The Top Domains and Content for Watches

From:

Charlie Williams

Published: 14.08.2024

Despite most of us carrying a clock in our pockets thanks to our phones, watches remain a popular purchase in the UK.

Even with the rise of smartphones, traditional mechanical or digital watches continue to be an important market, especially at the higher end.

Projections estimate that the UK market for watches will be worth almost £2bn in 2024. 32% of those sales are for luxury watches, which are seeing a surge in demand, leaving 68% for more affordable, everyday options.

Many of the UK’s most popular watch brands cater to a wider audience, not just the luxury sector. The rise of tech means that wearing a watch is now as much of a statement of style as a practical necessity.

That translates to a super-competitive online market, with many retailers and brands competing for the mass market, and famous manufacturers and brokers fighting for the luxury sector.

Top 3 domains for watches

So, whose content is ticking like clockwork? Our research has found the most visible domains for a representative sample of ‘do’ (action/transactional) searches and ‘know’ (informational) searches:

Do searches:

1. amazon.co.uk
2. hsamuel.co.uk
3. houseofwatches.co.uk

Know searches:

1. gq-magazine.co.uk
2. houseofwatches.co.uk
3. goldsmiths.co.uk

What’s trending in the watch search market?

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

• casio watch
• g shock watch
• luxury watches ladies watches
• subdial watches
• ladies tennis apparel
• uk wrist watch brands
• best brands for watches for men
• best watch brands on a budget
• quartz watches vs automatic watches

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 domains in the UK for watches

We’ve highlighted our top-tier timepiece domains, but it’s important to see the complete list of standouts for our analysis. Here are the top 20 domains for both of our keyword sets, so you can see who is clocking in with the best online presence:

Top 20 domains for shopping (‘Do’ intent) searches for watches: 

Top 20 domains for informational (‘Know’ intent) searches for watches: 

The top URLs for Watches

When you create a keyword list in SISTRIX, as we do for each of our analysis keyword sets, one of the reports available is the list best-performing URLs. We’ve included both of our sets’ ten most successful pages in this table, so you can see some of the best-performing content.

Content examples: What type of content is performing?

A quick look at the winning domains gives us some great takeaways for who is doing well in the watch sector.

• As is often the case with ecommerce sectors, Amazon is at the top for our transactional, ‘do‘ keywords. It ranks on page one for nearly half of our almost 1.9k keywords and ranks generally for an impressive 92.3% of them
  • Amazon also does well for our ‘know‘ keywords, when Google mixes in some ecommerce results for ‘watch brand’ searches or other commercial research queries
  • This is a trend we see throughout our keyword set, with some retailers getting some traction for ‘know‘ keywords when Google wants to show a variety of page types, potentially as the keyword has multiple potential intents
• However, specialist retailers follow next, with eight of the top ten domains for ‘do’ keywords either online watch retailers or established jewellers
  • This includes high street jewellers H Samuel, Goldsmiths, Beaverbrooks and Ernest Jones
  • And online stores House of Watches, Watches of Switzerland and Watch.co.uk
  • The top ten is rounded off by John Lewis, arguably the UK’s most famous department store and a big online retailer in its own right
• Competition for ‘do’ keywords is diverse, with the top ten domains ranking on page one between 48.5% and 17.4% of the time
• What’s interesting is that despite many of our most popular keywords being branded, such as ‘Rolex watches’, ‘casio watches’ or ‘Sieko watch’, manufacturers don’t appear in the top ten, with only Timex, Fossil, Nordgreen and Sieko making the top twenty-five
• Moving our attention to our ‘know’ keywords, we see a much bigger mix of website types and business models
  • The top ten has publications (GQ, Forbes), retail giants (Amazon), specialist retailers (Watches of Switzerland, House of Watches, Goldsmiths, Teddy Baldessarre), brokers, communities (Reddit) and Wikipedia
  • This mixture continues across the top fifty domains, with publications like Esquire mixing it up with manufacturers, jewellers, watch ecommerce stores and advice opportunities such as YouTube and Quora
  • This is partly due to the aforementioned mix of intent for some of our ‘know‘ keywords, where Google shows a mixture of content types to make sure they provide something of use for searches where they are not certain of the searcher’s intent
  • Together, this variety of domains shows there is room for a lot of business types to rank for some aspect of the watch sector, as long as they can show their relevance and provide something helpful

High-performance content examples

Having seen the winning domains and the types of sites Google is rewarding, it’s time to dive deeper into some of the content success stories from them.

