Seasonal Trends 
Visibility Vs Authority 
Link Acquisition 
Content Performance 
10 minutes
Reading time
20 pages
Length
Updated Aug 2019
Our Toy Stores Market Performance Report looks at the top 38 toy-specific retail sites, looking at the successes and seeing where others could improve. We’ve excluded department stores and other sites that sell toys, this report is solely for retailers that specialise in selling toys.
We look at key factors that can be integral to a company’s success such as SEO visibility, social presence and page speed. In this post you’ll also find information around keyword opportunities.
If you haven’t already downloaded the report, we’d suggest you grab it now so you can read this article alongside it. We take data from across the whole market, so even if you don’t appear in the top lists in the report, we’ll still have your information available. Just speak to us and we can give you more details.
The toy market has seen some great wins in terms of visibility this year.
The top ten retailers were:
1. smythstoys.com
2. lego.com
3. thetoyshop.com
4. shopdisney.co.uk
5. shop.hasbro.com
6. mattel.com
7. elc.co.uk
8. play.hotwheels.com
9. buildabear.co.uk
10. hamleys.com
Smyths Toys gained 16% visibility year on year, helping them keep their top spot position. Lego still managed to stay in 2nd place but did lost 21% organic visibility. In third place, The Entertainer has also had a fantastic year with a 30% increase.
1. shopdisney.co.uk (∞%)
2. smythstoys.com (16%)
3. thetoyshop.com (30%)
4. hamleys.com (44%)
5. board-game.co.uk (152%)
ShopDisney has gone from zero visibility to 17,566 at the time of data sourcing.
Their old site disneystore.co.uk looks to have been closed down in August 2018 which would explain the drop.
If we look at visibility scores for their old site from 8th August last year to their new site on 8th August this year, there is a difference of 12% which proves that their new site, even though it’s only a year old, is performing even better than their old one.
1. lego.com (-21%)
2. elc.co.uk (-26%)
3. fisher-price.com (-40%)
4. buildabear.co.uk (-14%)
5. mulberrybush.co.uk (-17%)
Many department stores and supermarkets sell toys, so it’s no surprise that Toy Stores will have to compete hard to get into those top positions on Google.
Well done to Smyths Toys for gaining position 1 for the highest competition keyword, ‘toys’.
One of the biggest opportunities we’ve seen for toy stores is separating toys out into age categories.
10 of our keywords contain specific ages or age-defining words such as ‘baby’ or ‘toddler’.
The results around a lot of these keywords look to be consideration based, with SERPs showing listicles and articles which can help parents decide on an appropriate toy or gift.
Children’s gift retailer Wicked Uncle is ranking in position 1 for lots of these keywords as their site is predominantly set up to answer these questions.
We love Smyths Toys’ Gift Finder tool which allows you to put in the age and maximum price of the gift to be shown a selection. You can then filter down the side by brand.
If you specialise in one area, make sure you should about it. Mulberry Bush is ranking in position 2 for the term ‘wooden toys’. They also have star ratings on their listing which means they’ve implemented review SCHEMA on their site.
Find out more about structured data for eCommerce sites in our guide.
A few years ago, it’s likely there would have been much more searches for gender specific gifts such as ‘toys for girls’.
We can see from this Google Trends graph the decline in searches for ‘dress up games for girls’ over the last 5 years:
The likes of John Lewis kickstarted an idea that children’s items don’t need to be gendered when they removed ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ labels from their clothing.
With a shift towards gender neutral toys and not labelling toys as ‘girls’ or ‘boys’, this has had an impact on what people are searching for.
Social media becoming a bigger part of marketing strategies for every company. Remember, your target audience is mainly parents or adults buying toys for children, so cater your social to them.
ShopDisney is highest on our social charts with a massive owned social score.
Their feeds mainly feature promotional posts and new items as well as release details about stock that relates to new films coming out.
Lego is next on the list. We love their social videos made in stop motion which give teasers about new products.
They also have ‘how-to’ videos which show users how to make different things with their Lego and impressive Lego models that they’ve made for different events around the world.
Lego also has a very active social presence on YouTube, which is unsurprising due to their success with the Lego Movie franchise.
The phenomenon of ‘unboxing’ videos has gone from strength to strength. They are extremely popular with children, but a 2014 study by Google revealed that a fifth of shoppers consult an unboxing video before buying a product.
If your brand doesn’t already have a YouTube channel, it could be worth tapping into this market or teaming up with influencers in this social space.
Smyths Toys are already doing this on their channel – well done!
Page speed is one of the most important ranking signals on Google’s radar. Faster site’s equal happier users but they also make for a swifter crawl for Googlebot.
We used Google PageSpeed Insights to find out which retailers had the fastest site. The top five are:
1. kidsstufftoys.co.uk
2. smythstoys.com
3. hasbro.com
4. hamleys.com
5. drtoymaster.co.uk
Our Toy Stores report costs nothing. We produce these reports to provide quality insight to the toy store market because we hope to provide genuine value. As a retail-specialised search marketing agency, we’re nerds for this stuff.
Our reports only show the top brands with ample visibility. If you feel you’d fit into this criteria and we’ve missed you out, get in touch and we can show you where you sit within the market.
