The Top Domains and Content for Tennis Equipment

From:

Charlie Williams

Published: 17.07.2024

Every July, the UK goes tennis mad.

Following the French Open and into grass court season culminating in Wimbledon, UK interest in tennis peaks. We see this reflected in online searches, where tennis-related keywords go through a seasonal surge in demand each July.

According to the Lawn Tennis Association, more than two million adults play tennis every month. There has also been a surge in the number trying the sport, with 4.7 million adults playing the sport in 2022, and over 3.6 million children.

The UK market for racket sports equipment, including tennis gear, is expected to be worth $96m in 2024. 

With the global online market for tennis rackets at $230m in 2022, and expected to rise to $360m by 2029, we can see that ranking well for tennis equipment, especially at this time of year, is a lucrative opportunity.

Top 3 domains for tennis equipment

So, to our data. As we hit the start of Wimbledon, who is best placed to take advantage of the surge in demand this year? The full list of winning domains is below, but here are our top seeds:

Do searches for tennis equipment:

• tennis-point.co.uk
• amazon.co.uk
• tennisnuts.com

Know searches for tennis equiment:

• tennis-warehouse.com
• wilson.com
• tennisnuts.com

What’s trending in the tennis equipment search market?

With some analysis of our keyword list and a look at our TrendWatch data, we can spot the tennis equipment topics that are growing in popularity:

• nike court womens trainers
• court trainers ladies
• best tennis shows women’s
• nike tennis shoes pink
• wilson ladies tennis shoes
• tennis backpack

If you’d like insight into even more search trends, and the back-story of those rising keyword searches, subscribe to TrendWatch, the monthly newsletter from the SISTRIX Data Journalism Team.

The top URLs for tennis equipment

When you create a keyword list in SISTRIX, as we’ve done for this analysis, one of the reporting options lists the best-performing URLs for your keyword set. We’ve included our keyword set’s most successful pages in this table, so you can see some of the best-performing content. First the URLs leading in the ‘Do’ commercial keyword set.

Here are the top URLs for Tennis in the ‘Know’ informational keyword set.

Note: 100 URLs and all the keywords are avaliable. See the end of this article.

The top domains in the UK for tennis equipment

We’ve seen our grand slam champions, but it’s important to see the complete list of seeds for our analysis. Here are the top 25 domains for both of our keyword sets, so you can see who is acing their online presence:

Top 20 domains for shopping searches for tennis equipment:

Top 20 domains for informational searches for tennis equipment:

Content examples: What type of content is performing?

Our list of winning domains serves up some interesting insights into who is smashing their search game:

• While we see Amazon near the top – as we do for nearly all e-commerce sectors with a few exceptions – this isn’t a sector completely dominated by the biggest online names
• Our champion domains include some e-commerce giants such as Amazon, sports retailers like Sports Direct and Decathlon plus specialist retailers such as Tennis-Point, Tennisnuts and Direct Tennis. These three domains are punching well above their weight in the number of keywords they rank for
  • Three of the top five domains and six of the top ten are specialist retailers
• The other business model we see doing very well is manufacturers, which isn’t a surprise when you consider the popularity of brand searches, such as Wilson tennis rackets (1,600 searches a month) or Asics tennis shoes (2,150 searches a month)
  • These domains do well by ranking at the top for these popular brand queries but have a smaller footprint when it comes to the total number of rankings
  • For example, Nike is the ninth most visible domain thanks to ranking well for popular tennis shoe keywords as well as searches with a ‘Nike’ keyword modifier. However, they only appear for 28.4% of our keywords, showing they don’t offer many of the popular product types (Nike doesn’t make tennis rackets for example)
  • Babolat is a popular racket manufacturer, and thirteenth in our list. However, it only appears for 48.6% of our keywords, and on page one for 17.3% – they get their success via brand-modified searches
  • As well as Nike and Babolat, we also find Adidas, Wilson and Head all ranking in the top twenty-five domains and many more in the top 100
• General retailers such as Sports Direct, Decathlon and Argos all do well, building on their long-established reputation for selling sports goods. Sports Direct and Decathlon in particular are doing very well with high rankings across many of our subcategories
  • Decathlon ranks for 85.8% of our keywords, showing their flexibility for ranking not just for categories and subcategories, but also [brand + category] searches
  • For example, Decathlon have a dedicated PLP for Wilson Tennis Rackets with a notable 140 products to choose from, thanks to the marketplace function (many of the other retailers on the list sell on Decathlon just as on other marketplaces)
  • This page ranks on page one for the main popular keyword as well as a variety of near variants like Wilson tennis (450 searches a month) and Wilson racket (200)

High-performance content examples

Having found our set of winners, let’s take a look at some of the best-performing content.

We’re looking for examples of high-performing content formats, directories and templates that give our winning domains an advantage when it comes to consistently ranking for their target keyword topics.

One of our biggest takeaways is that this is a sector where specialist retailers can not only compete with the biggest name in internet retail, they can outperform them with a strong shot selection.

