Seasonal Trends
Visibility Vs Authority
Link Acquisition
Content Performance
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This is the DIY & Tool Sites Market Performance Report for 2018.
The report will be beneficial to you if you want to see how and where you measure up against competitors within your market and the reasoning behind it.
Using data from across the sector, the report analyses the top websites from the industry and produces a ranking for the performers. We look at 9 key performance metrics to give a qualitative score to each company’s performance. This report is produced annually as some metrics change year on year including Brand Reach Score, Link Authority & SEO Visibility.
You might be wondering where you fit in. Our downloadable reports only include data from the top performers in your industry. However, we do source data from across the industry, meaning we’ll have your metrics too. We’d be happy to send you a report that includes your brand, just get in touch.
Once we’ve got the data sorted, we continue our research to check the metrics are right. If you’ve read the report but want some further insight on who’s doing well in each section and why, continue reading. These are our top finds from the DIY & Tools sector.
Improving your organic visibility can have positive impacts across the site. It should be a constant goal but can be difficult to achieve, especially in competitive digital landscapes.
Unsurprisingly, B&Q remains market leaders for visibility. However, Screwfix is hot on their heels gaining an impressive 20% increase in visibility year on year.
Elsewhere in the top 5 Wickes and Homebase have remained static.
Wilko lost more than half of their visibility this year but still managed to remain within the top 5 competitors. They should carefully consider their SEO strategy this coming year.
We have to commend Travis Perkins who has more than doubled their visibility this year. Continuing in this vain could see them moving up the ranks quickly.
Further down the chart, we’ve seen some major successes, with Machine Mart doubling and Robert Dyas almost tripling their visibility and overtaking a number of competitors. Great work on their part, however, they are still quite a way off the top competitors in the chart.
In the report, you’ll find a list of top competition and top opportunity keywords for this sector acquired from some of the best keyword research tools available.
It appears that the more common or popular tools understandably have more competitive search volume. Unfortunately, there aren’t really alternative names for these tools, so ranking for them is always going to be competitive.
Screwfix is appearing in position 1 for most of the ‘saw’ search terms both competitive and opportunity including circular, table, reciprocating, chop and mitre saw.
They also have products appearing in PLAs to maximise conversion. Their title tags are neat, and they have clear meta data on all products.
In fact, Screwfix is performing well across most keywords and appearing on page 1. Well done to them.
When searching for a brand, you would expect their own site to appear position 1. However, DeWalt is beaten by Screwfix to P1 for the keyword ‘dewalt drill’.
There are a number of reasons why this might be the case. Their ranked listing is a product page rather than the drills category page. The page contains no copy and a confusing title tag.
For DeWalt to rank well they would need to consider a well-defined content and keyword strategy to optimise their pages. They could also do with optimising their meta descriptions and page titles to gain those top spots.
Link building is all about quality over quantity. Gaining valuable links might not be easy, but the outcome is worth it. Google still uses link authority scores as one of its primary ranking factors, so improving your link profile should have positive implications across your site.
In the DIY & Tools sector, Lowe’s is gaining the most links by far and they are of very high quality. They are one of the biggest US retailers who deal with all aspects of home improvement which is probably why.
Most of their links come from product images which are clear and stock-like. However, they do have useful guides like this one which gained over 1,700 links from over 1,000 referring domains. They also have buying guides to help customers at various stages of the buying process.
Farnell is not gaining many links but the ones they’re getting are of high quality. Most of their links are going to homepages for various countries.
They do produce a lot of data sheets for certain products which are downloadable. These are picking up some good links too and provide Farnell with a valuable data swap detailing customer information.
You can use downloadable assets to fuel ECRM retargeting and social campaigns due to the insight gained.
Wilko has a similar issue to Lowe’s in that the majority of their linked content is images. This puts them in the ‘low quality, high volume’ category. They have no creative content outlets or downloadable assets, so it’s clear to see why this is the case.
Homebase has an Ideas & Advice section which features helpful advice and articles on lots of subjects from gardening to DIY. However, this is not gaining many links. Tweaks to their outreach strategy could improve their link building.
In a market like DIY & Tools which people often see as ‘dry’, it can be difficult to create engaging social content that people want to share. Social presence is so important and can do wonders for your brand reach. If you’ve neglected your social appearance so far, make this year the time to improve it.
B&Q is leading the social pack with an impressive number of brand searches and own social score.
With regular updates, competitions and promotional posts, they are very present on the three main social platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
However, the content does seem to be duplicated across all three. Changing it slightly may increase their owned social score and attract more engagement.
Screwfix is also near the top of the list, and it’s not hard to see why. Their Facebook feed features humorous posts, showing that they don’t take themselves too seriously and appearing approachable.
The content is very engageable and ‘share-worthy’. But they do have useful posts such as opening times and product promotions to balance it out.
Similarly, Bosch has an impressive owned social score with a great mix of educational, amusing and brand related posts on their Facebook.
Wickes has a large number of brand searches, but their owned social score is lacking in comparison. They post regular updates and competitions and their twitter features retweeted posts from charities they support.
They also appeared in the news last summer for creating a sunscreen for construction workers. It’s this type of positive press that can do wonders for your brand, and why outreaching your news is so important.
By keeping their hard work up in the new year, Wickes should see their owned social score grow.
If you’ve not yet downloaded the report, click the button below. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.
