The Q2 2023 benchmarking report for UK kitchen and cookware brands has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK cookware brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q2 2023 benchmarking report for UK kitchen and cookware brands has just been published. It covers the largest 11 national kitchen and cookware brands, including ProCook, Portmeirion, Circulon, Denby Pottery Company, Hexclad Cookware, Salter, Our Place, Le Creuset, Home & Cook, Anolon, and Grunwerg - it highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons in 20+ online performance metrics.
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 brands to win brand exposure, generate online orders, and drive in-store interest & recognition. 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 Q2 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 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 & 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 and cookware brands, particular ones aiming to offer a luxury cooking experience, a high-performing, easy-to-navigate website is essential for instilling consumer confidence, and ensuring potential customers can find the products they are looking for.
Generally speaking, kitchen and cookware brands have low levels of 4xx and 5xx errors, pointing to well-maintained sites which don't lead potential customers down dead ends. However, Circulon, Portmeirion, and Grunwerg prove to be the exceptions, with our crawlers being directed to over 1,000 4xx pages for each of these sites. Circulon in particular are struggling with this, with 1,798 pages returning error codes.
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 makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. For sites such as kitchen and cookware brands, who are juggling a wide range of products and may feel the pressure to make items stand out, high resolution images and content can hold back performance when it comes to site speed.
An 'okay' score for mobile page speed sits between 50-89. When we first started reporting on our specialist sectors, we found that very few sites were hitting these benchmarks. Both Home & Cook and Portmeirion exceeded the benchmark of 50 for 'okay', scoring 56 and 64, respectively. Denby, however, scored very poorly on site speed, coming in with only 11. Denby must prioritise reviewing their site speed and spotting any optimisation opportunities to improve customer experience.
Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority
Domain authority 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, ie. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. For kitchen and cookware brands, collaborations with online culinary publications, homeware suppliers, or even bloggers in their niche could be a great way to boost these figures.
Domain authority is considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. ‘Good’ DA score depends on the competition level of the industry. However, a ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing. Domain Authorities for kitchen and cookware brands span from 60 (ProCook) down to 17 (Hexclad Cookware). With such a broad range of DAs, Hexclad (along with the other brands near the end of the scale) should consider how they can harness digital PR to start building authority and, in turn, gain visibility online.
Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop
A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, 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. For brands within a space that may consider themselves more of a luxury or treat item, such as luxury kitchen and cookware, they may find that their organic traffic naturally starts shrinking, in line with a reduced consumer interest during the cost-of-living crisis.
We saw reductions in traffic across ten of our eleven kitchen and cookware brands, with the exceptions of Hexclad and Our Place who saw traffic increase by 219% and 82%. Though these brands are securing less traffic overall, any increase while competitors are seeing falls in traffic is commendable, and other kitchen and cookware brands should be on the lookout for whether their loss has been Hexclad and Our Place's gain.
Universal Search Opportunity
Google Universal Search Results is 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. 'Image' and 'Reviews' results would be particularly useful for kitchen and cookware brands, who would be able to show their products to users without them visiting their site, and build trust in their products by encouraging customer reviews.
Portmeirion and Denby Pottery are leading the way with Universal Search Results, but interestingly they have each dominated a different result type. While Portmeirion have secured 1,600 reviews of their products within the SERP, Denby are scoring highly when it comes to 'People Also Ask' results with 654 - an opportunity to appear for longtail keyword content and queries showing high conversion intent. To ensure your brand is making the most of Universal Search opportunities, the full scope of results should be considered in your organic strategy.
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 brand-new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Kitchen and cookware brands should be optimising for longtail keywords that show high purchase intent - though they may not score highly in terms of search volume or traffic, these keywords will pay off as being more likely to secure purchases.
ProCook are ranking both for the highest volume of longtail keywords overall (18,085), along with a high volume of appearances within the top three (1,180). However, they still have a huge amount of potential to increase these figures, with a further 2,680 appearances within positions 4-10. Though Le Creuset are ranking for fewer longtail keywords overall, they've secured 1,474 appearances within the top three results.
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 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.
We've pulled a selection of Portmeirion's Facebook ads below, for their Sara Miller campaign. Using the same copy from ad to ad, Portmeirion are able to test the impact of three different images (including two different sizes) and get great insight for future campaigns on how these different visuals performed.
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 longer. It's great for your brand engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Kitchen and cookware brands can bridge across both food-focussed recipe content, along with interior design and lifestyle pieces.
Surprisingly, none of our eleven kitchen and cookware brands were shown to be using Pinterest as their most used platform. With a focus on inspiration, and an abundance of lifestyle and recipe content present on the site, this could be a lost opportunity to drive engagement with their on-site content.
Website Readability & Accessibility
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, brands lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. Though the temptation may be there for luxury brands to choose style over function, they must not underestimate the impact of making their site accessible for all potential customers.
We can see that kitchen and cookware brands are showing various levels of errors, alerts, and contrast errors across their sites. ProCook are showing the largest volume of accessibility barriers, with 104 errors, 24 contrast errors, and 50 alerts. Though these levels aren't as high as some of the sectors we specialise in, ProCook will still want to ensure they're taking steps to remove any obstacles for potential customers with disabilities.
Q2 2023 Winners and Losers Summary
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 11 kitchen and cookware brands on, check out our quick-look table below;
GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q2 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 Charisse Kenion on Unsplash
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