We are on the lookout for high-performing content formats – pages, templates or sections which rank on page one for a good percentage of their keywords.

Why? Because these are great examples we can learn from.

If these sites add a new page on a relevant subject using one of these formats, they can expect to rank competitively for many of their target keywords. These are formats working well in this sector, with lessons we can maybe apply to our content doing a similar job.

Our third-placed domain for ‘do’ keywords is House of Watches, a “dedicated online watch retailer with over 130 years of experience in the jewellery and watch industry”.

How does an online brand have over 130 years of experience?

Because House of Watches is an online brand of T H Baker, an established family jeweller with multiple stores – and a website that appears just outside our top-20 list of ‘do’ domains!

Beyond merely giving them a second chance to rank, the House of Watches site is very successful, ranking for 75% of our sample keywords, and on page one for 36.1% of them. The domain overall has seen excellent growth over the past three years.

One of the most successful parts of the site for our keywords is their Men’s Watches page. The site all sits in a shallow structure, with individual pages at the root level for all the different men’s watch sub-topics, such as /casio-mens-watches/ and /mens-automatic-watches/.

There are seventeen different pages from the site in our top-200 most visible URLs, each in a different directory.

The men’s watches page is top of that list, ranking for 115 of our sample keywords and on page one for 52% of them (a high-performance ratio!) Overall, the page ranks for 1,761 keywords in the UK at the time of writing, bringing in an estimated 18,439 organic visits a month on average, worth £18,000. Of those keywords, it ranks on page one for 40.5% of the most important, marking it as a high-performance piece of content.

This includes ranking at two for mens watches (41,400 searches a month on average) and on page one for hundreds of close variants.

A quick look at the page gives us clues as to why Google likes it so much.

As well as being from a well-established brand, the page is well optimised, appearing in the main navigation, with clean on-page elements, intro copy at the foot of the page (so for SEO and not users) is built in Magento, has 20 different filtering options plus offers a massive 2,531 different products to choose from, including from all the big names we’ve seen keyword demand for.

Our second-placed domain is high-street retailer H Samuel.

The most successful section of the site for our keywords is the /watches/ directory. This includes the single-most successful URL, their page on ladies watches, which appears on page one for 121 (6.4%) of our keywords, including top of the rankings for some big ones like ladies watches (13,500 searches a month) and watches for women (7,550). This one page ranks for 4,270 keywords in the UK.

Overall, the watches directory ranks for almost 17k keywords in the UK, and on page one for 37.83% of them. These rankings bring in an estimated 110,892 organic visits a month from Google, worth a huge £69k a month).

Since its launch just over a year ago, it has maintained steady growth, adding more traffic.

As well as pages for women’s and men’s watches, H Samuel has 38 other pages ranking for at least one keyword, with individual pages for major brands, such for Casio, Citizen and Seiko, being the biggest contributors to their organic traffic.

This shows the value of creating dedicated, optimised landing pages within a clear structure for the different ways your audience searches for your products.

High-performance ‘know’ content

Of course, it’s not all about the shopping pages.

We also have a lot of interesting ‘know’ content to learn from. Our most successful page is from GQ magazine. GQ ranks for 57% (252) of our keywords and 28.93% (127) on page one. It does this with only a small spread of URLs – seven of the top one hundred are from gq-magazine.co.uk.

The top page is their article on “The world’s best watch brands, explained”. This one page ranks for 85 of our keywords, with a remarkable 62 of those on page one.

Overall, this page ranks for 1,380 keywords, with 25% of the most important on page one. This includes rankings at number one for keywords like best brands of watches for men (2,850 searches a month).

Together, these rankings bring almost 4k organic visits a month, worth £2,880 despite mostly ranking for informational searches.

Why does this article perform so strongly?

It’s a long-form read from a well-trusted name (GQ) in the fashion space. We have lots of content elements associated with E-E-A-T signals and elements users like, such as author bios (linking to author pages).

There is also a huge amount of information, with sections for different types of watches, such as the best “real watch” brands, the best affordable watches, the best dive watches and a lot more.

Each of these sections boasts 5-9 brands, with a couple of example watches from each. That’s a lot of watch models on one page, boosting chances you’ll find something to your taste making this a very helpful overview.

