by Sean
The customer arrives already decided
Somebody chooses their tiles on a Tuesday night, on a phone, in bed, from a photograph of a stranger’s kitchen. By the time they type anything into Google they have a shape in mind, a colour in mind and a rough size. Click below to access the latest Tiles market report.
If your tile SEO plan assumes a customer reading five buying guides and building a spreadsheet, you are optimising for a person who does not exist.
Which is why Porcelain Superstore is worth twenty minutes of your morning. They look like a business that accepted a brutal truth. The customer arrives already decided, and the only question left is whether your site can find the thing they decided on. We looked at the same retailer six months ago, so our earlier write-up on Porcelain Superstore will show you how long this has been building.
Growth without brand, links or speed
In the 2026 Tiles Salience Index, Porcelain Superstore sits 4th on traffic score, up 9 places. Visibility went from 53,397 in July 2025 to 85,335 in July 2026. That is 60% growth in a market that fell 8%, so 68% ahead of the market, and 31,938 traffic score added in absolute terms.
Now the part that makes it interesting. They did not do it on brand. Their brand searches sit at 9,900 a month, 11th in the sector, and they fell 12.3% on the year and 18.2% on the quarter. Brand demand went down while visibility went up 60%.
They did not do it on links either. 528 referring domains puts them 21st on that measure while they sit 4th on traffic. Karndean carries 4,520 referring domains and is down 12%. Porcelanosa carries 3,774 and is down 7%.
They did not do it on speed, at 36th of 50 in the page speed table with 59 on desktop and 37 on mobile. Nor on third party review volume, where the report logs 470 reviews at 3.5, ranking them 36th.
Set that against the sector pattern and it stops looking like luck. The 24 growers inside the top 50 carry 449 referring domains on average. The 26 decliners carry 943. Ranks 3 to 50 grew 3.2% while the top two shrank 25.0%.
The category tree is the product
Their decision is one most teams avoid, because it is unglamorous and it never gets a launch date.
They have decided that the category tree is the product. Every way a customer can describe a tile becomes a page, and that page is built to close.
Which turns the SEO question from “what shall we publish” into “what can somebody type, and does that sentence have a home on our site”.
Open the mega nav and you can read the strategy before you read a word of copy. Four of the routes in are the sector’s keyword set turned into pages.
- Shop by Room: Wall, Floor, Bathroom, Kitchen, Outdoor, Hallway, Living Room, Fireplace and Hearth, Feature Wall, Porch, Luxury Vinyl.
- Shop by Colour: Green, White, Blue, Grey, Beige, Pink, Black, Black and White, Terracotta, Teal, Brown, Metallic.
- Shop by Style: Marble Effect, Stone Effect, Zellige, Fluted, Kit Kat, Patterned, Victorian, Moroccan, Wood Effect, Terrazzo, Onyx Effect, Concrete, Star, Checkerboard, Striped.
- Shop by Shape and Size: Fishscale, Herringbone, Mosaics, Subway, Hexagon, Metro, 300 x 600, 600 x 600, 600 x 900, 600 x 1200, 900 x 900, 1000 x 1000.
- Accessories: Underfloor Heating, Spacers and Wedges, Silicone, Grout, Fixing Materials, Backer Boards, Adhesive, Sealing and Cleaning, Outdoor Fixing.
Read that fourth list again, then look at the keyword data. ‘600 x 1200 tiles’. ‘fishscale tiles’. ‘metro tiles’. Those are the exact strings people type. The tracked set contains 152 keywords with a millimetre size in them, and Porcelain Superstore has built a page for six of the sizes.
Then hold the accessories list against the growth numbers. Grout has its own route. So do adhesive, silicone, spacers, sealing and cleaning, and outdoor fixing. In a market where tile demand fell 12.8%, grout queries fell 10.1%, adhesive fell 8.3%, and ’tile grout colours’ grew 50.0% on the quarter. They have built a shelf for the one part of the job that is holding up.
Nine products and eight filters
Now go to the hexagon page, because it is the cleanest demonstration of the argument. There are nine products on it. There are eight ways to filter nine products: colour, wall or floor, tile size, style, finish, shape, material, and a sale flag.
Nine products and eight filters sounds absurd until you remember who is standing on that page. Somebody who saw a honeycomb splashback on a phone and needs to know whether the terracotta one exists in matt, in a small format, for a wall. They are checking one specific thing against one specific room, and the filters are the check.
The conversion scaffolding is wrapped round it the whole way. “Try before you buy with up to 4 free samples” runs as a banner on every page. Prices are per square metre, with the sale price beside the full one. Every product carries a star rating and the number of ratings, 184 on the Croft White Hexagon and 111 on the Onice Beige Mosaic. A postcode field returns real delivery dates before you have added anything to a basket. And a ‘Hexagon tiles buying guide’ link sits at the top of the category, which is a very different object to a blog post about hexagon trends.
The trade route is separate and obvious too. Trade Sign Up sits in the header and Open A Trade Account sits in the nav, because in tiles the person typing is often a tiler pricing a job.
One more detail worth stealing. Their homepage lists trending styles as Terrazzo, Patterned, Zellige, Checkerboard and Kit Kats. Checkerboard is the one style cluster in our data that grew, 41 keywords moving from 49,180 searches to 59,910, up 21.8%. Whether they read the data or read the feed, the growing style is on the homepage with a page of its own.
Your architecture is your content strategy
If this is why they are winning, the implication for everybody else is annoying, because the answer is not ‘publish more’.
It means your information architecture is your content strategy. Taxonomy, filters, size pages, colour pages, finishing pages. Those are the assets. A blog is a nice thing to own, and it is doing less work than it used to. If you want to know what that looks like as a piece of work, our ecommerce SEO work on category pages covers how colour, size and style queries turn into pages that rank and sell.
It also means brand demand and link volume stop working as a defence. Topps Tiles holds 165,000 brand searches a month, 3.8 times the next brand in the sector, plus 3,172 referring domains and 300 stores. Non brand visibility still moved 40%. You cannot outspend a mismatch between what somebody typed and what you have a page for.
And it means the sample is the metric. The click lands between the taste decision and the money. Everything on the page should be working to get a piece of porcelain into somebody’s hand. One category over, how UK Flooring Direct uses free samples shows the same idea at work, with the sample request treated as the step that closes the sale.
What the numbers cannot prove
Two things are true at once here, so let me be careful.
Traffic score is a modelled figure. Ahrefs takes the keywords a site ranks for in the top 100, applies search volume and an estimated click through rate for the position, and sums it. It is useful across domains and it is not Google Analytics.
And none of this proves that site structure caused the growth. What it shows is that a business built as a search shaped catalogue with a sample in the basket added 31,938 traffic score in a market that fell 8%, while carrying fewer links, less brand demand, slower pages and fewer third party reviews than most of the brands it passed.
One note on sources. The site’s own on page claim of over 50,000 five star reviews is a different measure to the 470 reviews at 3.5 logged in our report, which comes from a third party platform. Both figures can be accurate.
The meeting line version: when the customer has already chosen the tile, your website is a search result being checked, so build it to pass the check.
If you want that check to pass on your own site, our CRO and UX team works on the filters, product pages and delivery messaging that decide whether somebody on a phone asks for a sample. Send us the pages that matter to you and we will tell you what your customer cannot find on them.
Further reading
- the 2026 Bathrooms Industry Report, Tile buyers and bathroom buyers overlap heavily, and the bathroom report shows how the same size and style queries behave one room over.
- the 2026 Flooring Industry Report, Flooring competes for the same floor tile searches, so the report gives you the demand picture just outside the tile sector boundary.
