The Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK Luxury Home brands has just been published. Learn how the top 5 UK convenience stores perform across the digital space.
The latest Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK Luxury home brands has just been published. It covers 5 national luxury home brands, including The Sofa & Chair Company, Darlings of Chelsea, Willow & Hall, Arighi Bianchi, and Lee Longlands - 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 luxury home brands to win digital brand exposure, and secure online orders. 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 take-aways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
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.
Many 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 under-perform. 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.
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.
Most of the UK Luxury Home brands seem to have their website’s in good condition, with minimal 4XX or 5XX errors. However, Willow and Hall have a concerning 1,415 4XX errors on their site. This is a concern for any luxury brand, who will want to ensure their users are getting a perfect experience with their brand at any of their touchpoints.
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.
Site speed is something we have noticed as a common issue across all the sectors we have been researching. For Luxury Home, none of the five brands we reviewed have even been able to achieve an ‘OK’ score of 50-89. The Sofa and Chair Company are closest to achieving this, with a Google Lighthouse score of 45, while all other brands are achieving less than half this score.
Domain authority is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance and helps create a reliable overall gage of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, ie. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads.
Domain authority is generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. However, a ‘Good’ DA score really depends on the competition level of your industry. In our research, UK luxury home domain authorities range from 26 to 42. Arighi Bianchi sit at the top of this scale, while Willow and Hall are at the tail end. As this is not an area that any of our brands are particularly strong in, it presents an opportunity for someone to break ahead of the pack.
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.
Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. Many of the sectors we have been researching, particularly in the home improvement sector, have seen industry-wide falls in organic traffic. Though three of our five Luxury Home brands saw falls in organic mobile traffic year on year, Lee Longlands have achieved a 142% increase in organic mobile traffic. This has taken them from seeing the fourth highest level of mobile traffic in 2021, to the highest achieving brand for organic mobile traffic this year.
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.
Though there is a fair mix of Universal Search results for the Luxury Home market, ‘People Also Ask’ questions were the most frequently appearing Universal Search result. Darlings of Chelsea lead the way here, appearing for 345 People Also Ask results. The only brand to be appearing for any reviews is Arighi Bianchi, who are showing for 146 reviews.
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.
Darlings of Chelsea are appearing for the second highest number of long-tailed keywords in the top 100, with the most ranking in the top 3 (245). Lee Longlands have the highest total long-tailed keywords ranking in the top 100 by a comfortable margin (8,819) so, arguably, have the biggest potential for improving this figure.
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 highlighted Arighi Bianchi’s Facebook ads below, as they highlight a range of their product options – including third party brands that they stock. Arighi Bianchi’s strategy appears to be to use a range of ad types and creatives, which will help to avoid ad fatigue and appeal to different users. This is supported by organic content that highlights their products and their branding (as seen in their third ad below).
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.
With home improvement, particularly in the luxury sector, being such a visual product that needs to inspire users, it’s important for all brands within the space to be consistently producing engaging, shareable content. We noted that Arighi Bianchi have the most consistent content production strategy, with two of our five brands showing no content production at all (Buzzsumo, June 2022). With such a broad demographic using all kinds of social media, these brands should absolutely review their content strategy to ensure they are visible among their target market.
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.
Darlings of Chelsea and Arighi Bianchi are showing high levels of contrast errors on their sites, with 56 and 52, respectively. This poses an accessibility concern for any visitor with a colour vision deficiency, or who has another visual impairment that struggles to see small or non-contrasting text. Websites must be made accessible to everyone, in order to create a positive brand image (and maximise conversion potential)!
3.42 seconds are all it takes for a user to judge a site solely on its appearance. For sites with a low clarity score, this means users are getting a poor impression of your brand and aren’t seeing your vital cues to convert.
The Sofa and Chair Company achieved the highest clarity score of 82%, while Lee Longlands scored the lowest with 69%. Lee Longlands aren’t so far behind for this to cause immediate concern but, nonetheless, they should be looking to optimise their user experience and create clearer pathways on their site to improve on this score.
Additionally, we use attention maps to judge user behaviour and assess how customers are interacting with a site. You can see from these examples just how wildly different site designs can impact user attention.
You can see all these brands' performance at a glance in our quick-look table below;
If you want to explore how you can improve your performance relative to your competitors, reduce media spend wastage and drive more performance from less, read the 10 Week Performance Accelerator Programme for CMO’s & Marketing Leaders.
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 avery klein on Unsplash