The Q3 2024 benchmarking report for UK home furniture retailers has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK home furniture retailers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q3 2024 benchmarking report for UK home furniture retailers has just been published. It covers the 11 largest retailers in the UK, including Swoon, Oak Furniture Superstore, LuxDeco,  Furniture Village, Furniture and Choice, Oak Furnitureland, The Cotswold Company, Loaf, Heal's, Barker and Stonehouse, and Housing Units.

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 home furniture retailers to win brand exposure, drive online views, and increase in-store footfall (where relevant). 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 below or schedule a call.

Q3 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just six of the metrics we evaluated these top 11 home furniture retailers on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK home furniture retail brands or request a copy of the report for the full review.

Request the report

What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site 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. Retailers in any sector will need to effectively keep on top of changing stock levels, and implement a strong redirect strategy when removing items for sale. This will reduce 4xx errors, and prevent users from heading down dead ends or turning elsewhere from frustration. 

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. With mobile browsers accounting for 72.9% of all e-commerce sales in 2021, home furniture retailers must ensure that their site is prepared for an increasingly mobile-first consumer base.

The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 62 and 5, with Oak Furniture Superstore scoring the lowest site speed. This UK home furniture retailer’s website is image-dominant, and it can make improvements by ensuring that these are optimised (sized and formatted correctly) and contain meta descriptions and alt txt to help with site speed.

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. Furniture retailers will want to look towards interior design publications and bloggers who will be interested in their brand and create content within the right niche.

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. The DA for this quarter ranged between 70 and 23, with Oak Furniture Superstore reporting the lowest DA score for this quarter. Oak Furniture Superstore flagged the least number of backlinks, and it should adopt a PR strategy to help increase this, which will improve its DA rating.

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. Non-essential items and treats are likely to see falls in consumer interest due to the cost of living crisis. Consumers are, therefore, more likely to hold on to older pieces of furniture for longer, only replacing or buying items when there is a great need.

Five of the 11 retailers saw a decrease in organic mobile traffic, with Heal's reporting the biggest loss (-22%). Three retailers flagged a decrease in organic desktop traffic, with Heal’s reported a 15% loss there. The data shows that all retailers saw more organic traffic for desktop and should, therefore, ensure they’re utilising a mobile-free design to help increase traffic for consumers using a mobile.

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 site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. For home furniture retailers, they will want to pay particular attention for 'image' and 'local pack' rankings, which will help improve product visibility, along with capture attention from local shoppers who may then visit in-store.

Furniture Village remains at the top of the leaderboard for the most Universal Search appearances (48,665), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’. On the other hand, LuxDeco reported the fewest Universal Search appearances overall (4,376).

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. Home furniture retailers should specifically look towards high purchase-intent phrases and terms when building out their longtail keyword strategy, including things such as delivery options and financing.

Furniture Village remains at the top of the scoreboard for the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (4,889) and positions 4–10 (10,115).

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) hitting over 44 million users in 2023, it is not surprising that companies 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 GB pounds in 2019. Facebook ads are an opportunity to show furniture items within lifestyle settings or showcase current offers and deals, inspiring social media users to browse and purchase from the retailer.

We’ve included 3 examples of Oak Furniture Superstore’s sponsored Facebook posts. This UK home furniture retailer included personalised imagery to help with branding, though it should aim to reduce text for Facebook posts and keep to a maximum of 3 lines.

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 of time. Pinterest presents a strong opportunity for home furniture retailers as their comparatively affluent audience is well-immersed in the inspiration and consideration phase of planning any purchases.

The Cotswold Company has the largest Facebook page (243,500 Likes), while Loaf has the largest Instagram account (476,800 followers). It’s important that brands also assess their engagement rate, and Furniture and Choice has the highest engagement rate (5,313).

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. Home furniture retailers will want to think about the impression they are conveying to customers needing additional accessibility, and ensure that key product details are made clear for everyone browsing the site.

In our previous audit, Oak Furnitureland reported 355 accessibility alerts, which it's decreased to 73 this quarter. The retailer with the highest number of accessibility alerts is Furniture Village (a total of 196). Upon closer inspection, the majority of these alerts (185) are from redundant links, and it should assess its linking strategy to help reduce these alerts.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q3 2024 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 Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash