In an online world filled with the “UK’s leading Flooring Retailer” (we checked, and there’s a lot), it is difficult to stand out, differentiate and become a market leader. However, a tip-top digital marketing strategy is a way to step over the competition in flooring. In the Salience Flooring Index, we have identified characteristics of the leading brand’s marketing strategies that are helping them gain thousands of monthly visitors.
Brand awareness, onsite SEO, off-site SEO and the market offering are all considered part of the flooring market heavy hitter’s strategy. What’s most interesting is that all of these aspects are intertwined to boost visibility and drive conversions. Let’s dig into each element and discover what the top 1% of flooring brands implement in their marketing strategies.
Build Online Brand Awareness
Developing your brand awareness is a must in the flooring industry. Whether you are new to the market or a long-term player, by establishing your brand, you can gain brand searches, which puts you in a better position to convert. One way flooring companies have done this is by collaborating with the customers.
Flooring Supplies has done just that. They have taken images from happy customers who have purchased Flooring Supplies products for their renovations and shown them off through their own social media accounts. They have then created an inspiration space on their website, linking to the original post of the customer.
What’s more, they have made these images shoppable. So, if customers are struggling for inspiration, they can find a flooring style they like, see it within a home, click on the image and be diverted to the product.
Guest blogging is another excellent brand-building exercise for your digital marketing strategy. By this, we mean collaborating with influential people who have an audience within the industry. With this, you are tapping into a pool of new customers who will visit your website through brand-related queries.
If you are new to the flooring market or not yet a leading brand, read our guide on important signals to send when you are not a household name.
Onsite Flooring SEO
Onsite SEO is anything that appears on the website past the domain. Any good onsite SEO includes helping visitors understand what the page is about and helping them in relation to their search query. It is also an important strategy to consider as it will show search engines if your website is worthy of ranking for specific keywords.
Within onsite SEO, your content, navigation and keyword targeting are all considered, but most importantly, the buying intent should be your top priority. It is easy for companies in the flooring industry to house all of the products by flooring type. However, ranking for these head terms is highly competitive. Niching down on your targeting and going after keywords with smaller search volumes, may increase your chance of customers converting. The graphic below shows exactly what we mean about buying intent and specific keywords for laminate flooring.
As you can see in the graphic, you may have a wonderfully looking PLP for laminate flooring with top-quality products and a great filtering system. Still, the problem is that there is a risk that your visitors have low buying intent. Compared to the long tail keywords, these users have a better idea of what they want to purchase and are actively looking for brands to offer them precisely what they want.
Hypertargeted PLPs are an effective approach within the flooring industry. With high-quality content that matches purchasing intent, brands can target users at the buying stage of the journey. Sceptical of this working? Have a look at the work we did for Factory Flooring Direct. Salience grew its online visibility by 53% through optimising its PLPs for long tail keywords and creating new pages for rooms, colours, effects and many more. Just take a look at the mega navigation.
On each page, Factory Direct Flooring was able to target users with high purchase intentions through helpful content, relevant internal linking and a product offering they were searching for.
Moreover, supporting content that matches search intent further helps with visibility. Search engines such as Google rank websites based on their entities. Google Natural Learning processing (NLP) can identify the underlying purpose of a website when it has a strong connection to related entities. So, for flooring brands, creating guides on installation or blogs for design and inspiration, you are not only increasing your chances of ranking for all types of flooring-related queries, but you are also showing authority and knowledge within the industry, something that search engines also reward websites for.
Off-site Flooring SEO
Where onsite SEO is all about what is on the website, off-site SEO is, well, you guessed it, everything SEO-related before you find yourself on a website. So how can flooring brands include off-site SEO in their marketing strategy?
One major contributor to off-site SEO, and one that is a part of the trust segment of the EEAT algorithm, is reviews. Our 2022 flooring market report found that SCS, Carpetright and Tile Mountain demonstrated superiority due to their effective use of reviews. Search engines will reward sites with better rankings if reviews are positive, frequent and recent. Even if you get bad reviews, search engines won’t hit you with a visibility ticket as long as you resolve the issues in the review quickly. With this strategy, you will surely be on the good side of search engines.
But with all these reviews, don’t just let them sit on your trust Pilot. Place them on your site. Tile Mountain has reviews all over their site, even on their PLPs and product pages.
For users, this is a sure way to confirm product quality and is a fundamental approach to include in your SEO. Reviews are all to do with social proofing. If a user can see a product has lots of 5-star reviews, it takes the effort out of decision making, as they become reliant that previous customers are happy with their purchase. Not only will it increase conversions, but negative reviews will also highlight their pain points, which you can fix accordingly.
What’s more with off-site SEO is the effectiveness of backlinks. Having another website link to your website is a sure sign to search engines that your site is good enough to link to. Topps Tiles have mastered this within their marketing strategy. They have over 184,000 backlinks from over 4,200 referring domains. Although impressive, we see the backlinks from their blog to be even more effective in improving their visibility and answering the call of Google’s EEAT algorithm. Topps Tile’s blog content has over 3,500 backlinks from 143 referring domains. As we mentioned before, websites are rewarded for their authority as well as their experience, expertise and trust, and creating a connection between entities by showcasing these attributes can improve the chances of backlinks.
Optimising Your Market Offering
Flooring companies use many clever strategies to showcase their offering to their website visitors. When targeting customers through a website, you have no clue as to their experience or knowledge of your products. But what you can do is ensure they have everything they need.
Flooring Supplies is an example of a brand doing this very well. Once you’ve added the flooring you want to the basket, a pop-up appears with all the recommended accessories you may require to install the floor, meaning that the customer can get everything they need in one place, even when they didn’t know they needed it.
In the Salience Index Report, we track all of the trending, receding and opportunity keywords from the past year. We can soon establish who is reactive to these opportunities with a quick look at the SERPs for these keywords.
Having a strategy in place to be reactive to trends and opportunities in flooring industry is a sure way to lay down the law in the market. Optimising your pages and creating relevant supporting content and guides helps to dominate the space for any trending or opportunity keywords, and one to add to your digital marketing strategy.
Making the user experience easy and enjoyable is another strategy to include within your market offering. Decision-making is tiresome, especially online, with users overwhelmed by the many different colours, prices, styles and types of flooring. PLPs can be a minefield for users trying to make a choice, even with filters, but reducing the options can lead to more conversion. This is particularly helpful for users in the following scenarios:
- They have no well-defined preferences
- They are unfamiliar with the options
- The offering is all very similar
In the flooring market, each of these instances can occur. So, whittling down the options for users can lead to more conversions. An example of a brand doing this is Flooring Superstore. They have four main products within their EvoCore range. If they were to have every product on one PLP, users may be overwhelmed with the amount of choice, but by simmering the category down to their four main options, users have an easier time choosing the type of flooring they need. The image below shows how they do this:
From here, visitors can select the flooring type they need meaning that the only difficult choice they need to make is which colour they would like for their room.
Winning Marketing Strategies in Flooring
Getting just one of these aspects right doesn’t mean a guaranteed influx of traffic to your website. The thing with digital marketing strategies is that you must combine all of these aspects to achieve an increase in results. One brand in the flooring industry that is king when it comes to flooring marketing strategy is Carpetright. They surpassed the competition with brand awareness, on and off-site SEO, and showcasing their high-quality product offering. You can find out exactly how in our Carpetright brand spotlight, where we show you how they managed to get 371,000 monthly visitors.
If you are seeking a new digital marketing strategy or want to find out more, get in touch with the team at Salience for a free audit of your site and take your strategy to the next level.