Who's winning and losing in stationery?

Despite having -12% growth compared to the rest of the market, theworks.co.uk remain at the top of the online visibility charts as of December 2018.
The Stationary Insight Report, produced by Salience search marketing, ranks 50 of the leading websites within this competitive market according to their online performance.
The annual study reveals the successes and shortcomings of each website, highlighting where there is room for improvement.
Other stand-out results from visibility include:
– Paperchase finally started putting effort into their digital visibility, coming from nowhere to the 6th biggest industry name online. While that might sound reasonable to you, they had rock-bottom visibility in 2017, seeing a 279867% growth year on year.
– Four of the top 10, including Staples, Viking Direct & Ryman, lost online visibility to some of the smaller, online-only players.
– Viking Direct particularly need to sharpen their pencils, with a 42% loss in visibility over 12 months.
Social rulers
The Works erase their competition as the most searched-for brand per month, however, Paperchase leads when it comes to social, far surpassing other brands with their owned social score.
The social score considers followers and engaged conversations on all major social platforms.
Do you even link?
Links have always been a massive ranking factor and can make all the difference to how far up a brand appears on Google. Consistently gaining new high-quality links can be great for business, however, high-link volumes without the quality could spell trouble ahead.
There are several sites with ‘high-quality, low-volume’ links; these include postofficeshop.co.uk and Paperchase.
Conversely, there are also sites with a high volume of poor-quality links, such as theofficesuppliesmarket.com and euroffice.co.uk. Consistently gaining a high quantity of low-authority links highlights an urgent need to address your off-site reputation.
Brett Janes, content director, Salience, said: “The data behind this year’s winners & losers paints a fairly stagnant image of the industry. The real movers of the top fifty such as Paperchase and Papier saw quadruple figure percentage growth, while the rest of the market stayed – dare I say it? – stationary.
“This concerns me. It wouldn’t be the first industry where the big players have rested on their inherent authority, only to have the rug pulled from under them when small, online-only business start to hustle. Staples, Viking Direct & Ryman should be taking a good look at their search marketing strategy if they want continued success online.”
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