We’ve seen a lot of concern in SEO over the rise in prominence of Reddit in search results. Reddit appearing here is potentially another sector where Reddit posts are more prevalent than they ever used to be.

Reddit appears for 71% of our ‘know‘ keywords, and on page one for 20.2% of our keyword set. This is likely much higher than a year ago. If we use the historical data for our biggest ‘know’ keywords, we see Reddit ranking now, but not until recently.

YouTube is another monster site in our top domains and another way for businesses to rank for these keywords. YouTube appears for 75% of our keywords, though only on page one for 6.38% of them.

Summary

• As we often see in ecommerce, being a specialist retailer can pay off if you work hard at your brand, your experience and your offering
• Specialist retailers can succeed by focusing on the correct content and an excellent customer experience
• Thinking about how your shoppers define their needs, in this case, shopping for watches by gender, by brand, by type and by material, helps you strategically plan how to expand your store by creating landing pages that display your products exactly how your customers want to segment them
• In other words, smart product listing pages (category pages) and guides make a lot of difference – effective SEO strategies are still a route to growth in these cases. House of Watches and H Samuel exemplify how dedicated, optimised pages for specific product categories can drive significant organic traffic
• Having said this, big players in the ecommerce space (Amazon) and publishing industry (GQ) lead the way, meaning specialists have to work hard to keep up
• Long-standing experience and brand reputation could well play a part in this sector, as we now think it does in many. Many of our top-performing sites are from jewellers who have existed for many years, often long pre-dating the internet. The brand ‘equity’ or reputation these sites have for this topic must be strong
• Some subjects, such as our ‘know‘ keywords for watches have a lot of diversity in the business types ranking, indicating that Google sometimes needs to show a spread of content types and that sometimes there are multiple ways to get in front of searchers via content. Whether you’re a retailer, content creator, or marketer, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the top-performing domains and content in this sector
• The competitive yet varied landscape of the watch market presents numerous opportunities for growth. By leveraging high-quality content, effective SEO practices, and a keen understanding of market trends, businesses can improve their online presence and capture a larger share of the market. Businesses that are agile and adapt to the changing market and fresh insights, such as trending ways customers search, are in the best position to succeed

Keyword research in the Watch sector

To research this article, we curated two sets of keywords that are a representative sample of the search market for watches. Our sample includes many popular searches made in the UK by those looking to buy a watch, researching the best options or asking common questions about the different types or watch maintenance..

In our research, we always categorise our keywords by their search intent. We do this so we fairly compare sites competing for the same types of searches, those going for the same audience. By comparing like-for-like content, we build a list of the best-performing domains and content in this sector.

Our two lists consist of what are known as ‘do’ keywords and ‘know’ keywords.

‘Do’ searches are those where someone is looking to buy, hire, download or convert in some way. In this case, the ‘do’ is buying a watch, so these are shopping searches or sometimes those making commercial research queries. In search, we often consider these keywords to represent a conversion intent and therefore regard them as valuable targets.

In our keyword set, we have over 1,800 ‘do’ keywords, representing over 1.6m searches a month on average, with peaks each November and December.

We’ve included keywords like mens watches (41,400 searches a month on average in the UK, with a high of over 74k in December), casio watch (35,700 searches a month), ladies watches (13,500), rolex watch (32,600) and seiko watches (5,050).

Our second set is ‘know’ keywords, where the searcher wants to learn some information or find something out. We have 438 keywords in this set, representing an average of over 186k searches a month.

In this set, we also included popular shopping research searches like best watch makes for men (2,850 searches a month in the UK on average) and best bargain watches (1,800). We’ve also included common questions when researching watches such as best watch brands under 200 (200 searches a month), how to adjust bracelet watch (650) and chronograph meaning in watch (550).

Our research discounted searches with a retailer’s name and searches for the second-hand market, which is huge for luxury watches. We also didn’t include searches for ‘vintage watches’ as many of these have a potential second-hand intent, even though there is a well-established trend for retro-styled watches that also appear for ‘vintage’ keywords.

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 watches keyword discovery tables.

We chose selections of highly targeted keywords with a ‘do‘ intent and a ‘know’ 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: mens watches, womens watches, designer watches, luxury watches, automatic watches, diver watches, pilot watches, chronograph watches, mechanical watches.

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, keyword clusters and the traffic forecast you can see below.

SectorWatch 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.