The Q3 2023 benchmarking report for UK fitted furniture brands has just been published. Learn how the top 7 UK fitted furniture brands perform across the digital space.

The latest Q3 2023 benchmarking report for UK fitted furniture brands has just been published. It covers the 7 largest fitted furniture brands in the UK, including Sharps Bedrooms, Neville Johnson, Empatika Fitted Furniture, Hammonds Furniture, Sliderobes, Strachan Furniture Makers, and Online-Bedrooms.co.uk.

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for other fitted furniture brands to win brand exposure, drive online views, and ultimately win purchases. The report highlights quick wins that will improve enquiries from your online strategy and identifies the barriers that may be reducing your site’s ability to optimise digital performance.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q3 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer based on 50+ metrics and indicators of successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.  

Driving Optimal ROAS from Paid Media Channels

Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing and Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from £30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing. Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long-term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.

Technical Website Compliance

Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance. For fitted furniture brands, they'll want to ensure key informational pages, such as pricing, payment options, and delivery and installation estimates, are clearly signposted and not blocked off by 4xx errors.

Six of our seven fitted furniture brands have excellent levels of technical website compliance, returning fewer than 30 4xx errors in our crawls. The exception, however, is Hammonds Furniture, which has flagged 141 4xx errors. Hammonds must ensure that customers are not losing patience after being led down dead ends, particularly further along within the conversion funnel.

Site Speed & Conversion Rate Performance

When 62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load will see a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. Fitted furniture brands may be tempted to include high-quality videos and images on their sites, to entice customers, but each brand must ensure that these are appropriate sizes that will not slow down mobile devices.

Mobile page speed score for fitted furniture companies ranges from 42 for Sliderobes down to 24 for Empatika. Empatika has large, high-quality images on its homepage, which may be what is impacting this score. Empatika should review home page performance in line with best practices, ensuring the site both looks beautiful and provides exceptional user experience.

Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority

Domain authority (DA) is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. By working with a digital PR specialist, fitted furniture brands can look at link reclamation, in addition to out-of-the-box thinking to develop exciting PR campaigns that tie into their product lines.

A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however, it’s generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. DAs for fitted furniture brands are typically below average for the wider industry, with six brands' DAs sitting below 40. Strachan is the poorest-performing fitted furniture brand, with a DA of 17.

Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop

A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for core, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. Following the lockdown and Covid boom of home improvement, we have seen falls in organic traffic across all sectors within the space.

As expected, almost all of our fitted furniture brands have seen falls in organic traffic year on year, with the biggest loss, of 89%, being seen by Empatika. Online-Bedrooms.co.uk, however, has secured an increase in digital footfall, seeing 28% more traffic than in 2022.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results are an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. 'Reviews' and 'images' are both great options for fitted furniture brands, enabling them to give users a good perception of their service and products directly from the SERP.

'Images' is the widest-used Universal Search result for fitted furniture brands, with all seven brands prioritising this result type. Sharps has secured the most appearances for 'image' results, with 3,200 results.

The Longtail Keyword Opportunity

Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Fitted furniture brands will want to pay particularly close attention to phrases that indicate a high-purchase intent, such as 'quick installation', 'payment plans', and '12 year guarantee'.

Empatika is making no appearances in the top three positions for longtail keywords and is only ranking for 295 overall. Empatika must review its current onsite content to identify high-potential areas that can be built out and star ranking for conversion-intent terms.

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) forecast to hit over 42 million users by 2022, it is not surprising that brands have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached £2.6b in 2019. Facebook ads are an opportunity to show the high quality, appealing furniture on offer from these fitted furniture brands, and engage potential customers through social media.

We've included examples from Strachan below, which highlight current designs, along with bringing attention to sale discounts. Strachan has also used video ads to engage with an increasingly video-first audience and sit natively within a Facebook feed.

Top Social Shares & Content

When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for a long period of time. It's great for your engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content that achieves traffic over a long period. Pinterest is a useful platform for fitted furniture brands to consider, as it boasts a comparatively more affluent audience than other platforms, who are immersed in the decision-making stage of purchasing.

Two of the seven fitted furniture companies are showing a preference for Pinterest, giving them a competitive edge on the platform. Looking at Meta's platforms, Sharps has the largest audience on Facebook, with 46,700 likes, while Hammonds has the largest Instagram following, with 65,400 followers. For both these brands, this represents a large, pre-engaged audience that is more likely to see organic social activity, reducing the need to rely on paid ads.

Website Readability & Accessibility

About 20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. Fitted furniture brands may include accessibility as a key feature in their product lines, so this should be extended to their digital presence to make sure their brand is welcoming at any touchpoint.

Generally speaking, fitted furniture brands have low levels of accessibility errors. However, we identified an exception in Sharps, which returned 122 alerts in our crawls. Looking in greater detail, many of these come from redundant alt and title text, which could potentially pose challenges for site visitors using screen readers.

Q3 2023 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just six of the metrics we evaluated these top 7 fitted furniture brands on, check out our quick-look table below;

GET THE FULL 79-PAGE Q3 2023 REPORT

To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Mike Movassaghi.

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