Seasonal Trends 
Visibility Vs Authority 
Link Acquisition 
Content Performance 
10 minutes
Reading time
1-50
Brands ranked
Updated April 2022
This free Stationery & Office Supplies Report gives you everything you need to know about the state of search marketing in the stationery industry for 2022.
Inside, no page is left unturned as we’ve collected a bunch of metrics and stats to provide priceless insights into the office supplies industry and how you can make the most of these online opportunities in an easily-digestible format. Download the report now for immediate access to the UK Stationery & Office Equipment:
Get your free copy now by filling in the form atop this page. If you’re still sceptical, continue reading for a sneaky summary.
With people starting to return to the office, the online Stationery and Office Supplies market saw a boost in online visibility. Visibility is all about how easily your brand can be found online. Industry-wide, the UK Stationery and Office Supplies market visibility increased by 16%.
Despite a market-wide visibility increase, some stationery and office supplies did especially well even compared to the market. ypo.co.uk, for example, witnessed a huge 210% uplift in visibility and euroffice.co.uk saw something similar, seeing an increase in visibility of 123%. Regardless to say, there are big visibility growth opportunities in the UK Stationery and Office Supplies industry for 2022.
Of course, there have also been some visibility losses too. Unfortunately for these brands, the fax don’t lie and brands such as papier.com and smiggle.co.uk saw a decrease in visibility of -35% and -51% respectively.
Want to see where your brand ended up on our visibility league table? Download the free report now.
These are the rulers of the office supplies world. Here is a quick rundown of the top 10 online Stationery and Office Supplies sites with the highest visibility scores:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, WHSmith has retained its top spot from 2021 with the rest of the top seven also maintaining their respective positions. Whilst the top ten most visible stationery brands appear relatively staple from 2021, new additions to the top 10 include cartridgepeople.com and tts-group.co.uk.
These are the top 5 brands seeing the biggest jump in visibility score:
Despite an industry-wide increase in visibility, these brands have pencilled in their potential for disrupting the UK stationery and office supplies industry. Look to emulate their success by understanding their search engine strategies and working out how you can implement them.
These are the bottom 5 brands seeing their visibility wilt away:
On the other side of the coin, these brands have seen the biggest hits to their visibility scores. Whilst overall, the Stationery and Office Supplies industry has increased in visibility, other brands have remained stationary or worse – gone backwards. Despite the stability of the top 10 from 2021, it goes to show that not every brand is a permanent marker.
They may have been hit hard by Google algorithm changes or require new strategies. Look to learn from their mistakes.
Authority refers to the stature and reputation of your website. Search engines reward high authority sites as they’re judged to provide more useful content and services. The authority is calculated using a metric called domain authority which considers a website’s popularity, size, age and link profile. We highlight the top 5 online Stationery and Office Supplies for domain authority:
As you’ll notice, these aren’t the same results for those bursting with visibility. The difference, in brief, is that authority concerns what the rest of the internet thinks about your site whilst visibility is what your site says signals about itself.
If you have good authority but no visibility, you could be sitting on a sleeping giant that could easily hole punch its way through the crowd given some technical enhancements. The golden formula is to have both high authority and high visibility.
Get in touch to find out how we can help both boost authority and visibility to increase your sales or download our full report for further insight.
High competition keywords are those with high search volume but are also targeted by the rest of the industry, therefore, making them hard to rank on Google’s results pages. Ranking for these, however, will see your sales grow exponentially.
Unsurprisingly, keywords such as “office stationery”, “pencil” and “diary” all have very high search volumes but are equally very competitive. Ranking for these terms is difficult but rewarding financially.
High competition keywords shouldn’t scare you off if you’re a smaller brand, however. You can also use these words to better map your site by creating category pages that build around keywords. This way, you’ll be better able to serve the intent of the user.
For “office stationery”, a term with over 3,100 monthly searches, officestationery.co.uk, theworks.co.uk and staples.co.uk are the top 3 organic search results.
Download the full report to see a full list of high competition keywords for the Stationery and Office Supplies industry.
Opportunity keywords are the low-hanging fruit opportunities that have high search volume but low competition. These keywords are great if you’re a smaller brand and don’t have the authority (yet) to compete for high competition keywords.
In the report, the most searched but least served keywords relate to product categories. For example, the best keyword opportunity is “pencil case”. Other top keyword opportunities include “pen and pencil” and “mid-year diary“.
This highlights the importance of creating ultimate category pages. This not only helps the user by guiding them towards products that will help fulfil their needs but category pages can also rank well in search engine results providing they offer value.
Users want to know whether they can trust your site; they want to know that if they are going to part with their cash, they will get the service they’re after. As Google knows this, trust is therefore a serious ranking factor along with expertise and authority, especially since Google’s E-A-T algorithm update.
Here are the top 5 brands with the highest reviewed sites considering both the number of reviews and review scores:
To boost trust on your site consider using trust bars, customer testimonials, individual product and brand reviews (e.g., TrustPilot integration). Do this to show Google you’re winning the trust of customers and are a brand worth ranking.
One of the leading winners regarding visibility, cartridgepeople.com have done a great job integrating trust signals by enveloping their site with reviews, guarantees and awards such as the trust bar below:
Because this practice has become so important, we include a review and reputation analysis in our Stationery and Office Supplies report.
Want to see where your brand ended up? Get the report now.
No, this report is entirely free. We use these assets to build relationships with brands we want to work with. Feel free to download your free copy using the form atop this page.
Struggling to find your brand in our report. Not to worry! Simply get in touch and we’ll sort out a personalised report containing your brand, so you can compare it with the competition.
If you want to know anything about the report or are curious about how we can create a bespoke SEO strategy for your brand, get in touch today.
