Ranking #1 on Google is a great objective, but dominating the web so exclusively that your competitors get starved out is even better. This method of Exclusionary Dominance™ is the secret to many online success including our case study today of Football Fanatics that has managed to dominate the JU Dolphins T-Shirts search result. We will delve into how they managed to accomplish this and see if we can learn from their success for our own website projects.
First we need to Google for "JU Dolphins T-Shirts". We have chosen a very niche product name so we can see this exclusionary effect on the competiton. This is a keyword phrase that is broad enough to have competition but specific enough to predict that a buyer typed it in and he's looking to purchase a JU Dolphins T-Shirt.
See how they dominate search results #1-#10
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Football Fanatics (FF) is the central money portal
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College Football Store is the pay per click venue
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Football Fanatics is the comparison shop channel
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eSportsMania has 2 competitive placements
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YahooSports is an FF private label store
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ShopNCAASports is another FF store
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JaxFanShop is an FF hyper targeting domain
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Note the other ShopNCAASports double tap
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Shopping.com is an FF comparison shop channel
13 out of 16 listings exclude competitors
All channels are being targeted including:
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Military Procurement (AAFES)
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Bizrate/Nextag comparison shop
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Froogle/Vast shopping directories
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Amazon/Yahoo/MSN marketplaces
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eBay auctions
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Affiliate websites (de-ranked in Google on purpose)
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Hyper targeting domains (super-focused on keywords)
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Private label (Yahoo Sports, NCAA) with Google ranking
Other techniques ensure dominance:
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Double tap stacking (two listings per natural result)
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URL rewrite ensures keyword relevance
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Verbose and repetitive descriptions (title, META)
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High density and unique keywords (META + content)
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Keyword Domain matching (JaxFanShop targets Jacksonville)
Traditional advertisers are spending in the millions to target these products and consumers. The natural consequence of a television ad 10 years ago was to “remember” the brand or to write down a response PO box and send a letter. Now the customer simply remembers the brand and product (not the domain name necessarily) and “googles” for it.
This causes search engine “piracy” where the traditional advertiser motivates the customer to purchase, but when they go to purchase, the top ranked websites covet the “conversion.” This means that whomever ranks substantially #1-#10 have the highest chance of converting the sales that were funded by the other advertisers… Effectively the top ranked sites get the majority of the benefit of the entire industry’s advertising in that topic.
In physical commercial real estate there are thousands of good “street intersections” to sell JU Dolphins T-Shirts. On the internet, this single search result page is the ONLY PAGE ON PLANET EARTH (statistically speaking) where the competition can compete for online conversions. This makes the value of being listed on this page high and #1-#10 dominance very exclusionary.