Between May and August, a monthly average of 17 million searches were made on Google UK for homeware, decor, furniture and garden products, reveals a report by independent digital marketing agency, Greenlight.
Figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) in August showed that a total of 68,200 people bought their first home in the second quarter of this year – the highest quarterly number seen since the financial crisis.
Additionally, a YouGov survey commissioned by Avant Homes found that three quarters of homeowners in the UK have made improvements to their property, spending an average of £13,000.
Greenlight’s Home & Garden Sector Report – Issue 1 shows that queries pertaining to furniture and garden combined accounted for the majority (67%) of the 15.8 million online searches made in August. Decor and homeware accounted for 19% and 14% shares, respectively.
The keywords ‘wallpaper’ and ‘diy’ topped the list of the 10 most popular searches. Each was queried 246,000 times – accounting for 2% a piece – of all home- and garden-related searches online. ‘Garden furniture’, ‘beds’, ‘sofas’, ‘curtains’, ‘oak furniture’, ‘gazebo’, ‘garden shed’, and ‘sheds’ followed.
This search behaviour tallies with a report from Halifax Home Insurance. A July poll of 2000 showed homeowners are more likely to have carried out aesthetic DIY work such as painting or decorating (86%) and assembling furniture (77%) rather than tackling home maintenance issues like cleaning gutters and repairing fittings or cracks.
Greenlight’s report ranked the most visible websites to consumer searches for the 11,659 keywords analysed in the report. Ebay.co.uk was the most prominent site in the organic listings. It attained a 17% share of visibility, visible to a volume of 2,683,070 searches pertaining to home and garden goods. Ebay.com was also the most visible advertiser in the paid listings, achieving a 36% share of voice, and it scored top in Greenlight’s Social Media analysis.
Commenting on Greenlight’s report findings, Neil Saunders, MD of research agency and consulting firm, Conlumino, says: “The housing market is key for all these home retail sectors, and the outlook for the next five years, whilst not as rosy pre-recession, is certainly much better than it has been since 2008 and the onset of the downturn.
“As the housing market improves and strengthens, all of these sectors will grow more strongly, and they will pick up in terms of the number of consumers looking to make purchases.
“In particular, furniture and floor covers, sales of which really suffered over the downturn, claiming many casualties – we project they will see a 1% growth next year.”
