Taking multiple spots on SERPs by investing in multiple web assets
Table of Contents
I am going to talk about a tactic I’ve never spoken about. It’s called the Dragon with 7 heads strategy.
I am kind of happy that I am underground. Why? Because most of the guys/gals who are unknown have the best digital marketing strategies and they keep it to themselves.
Most of us don’t want to be “known”, are very private and have the same drive as some of the biggest names in the industry.
I am sharing my thoughts because I need to write every day and the odd individual who goes over my concept will win 100%. I have to give back somehow.
The thought process is publishing, hacking, advertising, and doing whatever it takes to show up on SERPs. Hence, why my blog is called Game of SERPs.
We take up 5 spots on Google SERPs for any given keyword in some cases.
We’re all competing against multi-national/billion-dollar conglomerates. Spare me the “it’s not fair” speech.
Now that I’ve told you about what the strategy is, let me share how we do it.
Your main website
We always start with the main website. Your main website is the validated hypothesis that worked. Your primary web asset lays all the golden eggs for you to spread around.
Your main web asset is the head of the dragon. It has grown significantly and has given you the freedom to expand.
Once we established ourselves in our industry, it was time to spread our wings and build more dragon heads.
How did we do it? We bought up a bunch of domains and started building side web assets (dragon heads) to dominate different categories or branches of our industry.
This wasn’t a fast process. We were meticulous. Each dragon head deserved our attention.
Over the course of five years, we were showing high up for hundreds of keywords, in multiple cities and stopped taking leads (from certain cities) because we couldn’t take on the business.
I even went on a micro-level and built local pages on our larger web assets to take different jurisdictions in larger cities (i.e. Lower Mainland or Toronto).
Why build more websites
If you’re a digital marketer, you understand SERP real estate is the most valuable space on the planet right now.
Showing up for a qualified keyword at the right time will skyrocket your lead numbers.
Let’s not forget that you’ll be competing with multiple competitors who have way more money than you. In our case, it’s multiple billion-dollar companies.
You’re building multiple web assets to take up as much space as you can.
If the first position for a keyword gets 30% of the clicks and the third position gets 15% of the clicks, you want to show up in these two spots.
We do this with my 7-head strategy by building multiple web assets.
Let’s talk about how we’ve done this.
Growing more dragon heads
Some SEOs think duplicating your bread-winner and updating the content is all you need to take up more valuable SERP space.
I disagree!
What we do is take every category of services and products and spin them off into their own websites.
These websites will have their own branding, design, backlinks and sometimes, their own LLC/Inc.
Take a look at Machinery Trader and you’ll see what I mean. They have 17+ spin-off brands with incredible reach.
They’ve broken different markets up into niche industries.
Machinery Trader is the head of this dragon. They also have a dozen+ other heads which generate millions of visitors per month.
Tractor House, alone, generates 2 million+ visitors per month. And that’s a conservative estimate.
We break up the different dragon heads by category (i.e. strollers which can also be used as a car seat) or by brand (i.e. Baby Jogger).
I’ll go over the details in a bit but let’s talk about how to quickly rank your new web assets.
Hypothetical project
Let’s assume you have a successful website selling baby gear. That’s what you specialize in and that’s what you dominate in your state.
You have categories like car seats, strollers, nursery, and toys on your website.
Your website is a 1-headed dragon. It’s time to grow more heads.
We’ve decided that the strollers category needs to separate into its own niche with a dedicated website.
If you can, breaking up the strollers by brand would be even better but that’s for much later in the game.
Here’s what your dragon strategy can look like.
For us, we started with branded URLs (i.e. Bugaboo strollers) and expanded into categories (i.e. outdoor strollers).
Building links
After spending time and money on building a new web asset (dragon head), link-building becomes the next time consuming and expensive task.
Yes, I understand that not all of us have teams to help build each project.
That’s ok! Do this slowly. Even if it takes 5-8 years, keep at it. That’s what we did. None of what I’ve built happened in a year. It has taken 8+ years to get here.
We did this just like Machinery Trader. We put up a partner section in the footer of each web asset and interlinked all of our websites. It’s a quick boost for your new websites.
To be honest, link-building is not my strongest strength. That’s why we hire out but I’ve still gathered enough experience to know what works. Here are 3 articles on how I build links:
- Our link building strategy- An eCommerce digital strategy
- What is tiered link building and does it work
- Backlink gap analysis research with examples
I’ve been told that I’ve always been “lucky” because of my resources. I disagree.
No one hears that I used to stay up until 4 AM doing manual outreach on my own. Not a lot of people know that I sometimes wrote articles I knew nothing about but because I didn’t have the funds. Learning the industry I was writing for was the only option.
How long does it take to see results?
Every project is different and I am happy to say that we’ve never rushed any of them.
For example, when we launched our second web asset, we never even bothered to obsess over rankings or leads.
Our team focused on the basics and just kept going.
We were right up to our main web asset (primary dragon head) within three years.
My point is that you shouldn’t listen to the twenty-something-year-old on Twitter saying that “all my projects rank within 3 months and so should yours”. Real life and business don’t work like that. Maybe they do rank their websites within 3 months. I don’t!
Don’t get discouraged. Keep working on your ever-expanding list of web assets. You will dominate your niche if you don’t give up.
Oh, and by the way, exact match domains do work. Some of our web assets are exact match domains and do very well.
Conclusion
Alright, let’s sum it up:
- Work on your main web asset (dragon head) until you dominate your market and area.
- Once you understand your demographic, start building other web assets.
- The new web assets can be a profitable category you want to focus on or even a brand.
- Continue building links to each web asset. You can interlink your web assets, of course.
- Success will take time. Most likely, it will not happen in three months.
I was going to show everyone how to do this but I don’t want to paint on your canvas. Some of you will do a better job than I ever could.
Hopefully, I’ve sparked a few ideas.
Thanks for reading. Until next time, catch you all on my next post.