I analyze a 3-year-old authority MMA website, WayOfMartialArts.com. The site receives 305,000+ pageviews per month (Ahrefs estimate).
The site relies on display ads for 95% of its earnings, and most of its content doesn’t go into much depth. This is an opportunity for the current owner to enhance existing content since now the site is on a good trend, or for competitors to beat this site with better more in-depth content.
I share a tactic in this writeup where you can leverage programmatic SEO plus AI content to really enhance the site. Keep reading!
This is what I cover in this report:
- Website overview
- Major highlights
- Competitor overview
- Easy wins to increase revenue and/or traffic
- How much is this website worth (valuation)
- Actionable takeaways you can apply
Let’s get into it!
✅ Website Overview & Highlights
The website has had amazing growth over the last couple of years peaking at 320,000+ pageviews/mo according to Ahrefs (most likely much more).
Ahrefs shows a steady growth traffic curve with a significant amount of referring domains (3,400+) linking to the site:
The website’s domain has been active since 2020, with slight changes to the homepage design over the last three years.
The site boasts a collection of nearly 550 blog posts, providing extensive coverage of the major martial arts through news, guides, and gear reviews. Most of the content has been written by experienced specialists in the sport.
Highlights
- The niche has been covered in-depth with over 500 published articles.
- The owners attempted to implement supplementary revenue streams
- Tremendous traffic growth during the last 2 years
- A solid backlink profile with links from sites like SportsCasting, EssentiallySports and TheManual
Why is this site “winning”?
- Great shareable content based on listicles and more in-depth guides to specific martial arts
- Strong backlink profile boosting the site’s authority coupled with spotless E-A-T elements
- Focusing on display ads content saved the site from Google’s product updates during the last year
Top 3 Competitors
Here are similar competitors targeting the majority of the same keywords.
- MMAChannel.com – 40K traffic according to Ahrefs, a similar site, hit by the November update.
- TheMMAGuru.com – 30K traffic according to Ahrefs, same as the above, decimated by the update proving that WayOfMartialArts content is better than most of its competitors
- MiddleEasy.com – 70K traffic according to Ahrefs, mostly oriented towards recent MMA news
Let’s get into the easy wins to grow this specific website.
🔥 3 Easy Wins To Grow This Website
There are opportunities to significantly grow this brand. I break down the following easy wins:
- Improve affiliate content
- Resolve brand awareness issue
- Implement programmatic/AI content
Let’s get into it!
➡️ Win #1: Improve affiliate content
This recurring win is frequently featured in my newsletter. The reason why I am prioritizing affiliate revenue is that it often offers a more reliable income stream compared to display ads.
As I have outlined on my blog multiple times, there are various alternative affiliate deals that can be made with niche companies.
While many people still purchase their gear from Amazon or UFC shop, there are several smaller companies focused on individual martial arts, allowing for affiliate partnerships for each major martial art like kickbox, BJJ or karate.
Despite being smaller in scale, these companies often offer better affiliate deals. Here are my suggestions on how to enhance the current affiliate content on this site:
💰 Standardize buying guide layout and style
After analyzing this site, I noticed three different layouts for its buying guides.
One layout uses the AAWP plugin, another features customized comparison tables, and the last one displays outdated non-aligned images and buttons.
Given that it’s not a proper A/B split test, I recommend that the owner establishes a standard operating procedure (SOP) for editors.
By creating a clear and easy-to-follow SOP, it will ensure consistency and maintain the quality of future content.
💰 Improve the quality of gear reviews
Although it’s apparent that most of the gear has not been tested in live situations, the buying intent content could be improved by adding a more personal touch to the reviews.
This can be achieved by researching other reviews on Amazon, forums, boards, and hiring experts to review and add their personal touch.
Furthermore, since this is a visually appealing niche, adding more high-quality images and videos would be advantageous.
💰 Add or improve existing comparison tables
As previously mentioned, one of the buying guide layouts has decent comparison tables (see the image below). This could be improved by:
- Removing unnecessary text below the images. Replace with bullet lists if needed.
- Adding a no-follow link to the images
- Replacing the complicated scoring system with a more user-friendly star rating system.
➡️ Win #2: Resolving brand awareness issues
This would be a major red flag for me and could potentially dissuade me from purchasing this site.
With massive communities centered around martial arts on Facebook and Instagram, having the same name, but not being owned by this site is a significant issue.
The fact that the site’s own social media communities have only 100 followers across all platforms is another cause for concern.
Having a recognizable brand in the niche can greatly enhance the site’s overall credibility and trustworthiness.
If I were to be in a site owner’s shoes I would do the following:
- Buy out those pages, collaborate with them, or offer them a percentage of the revenue for promoting the site on their social media.
- The purchase of smaller communities such as pages, groups, newsletters, or podcasts could prove beneficial, even the Joe Rogan Experience started as an MMA podcast.
- Improve existing social media – this will probably be the most time and money-consuming way of building the community from scratch
➡️ Win #3: Use programmatic SEO for covering sports events
This easy win comes from one of the SEO Facebook groups. One of the group members did a great job using AI and programmatic SEO to automatically cover major MMA events. Head out to the SEO signals lab and you will find the actual post.
In short, he created an automatic way to cover upcoming fights and events in a way of publishing press releases for said events. This is how he is doing that.
- He uses a database of fighters and events from sites like Tapology and Sherdog
- He uses data for a round-by-round breakdown from sites like MMAJunkie, ESPN, etc
- He created unique ChatGPT prompts for it to write a press release with the data from points 1 and 2.
- Edit the final result
- Additional step: outreach to fighters and organizations for a personal touch to the article
💰 How Much Is this Website Worth?
Here are the assumptions I am making:
- 305,000 pageviews/mo according to Ahrefs
- Primarily monetized by AdThrive display ads
Based on the site’s current traffic and the average RPM in the industry, I estimate that the site earns between $6,000 and $8,000 per month from display ads alone.
The affiliate part of the business has been neglected, so it is probably under 10% of all revenue.
I would value the site in the range of 35-38X, resulting in a final price of around $260,000 to $300,000.
👉 Actionable Takeaways
Here are actionable takeaways that you can apply to your niche website today:
- If there isn’t a dominant affiliate player in your niche, such as Amazon, it may be worth considering reaching out to smaller retailers within the niche. These retailers are often more open to alternative affiliate arrangements and could provide a valuable opportunity to expand your affiliate revenue.
- Although some may have a negative view of the SEO community, it is actually a highly supportive and helpful group of individuals. For instance, consider the case of #4 Win, a member of an SEO Facebook group who shared an effective strategy for generating fresh traffic all for free
- Creating a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for every step involved in building and managing your website can help you avoid many potential issues in the future.
