Seasonal Trends 
Visibility Vs Authority 
Link Acquisition 
Content Performance 
10 minutes Reading time
20 pages Length
We’ve opened up the toy box on the toy store industry in our sector reports this week, investigating all there is to know about the industry and how it performs in terms of SEO and online marketing. Within this capsule of knowledge, you’ll discover the top performers in online toys, as well as the ones who have thrown their SEO toys out the pram.
A wide range of metrics are analysed, including the essentials, such as visibility, keyword potential, and page speed. As well as core elements, secondary KPIs are researched, including brand mentions, social scores, and online reputation.
If you’re associated with an online toy store and are looking for the latest knowledge in your online playground, download your free copy of the report using the form above now.
The online toy store market has been seeing a lot of uplift in visibility year-on-year (YoY) – the market is up by 27% in total. Of course, although some brands have been winning big, other have been falling behind.
For the winners, brands like Hot Wheels have seen a tremendous increase in visibility, shooting to the top of the league table with a 710% boost. For the losers, such as Lego, however, sharp losses have been found. Some as much as -66%.
But the real question is: where do you sit? Want to find out where your brand falls on our visibility league table? Get the report now, for free, using the form above.
Here is a quick rundown of the top 10 sites:
High competition keywords are difficult to grab, yet they have some of the highest search volumes in any industry, especially toy stores.
Therefore, although they may seem pie in the sky, achieving rankings on these highly competitive search queries can pay off in the long run. If you were to snatch up a top position, imagine the level of traffic that would come flowing your way.
For this reason, we investigated the most competitive keyword in the toy store industry and found the ones you need on your target list ASAP.
As you might expect, the keyword ‘toys’ is the most competitive term in the industry, amassing over 110K searches a month. If you rank for this keyword, it’s safe to assume you’re working hard and deserve an applause.
The first brand to appear on the first page for this keyword is Smyths. Interestingly, they rank for both the first and second positions on this lucrative keyword, meaning that they’re sucking up a TON of search traffic from this one keyword. This happens when two of the pages on one site are both optimised better than the other results for the keyword. Although Smyths pages are competing against each other, it actually works out to be beneficial!
Other brands, such as Argos and The Toy Shop, take high positions for the term ‘toys’. However, none of the others appear to be toy-specific – many are general brands that sell a whole host of products. This could mean that with some critical optimisations, toy-specific sites shouldn’t have a hard time getting spots for this keyword.
If you want to see other high competition keywords in the toy industry, download the report above using the form. It’s completely free.
As well as high competition, opportunity keywords are also dug up. These little gems help you get to the top of the SERPs fast with little effort and can often be used to meander round your biggest competitors.
You won’t have to relentlessly build backlinks or painfully outreach content. All that’s needed to rank for these keywords is a little bit of research.
The good news? We’ve done that research for you in this report. Here’s the types of elements you’ll need to start rankings for these hidden terms.
When investigating the SERPs for these opportunity keywords in more depth, it was quickly noticed that many brands aren’t creating on-page categories around specific toy types that get tons of traffic.
Many individual products are searched in the thousands every month. It’s important to create categories that target this intention properly. Serving someone a general category for toys when they’re searching for a specific toy type won’t help your conversions.
Want to get your hands on the low competition, high search volume toy types flying under the radar? Get the report now, for free.
Ever heard of YouTube shows like ‘Ryan’s world’? These YouTube shows get millions of views and literally feature children playing with and explaining toys. Some of these channels have over 20 million views and are watched by your dream audience – children!
However, did you know these channels/videos are also ranking for some high-volume toy-specific keywords?
There are a lot of opportunities for toy brands to create these videos and rank in Google. Not only would you have a top spot with a web page but a video as well. Google often show video thumbnails among the search results, so you wouldn’t be competing with yourself either.
Want to see the keywords that get video rankings as well? Get the free report now.
Social media is a key piece in the difficult puzzle that is online marketing. We shouldn’t have to tell you it’s important, yet many brands still neglect their channels and fail to engage with their audience.
With toy stores specifically, many forget their core buyers are on social. If they could reach their target market more effectively, they’d make more profit for sure. It’s for this reason as to why we include an in-depth social analysis in this report. We want you to see how your competition are running the show on social in the hope you’ll find some value in their strategies.
Additionally, we also match this up with online brand mentions. This tells us how far their name goes online and is often associated with their brand marketing on social platforms.
In the toy store market, Lego takes the industry by storm. They have a tremendously high social score of 34,272 and brand mentions exceeding 368,000! These monster numbers have to be produced from something, so we decided to take a peek at their socials to see what’s going on. If you look closely, you’ll be able to use some of these methods to bolster your own social strategy.
The post a ton of product demos and Lego versions of real-life products, such as cars. This allows them to not only show off their product but appeal to broader niches, such as car enthusiasts.
They also throw down challenges which get tons of comments and get people building creative contraptions with their product.
They also showcase impressive builds from members in their community. Even I have to admit, some of them are incredibly intricate and impressive.
Is there anything you can take away from Lego’s strategy? What can you do that’s similar to boost your own social platforms?
Download the report now and see the best techniques your competition is using to beat you in the game that is social media.
One of the core elements which drives repeat business is reputation. If you can produce an image that is authoritative and reputable in your industry, your online cart will never be empty again.
Google has been working hard to adjust its algorithm to spot these reputable brands, giving them higher positions in the SERPs as a result of their efforts. One way it measures this is through online reviews, particularly through sites like TripAdvisor.
Therefore, it should be your duty to ensure your reviews are both amazing and displayed on your site to show customers and Google your site is one to trust. To help you improve your reputation, online reviews, and image in the eyes of Google, we’ve put together a list of the best review toy store brands online.
Use this to see where you match up against the competition and learn from them best.
Here are the top 5 brands who are crushing it in terms of online reputation:
We bang on about page speed a lot here at Salience. It’s just too important to ignore! If your site is slowly loading, visitors will bounce and Google will mark you down. Too much rests on this metric, so we had to include a full-page speed analysis on the toy store market. You can thank us later.
With this analysis, you’ll be able to identify the fastest brand in the toy store market and learn from their quick-loading ways.
Here’s what PageSpeed Insights identified as the top 5 fastest toy store brands:
Read more about the importance of page speed here.
This report is free, just like all the reports we perform here at Salience. We research markets we would like to work in and create valuable resources brands within can use to improve their online marketing. Grab your free copy using the form at the top of this page.
We have a number of thresholds when it comes to including sites in this analysis. If your site is not included, it may have flown under our radar. However, if you’re struggling to find your brand, get in touch and we can send a personalised report out to you ASAP.
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.