We have seen this occasionally before, such as for paddleboards, whereas many popular e-commerce sectors are dominated by e-commerce or high-street giants. 

Our top-ranked domain is Tennis-Point, a German retailer specializing in tennis equipment for everyone, from beginners to pros.

Tennis-Point.co.uk ranks for 90.96% of our ‘do’ keywords (almost as many as Amazon), and on page one for a smash hit 73% of them (8.5% more than Amazon).

Overall, the domain ranks for 37k keywords in the UK. 21.06% of these rankings are on page one, and together these rankings deliver an estimated 74k organic visits per month, with a value of £37k.

The site is broken down into directories for each product category, such as directories for tennis rackets, balls, bags, strings, shoes and clothing. All the major categories are covered and featured in the main navigation. There are also top-level directories for each brand.

Each category then contains many subcategory product listing pages (or PLPs), though some subcategories have their directory at the root level, such as https://www.tennis-point.co.uk/tennis-rackets-junior-rackets/. If these were in the main racket category, its organic performance would appear even stronger.

In the UK, the clothing and rackets categories are among their strongest content. The rackets category ranks for 655 keywords, for example, bringing in over 5.5k organic visits each month.

The directory might have a relatively small footprint, but it’s an impressively effective one. Pages in the directory rank on page one for 71.6% of the most important keywords.

Why does it do so well?

Their main category PLPs are hard-working, often ranking for the most popular top-level queries. For example, the /tennis-rackets/ PLP ranks for 655 keywords, including some big ones in our keyword set.

It ranks at 4 for tennis racket, 3 for tennis rackets and 1 for uk tennis rackets.

We’ve also seen that the site creates sub-category PLPs based on important facets of its product range, principally around use (such as tour rackets) and demographics (such as /tennis-clothing/women/). But for rackets, it is the brand-delineated child PLPs that are particularly effective.

Eighteen Tennis-Point PLPs are in the top one hundred most visible pages for our keyword set and thirty of the top two hundred.

The domain isn’t doing well with a small number of PLPs getting a lot of traction. Instead, they have a range of PLPs doing well for all the different topics and sub-topics in our keyword set. This is a site that has put effort into creating a range of dedicated shopping pages for a variety of ways they know their target audience shops (probably influenced by both keyword market research and customer insight).

This volley of pages leaves them ranking for all kinds of tennis equipment searches, from PLPs for tennis strings and grass court tennis shoes to the homepage ranking for more generic searches like tennis uk shop.

They’ve also put some work into their e-commerce optimization and shopping experience:

• As noted above, they have a clear navigation with all the major categories and subcategories in easy reach (and benefiting from a high position in the site structure)
• PLPs also have a sub-menu in the top-left (visible on the desktop version of the design), linking to related PLPs or sibling subcategories. There are also breadcrumbs adding further context for both users and search engines while adding more internal links
• They offer faceted navigation to help customers refine their search and narrow down their options. We should note that a lot of their faceted navigation options are indexable (which might not always be ideal…)
• They offer a wide range of choices – 179 different Wilson rackets at the time of writing
• Each product listing has a large image, some key attributes such as the head size and racket weight as well as the string pattern, price and the option to compare two or more products
• When you hover over a racket, it also shows you the available grip sizes
• The page design uses decent headings and an optimised title tag (though the meta description leaves something to be desired – perhaps evidence the site hasn’t been investing fully in SEO yet)
• Finally, there is a large piece of overview copy at the foot of the PLP, below the products. This covers key background points, uses subheadings to introduce key products and includes links to related PLPs, such as other product types by the same manufacturer
  • In fact, on the main rackets category page, there are over 1,300 words in this ‘overview’
  • As a piece of copy that few users will read that is normally done ‘for SEO’, this is perhaps evidence that Tennis-Point has been looking at SEO techniques, or at least has in the past
• Tennis-Point supports this shopping experience with further content designed to help those still choosing the right option – those in what Google calls a ‘messy middle’ buying journey
  • There is a racket finder tool and a range of articles in the info centre

Of course, we’ve seen this isn’t the only tennis specialist doing well. The third-placed site for our do keywords is Tennisnuts.

This domain ranks for 91.9% of the keywords in our set – and on page one for 66.7% of them.

While the site sells gear for all types of racket sports, including badminton, squash and padel, it is the tennis directory that is the most successful.

The tennis section ranks for almost 6k keywords (almost 30% of the site’s total) bringing in an estimated 26,786 organic visits a month. 397 different pages rank for at least one keyword in the UK, and the pages rank on page one 44.69% of the time.

Like Tennis-Point, Tennisnuts built their success by creating a wide range of PLPs that smartly cater to how their audience buys rackets and other tennis gear.

This isn’t a ground-breaking tactic, but good, solid shopping optimization that covers a wide range of categories and subcategories, giving them specific answers search engines can serve up when asked by potential customers.

