What exactly is SEO due diligence, and why is it important for you and your investors?

If you’re thinking of selling your SaaS company, you need to do your SEO due diligence. A strong SEO foundation can help you fetch top dollar for your business. Here’s what you need to know:

Why is SEO important for selling a SaaS company?

There are a few reasons why SEO is important for selling a SaaS company. When done right, SEO can help your SaaS business to:

• Attract more buyers. When potential buyers are looking for SaaS companies to buy, they can use search engines as part of their research. If your website ranks well for business and product-relevant keywords, you’ll be more likely to show up in their search results and attract their attention. Should anyone search for a primary business keyword and you show up in search engine results, it will indicate that your SEO is working.
• Help you increase your asking price. Buyers are willing to pay more for SaaS companies that have a strong SEO foundation. This is because it will cost them less to optimize it further. It’s a completely different situation when you have to save a domain that has applied a lot of black-hat SEO tactics. Or to redo all the website content and pages because the content on the website has nothing to do with the product (it drives traffic, but does not reach the right audiences). 

In a nutshell, a well-optimized website will attract more customers and generate more revenue.

• It can help instill confidence and trust. When buyers see that your website is well-optimized, they’ll be more confident in your business and more likely to move forward with the sale. The opposite will happen if they see that you’ve used SEO tactics to appear as if your website is successful. It will look like you’ve done this to inflate your numbers because you want to sell. Your potential buyers might believe that you are trying to deceive them.

What is SEO due diligence?

• SEO due diligence is the process of evaluating a website’s SEO health and ranking potential.
• It involves checking for technical errors, content quality, and off-page factors.
• The goal is to identify any potential problems that could be hindering the website’s performance in search engines.
• It’s to determine the quality of the website traffic you are receiving and how much effort it will take to grow it further once it’s been sold.  

How do you do SEO due diligence?

Here are a few things you can do to do your SEO due diligence:

• Audit your website. Check for technical SEO issues. Review your content and keyword performance to understand if the content is actually driving value to your business, or is it purely there to generate traffic with no thought of whether relevant or irrelevant audiences are visiting your website?
• Analyze your website’s backlink profile. Link building is a common service to outsource to agencies. Not all of them offer the same quality. Even if you trust an agency to do this for you, it’s your responsibility to ensure that you are getting good quality, industry-relevant backlinks for your website.
• Check for technical SEO issues. Technical SEO issues can prevent your website from ranking well in SERPs. You can use a tool like SEMrush to check for technical SEO issues on your website.
• Get a professional SEO audit. If you’re not sure how to do your SEO due diligence, you can hire a professional SEO company to do it for you.

Doing your SEO due diligence is an important part of selling your SaaS company. By following the tips above, you can make sure that your website is in good shape and that you’re getting the most out of your SEO efforts.