Seasonal Trends 
Visibility vs Authority 
Link Acquisition 
Content Performance 
10 minutes
Reading time
1-50
Brands ranked
Report Updated June 2022
Our free Toy Market Report offers everything you need, from website data to online pre-sents. This will help gift new marketing opportunities in 2022.
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By filling in the form at the top of the page, you will get access to our toy store’s market report. Alternatively, continue reading below for a sneaky summary.
With the start of the end of Covid in sight, the online toy market took a hit regarding visibility. Visibility is all about how easily your brand can be found online. In total, the UK toy market visibility increased by just 3%.
Following the market-wide visibility increase, we have highlighted some of the market growers. Tonie’s, for example, witnessed a massive 100% uplift in visibility. Toy Master saw something similar, with a 161% increase in visibility. Evidently, there are big visibility growth opportunities in the UK toy industry for 2022.
Despite the wins, there have been some visibility losses. Big brands such as Playmobil and Fisher-Price saw a decrease in visibility of 46% and 85% respectively. Despite being large brands, online visibility continues to be a thorny issue.
Want to see where your brand ended up on our visibility league table? Download the free report now.
Here is a quick rundown of the top 10 online toy sites with the highest visibility scores:
Smyths Toys holds steadfast in 1st in 2022. The Lego Store, The Toy Shop, and Shop Disney are closely followed, completing the top 5 positions. Hotwheels has been bumped out of the top 10 list, with 365 games taking their place.
Which Toy brands have seen the biggest growth in visibility in 2022?
These are the top 5 brands seeing the biggest jump in visibility score:
Despite an overall 3% increase in visibility, these are the biggest climbers in the toy 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 slowly drop:
On the other side of the coin, these brands have seen the biggest hits to their visibility scores. 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 by looking into a website’s popularity, size, age and link-building. These are the top 5 online toy stores for domain authority:
As you’ll notice, these aren’t the same results for those sprouting with visibility. The difference is that authority concerns what the rest of the internet thinks about your site whilst visibility is what your site says about itself. If you have good authority but no visibility, you could be sitting on a sleeping giant. The golden formula is to have both high authority and high visibility.
Get in touch to find out how we can help boost both 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 will see your sales grow exponentially.
Unsurprisingly, keywords such as “toy store”, “soft toys” and “wooden toys” all have very high search volumes but are equally very competitive. Ranking for these terms is difficult but rewarding. Alternatively, you can also use these words to better map your site by creating category pages that build around keywords as, after all, this is what your customers are looking for. Due to the increased revenue potential, using and targeting high-competition keywords can be a very fruitful task.
For “Toy Store”, a term with over 17,000 monthly searches, Smyth Toys, The Toy Stores and Hamleys are the top 3 organic search results.
Download the full report to see a full list of high competition keywords for the toy industry.
Opportunity keywords are the low-hanging fruit opportunities that have high search volume but low competition. These keywords are awesome if you’re a smaller brand and don’t have the authority (yet) to compete in the big league.
In the report, the most searched but least served keyword is “stress ball”. This indicates that there are major opportunities for local SEO strategies, including seasonal optimisations and any reoccurring trends within the market.
Below is a graph outlining the YoY fluctuation of how the toy industry has benefitted from its online presence. Comparing 2020 stats to 2021, lockdown gave people more time to spend online, rather than in stores. This resulted in an increase in website visibility and engagement. Seasonal peaks are clear in the run-up to the Christmas period, where the toy industry sees its highest engagement.
However, where there are gains, there are slight drops. Search volumes appear to have gone back to their 2020 levels, most likely because of the end of the pandemic and the opening up of the physical economy.
As there are no huge seasonal events throughout the middle of the year, with the exception of birthdays, this is where the toy store industry slightly suffers.
Targeting any seasonal events could see a dramatic increase in traffic and sales on your website.
Contact us if you would like to know more about these keyword opportunities and ways you can capitalise on them.
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 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:
User reviews, testimonials, trust-pilot integration, guarantees and credentials/certification are all sure-fire ways of increasing trust. Because this practice has become so important, we include a review and reputation analysis in our toy store report.
This way, you can see who’s winning the trust of their consumers and showing Google they’re a brand worthy of ranking.
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.
