Since June 2020, the KBB sector and the wider home improvement industries have seen a consumer spending boom driven by housing market activity, record low interest rates, and reduced consumer spending on luxury purchases such as travel and hospitality.  But there are now indications that this demand may be reducing. Lead Wolf’s monthly analysis of over 2,000 search phrases in Google pertaining to kitchen purchases has shown that aggregate search volume is down substantially in June and July 2021, versus prior months: 

The total size of the data set is 3.35m so we have high confidence this is representative of present new purchase intent levels. Search volume was an average of 38% higher in the three months to May than in the average for June and July. With sales cycles typically 60-120 days, it will take time for this trend to manifest in reduced order intake for retailers, and it’s probably a further 30- 180 days beyond that the suppliers will start to see the impact. Of course, this is only two months’ worth of data, and we would want to see the number for August and September, especially once children have returned to school. 

 What’s important is that retailers and manufacturers keep an eye on their top of funnel metrics to give them time to forward plan.  

Retailers- Don’t Worry About the Size of the Cake, Worry About the Size of Your Slice: 

Even if search demand is down 23% you can mitigate this by improving your performance in Google Search. For example, if you presently rank position 8 in search results or the local map, and you improve that to position 6- you’ll double your click volume. There are lots of things you can do to try and improve this, such as better content, fast page load times, backlinks from other websites, improved technical SEO, and more reviews on Google. A good SEO strategy has your rankings increasing- growing the size of your slice, no matter how big the cake.  

 

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