sideproject .link - #2 - Website about old dogs | $2.5K MRR

Senior Tail Waggers is a website about wellness, health and care of elder dogs. The website was created in 2010 and has been active since then. It has very stable organic traffic which stands for 90% of total traffic.

According to verified Google Analytics data, the website has averaged monthly 100K pageviews / month last year. Semrush data also shows that the organic traffic to this website is stable, and it hasn’t suffered from any Google algorithm updates in the past.

Senior Tail Waggers has around 300 keywords ranking in Google’s top 3 organic search results. Here are the top keywords that drive traffic to website.

And here’s a screenshot of top ranking pages:

While main income source of this website is ads, there are many commercial keywords (dog treats, weight loss etc.), this website receives traffic from and most of these pages are not effectively monetized with relevant products from Amazon. Potential buyers must keep this in mind, if they want to further monetize the traffic.

I analyzed the backlinks this website has with Ahrefs and I didn’t see any pattern that raises red flag. It has 844 referring domains and many of these domains are very reputable websites like WikiHow, TreeHugger, DogTime, BrightSide. Here’s the top 10 referring domains listed by their domain authority.


 

Apparently quality backlinks and content are among the main factors why this website has been able to maintain its organic traffic over the years.

The interesting part is that this website doesn’t have any social media profiles. Considering it has 100K pageviews a month, the new owner can build an audience on relevant networks such as Instagram and Pinterest to drive more traffic. I’d also set up a discussion board where senior dog owners ask and answer questions. So that direct traffic would also increase, meaning more ad and affiliate revenues.

Revenue details:

The website runs ads from AdThrive. AdThrive is known to have high RPMs compared to popular ad networks like Google Adsense. I've been working with Mediavine as monetization partner for over a year and I'm quite satisfied with their RPMs. I have seen +$30 session RPMs with them and I'd give them a chance to beat AdThrive's RPMs.

Also, there's an obvious decline in Amazon earnings. As I said previously, this website needs better optimization when it comes to affiliate links and I believe the earnings in 2018 can be recovered, and improved.



The seller has set the reserve at $75K but you can still negotiate for a fair price. If I were to buy it, I'd initiate the negotiation process with an offer of 12x of MRR and go up to 18x.

Also note that this website's traffic heavily depends on organic search, you have to be familiar with SEO in order not to get hurt from Google's algorithm updates and improve its traffic.

That's it, and stay connected for more!

Best,
Onur