citation presence. Whether the target is cited as a source in AI answers in its category, or only ranks beneath them.
• Entity strength. Whether the business is a recognized entity, and whether that recognition belongs to the brand or to a departing founder.
• Click-share divergence. Pages where rankings have held but clicks have thinned, an early signal that rank tracking alone misses.

For informational content acquisitions, this often matters more to the five-year model than the technical audit.

• Findings in model terms. For each material finding: organic revenue at risk, the horizon, the cost and time to fix, and the adjustment you can defend. Findings that support the seller's position are reported too.
• Channel value floor. Where useful, verified non-brand traffic is valued against the paid-search cost of the same queries. It is a check on the multiple, not a replacement for your valuation.
• Upside. Correctable technical problems and unworked content opportunity are quantified with the same rigor as the risks.
• Price adjustment vs. post-close budget. Work needed to hold the traffic your valuation assumes belongs in the price. Work that grows the asset beyond that belongs in your post-close plan. The report separates the two.

For a domain move, rebrand, replatform, or consolidation into an existing property, the report shows the search cost before you commit: URL-level redirect mapping, protection of pages carrying link equity, handling of content that overlaps with properties you own, and the failure modes that cause most migration losses (wildcard redirects, bulk consolidation onto category pages, redirect chains).

For roll-ups, each target is assessed individually, then overlap across the group is mapped: where consolidation strengthens authority and where it would retire pages that were earning. International targets are assessed market by market, since a global total can hide both dependency and opportunity.

The detailed 100-Day Post-Close SEO Roadmap is available as an add-on.