For example, 89 different URLs in the tennis rackets section currently rank for at least one keyword. Principally, these break down their range by brand and by brand+product, but they also have pages by price (such as rackets under £70) and by category such as their top rackets for recreational players or their favourite power rackets.

And it’s not just e-commerce content that’s doing well. The most visible page in the rackets directory is their guide on how to use a tennis racket. This ranks for 204 keywords in the UK, and on page one for 121 of them.

This simple page isn’t a huge guide. Nor does it use fancy graphics, but it is packed with practical information a tennis newbie will find invaluable in picking the right racket, or at least learning what questions to ask next. It also neatly links through to useful product listing pages for the different racket types, including their ‘top ten’ choices for a few categories which new users will gravitate towards. No doubt the success here helps establish Tennisnuts as a good retail experience for searchers.

What’s interesting is that, like Tennis-Point, these are not perfect pages. These sites benefit from other expertise signals as well as solid content and the benefit of good-sized product ranges.

They have some great foundations in place, but there’s scope to go further and improve things. We can see both sites lost ground in Google’s March core update, continuing the trend SEOs are seeing of smaller sites struggling against larger brands. If they were to push the content quality further, would it be rewarded with visibility gains?

Summary

• If you are in the right sector, smaller retailers and sites can compete with huge names. However, you need to create a brand in your own right so Google can associate you with your area of expertise
• Such specialist retailers win by focusing on the correct content and a dedicated customer experience. By strategically expanding their search potential through smart landing page subjects and offering insightful guides to help the shopping experience, smaller retailers can outperform their bigger competitors, though we can see it is currently becoming more difficult
• Winning domains in this e-commerce sector smash their use of product listing pages. They create sets of targeted landing pages for popular terms as well as useful long-tail subcategories, often combining product attributes that meet specific audience interests
  • They also expand their reach by building shopping experiences tailored to their customer base, from beginners to seasoned players, the winning sites have specific product ranges for you
• This is a search market where big retailers can leverage their advantages. Decathlon is a great example of this. They do very well with a combination of their large brand signals with the marketplace opportunity they present for smaller retailers which boosts Decathlon’s PLPs with further choice plus the slick UX and shopping experience of their recently revamped PLPs
• Brand demand is key. Not only does this offer a way for retailers to segment their product ranges in a way customers want, but it also allows manufacturers themselves to earn search traffic from those who already have an affinity with their brand

Keyword research in the tennis sector

For our research, we’ve curated a comprehensive keyword set to build a representative sample of the search market for tennis equipment. This sample includes many of the popular shopping searches made in the UK by potential customers looking to buy tennis equipment online.

In our research, we always categorise our keyword sets by their search intent. This lets us compare sites competing for the same styles of searches – and audience – in a fair manner. By comparing like-for-like content, we build a list of the best-performing domains and content in this sector.

This month’s list is made up of what are known as ‘do’ keywords. ‘Do’ searches are those where someone is looking to buy, hire, download or convert in some way. For shopping searches like those we’re looking at here, these are often customers at the bottom of the sales funnel or making commercial research queries in the middle of the funnel. In search, we often consider such keywords to represent a conversion intent and therefore regard them as valuable targets.

In our keyword set, we have over 500 keywords, representing over 220k searches a month on average, with a peak in July 2023 of over 680k.

We’ve included popular keywords like tennis racket (13,300 searches a month on average in the UK, with a high of over 200k in July 2023), tennis shoes (7,650 searches a month), tennis balls (7,150), tennis dress (2,350) and tennis bag (1,350).

We also included popular shopping research searches like best racket tennis (1,300 searches a month on average) and best tennis racquets for beginners (650).

We have a detailed step-by-step article on keyword research with SISTRIX tools and data where you can see our list-building process.

Our SectorWatch process

For this SectorWatch, we used relevant keywords from a curated selection of tennis equipment keyword discovery tables.

We chose a selection of highly targeted keywords with a ‘do‘ intent. From these, we harvest all the ranking keywords for the URLs in the SERPs. We call this the Keyword Environment. Most SERPs will have some mixed intent so we re-filter the list for the correct intents and sanitise it by hand to leave a smaller, highly-relevant set of searches made by the UK public broken down by searcher journey. The results are based only on organic result rankings.

Curated keyword set and sector click potential

Core keywords: tennis racket, tennis shoes, tennis balls, tennis racquet, tennis bag, best racket tennis.

The full data set used for this study is available as a Google Sheet. Further analysis can be done in the SISTRIX keyword lists feature, including competitor analysis, SERP feature analysis, questions, top URLs, keyword clusters and the traffic forecast you can see below.

Potential traffic for ‘do’ keywords and click total for position #1SectorWatch is a monthly publication from the SISTRIX data journalism team. All SectorWatch articles can be found here. Related analyses can be found in the TrendWatch newsletter, IndexWatch analysis along with specific case studies in our blog. New article notifications are available through X (Twitter) and Facebook.