The Q3 2023 benchmarking report for UK kitchen appliance brands has just been published. Learn how the top 9 UK kitchen appliance brands perform across the digital space.

The latest Q3 2023 benchmarking report for UK kitchen appliance brands has just been published. It covers the 9 largest national kitchen appliance brands, including SharkNinja, Morphy Richards, Dualit, Tefal, Hotpoint Appliances, Kenwood, Prestige, KitchenAid, and Russell Hobbs.

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 kitchen appliance brands to win brand exposure, drive online views, and increase in-store recognition and 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 brand based on 50+ metrics and indicators of a 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 kitchen appliance brands, having an easy-to-navigate site is essential for consumers looking to make a new purchase and particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages, such as best-selling appliances, comparison pages, and any key feature pages that customers may need to access.

In our Q2 report, we noted that Prestige were the only kitchen appliance brand to record a high level of 4xx errors, with a total of 728. In Q3, Prestige has significantly increased this figure, now returning 1,773 4xx errors in our crawls. Prestige must ensure that the removal of products does not impact technical compliance, and that customers are not being sent down dead ends. An effective redirect strategy should be implemented, in order to direct customers to alternate products or ranges that may suit their needs.

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. When operating in a competitive market, kitchen appliance brands will need to ensure they're offering an exceptional customer experience at every touchpoint, including the speed of their site.

The benchmark for an 'okay' score is 50-89, though we have found that brands across many sectors struggle to achieve a score in this range. Dualit, which was the only kitchen appliance brand seeing an 'okay' score in Q2, has seen its score fall from 59 to 23 in Q3. Morphy Richards is now the only kitchen appliance brand breaking through this benchmark, now scoring 59.

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. Kitchen appliance brands should be continually pushing to improve their domain authority and can achieve this with a strategic approach to digital PR and outreach.

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. For kitchen appliances, the highest DA of 76 is still being seen by Kenwood. Prestige, which had recorded a score of 40 in Q2, has seen this drop slightly to 39. Prestige, along with other brands near the end of this scale, must evaluate their digital PR strategy, and identify opporturtunities to win backlinks and referring content.

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. Kitchen appliance brands, who are less likely to see consumers make 'impulse purchases', must ensure that they are optimising for keywords across the full range of awareness, consideration, and conversion terms to capitalise on traffic at each of these stages.

SharkNinja has increased its already impressive rise in organic traffic, jumping from a 180% increase in Q2 to a 216% increase in Q3. We expect this remains down to the popularity of air fryers, for which SharkNinja are the leading brand. Morphy Richards and Tefal have also secured increases in digital footfall (with 14% and 48% respectively), while all other kitchen appliance brands have lost organic visibility YoY. 

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 brand can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. For kitchen appliance brands, 'reviews' are an excellent way to increase visibility through universal search and will help brands stand out against their competition with customer endorsements.

SharkNinja has more than doubled its appearances for 'reviews' since Q2, now making 11,700 appearances for the result-type. While SharkNinja is also showing for a significant amount of 'image' results, an eyecatching option for kitchen appliance brands, Hotpoint has taken the lead on 'image' appearances, with a total of 7,400.

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. There are many longtail keyword options kitchen appliance brands could be optimising for, such as 'buy airfryer online UK', or 'kettle next day delivery'.

Though Tefal is still ranking for the fewest longtail keywords overall, it has improved on this figure since Q2, now ranking for 2,371. Tefal remains ahead of two competitors when it comes to appearances in the top three positions, and are covering ground behind Kenwood too - making only 25 appearances fewer. A steady growth in longtail keyword appearances indicates a well-nurtured content strategy, pointing to improvements both in technical compliance and user experience. 

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) forecasted 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.

We've included examples of Tefal's recent Facebook ads below. Tefal has three different creative formats in its arsenal - a static image, a vertical video, and a carousel (including video content). Video creatives are engaging and eyecatching in any format, but a vertical video will fit natively into 'Reels' content, appearing to readily-immersed social media scrollers. The use of three different creatives will enable Tefal to effectively assess performance, and identify which ads work best for which products and audiences.

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 which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Kitchen appliance brands can get creative with content and social media, by sharing recipe content, images of their products in lifestyle settings, and news of any special offers or sales.

Facebook is remains the platform most used by almost all our kitchen appliance brands. Looking at Facebook and Instagram audiences, Tefal has, by far, the largest Facebook audience, with 3.8m likes. SharkNinja is leading on Instagram though, with 154,800 followers, this is a very modest audience in comparison. 

Website Readability & Accessibility

Around 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. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, even subconsciously, brands lose customer interest as they turn to other kitchen appliance brands that can better meet their accessibility requirements.

In Q2, we noted that Russell Hobbs had flagged 319 accessibility alerts, mainly due to duplicate alt text and redundant title tags. In Q3, Russell Hobbs has seen a slight increase in the figure, rising to 330. As so many alerts can cause barriers for users accessing sites with screen readers, Russell Hobbs must ensure these are all addressed.

Q3 2023 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just six of the metrics we evaluated these top 9 kitchen appliance 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.

Photo by Daniel Norris on Unsplash