Tile.co.uk

Tile.co.uk

How a lean SEO budget made Tile.co.uk the fastest growing tiles brand in organic search

  • +160% YoY organic revenue
  • +43% Growth in organic visibility
  • +20% Tile samples increase

Strategy overview

Tile.co.uk are a challenger brand in a mature, competitive tiles market led by businesses that invest heavily in above the line, paid media and discounting. That makes them sensitive to shifts in competitor paid search spend and promotions, and their organic revenue had been falling, down well over half year on year.

Herd were brought in to stabilise organic search and return the channel to year on year growth on a modest budget. The total addressable market is very broad, so we narrowed the focus to in-market customers at the inspiration stage, before samples are requested and options narrow, and deliberately avoided impulse and discount shoppers to protect margin and limit what competitors could poach on price.

To win against far larger budgets, we needed opportunities those competitors could not easily capitalise on. Our team analysed search results pages, AI platform outputs and social rankings, and combined content scraping, ranking data and content sentiment to find three areas of advantage for Tile to pursue.

Visit website

The brief

The channel had to move from decline to growth. Organic revenue had dropped sharply, so the plan was to reach break-even first, then grow, and to lift sample orders as a leading indicator of revenue to come. The programme ran for six months on a deliberately lean budget, split roughly 10% on data and dashboarding, 20% on strategy and consulting for Tile’s internal developers and social teams, and 70% on content production and optimisation.

Key objectives

  • Return organic search to growth (revenue had fallen well over half YoY)
  • Increase sample orders as a leading indicator of future revenue
  • Compete against brands with much larger paid and discounting budgets

“Tile.co.uk could never outspend the big tile brands, so we had to outpace them. Trends start in social and UGC spaces and only how up in search data weeks later, and the big brands were slow to react, publishing a month or more after a trend peaked. We built a way to spot those trends as they emerged and get Tile’s content and products in front of demand first. That turned a small budget into an advantage rather than a
limit.”

Michael Bates Head of Organic Media, Herd

Project highlights

Consistent demand exists for interior trends and designs, but search data is slow to show it. Trends grow in UGC and social spaces first, then cascade to Google, and tile trends drive an early surge in designer and premium sales before discount brands follow. We built the strategy around
getting ahead of that cascade.

The on-site expression was Tile.co.uk’s Tile Trends hub, an evolving, reactive content and product hub that anchored editorial content around tile styles. Content was warehoused in the blog, and as demand grew for a specific theme the relevant content was foregrounded on the hub, so the page always mirrored the products customers were about to research.

Site search and navigation data was cross-referenced with search and social post volumes across products held in stock. Weekly alerts told the team which trends and styles needed support in a given period, driving adaptive content production that stayed on the frontier of user demand.

Internal links and product showcases drove authority and traffic to specific products and ranges in line with search and social demand as it evolved. Tile Trends products consistently reflected the trends search engines expected to see as demand grew across UGC platforms, while supporting customers through to conversion.

The work only paid off if Tile’s own teams moved with it. We built a repeatable way to share trend data with their social, influencer and email teams, and set up automations and workflows with their web team for fast editorial checks, approval, go-live and promotion, so the latest content reached the audience quickly.

The results in detail

The channel moved from steep decline to consistent growth inside the six months, and Tile became the fastest growing brand in the market for generic search. All figures are from Tile.co.uk and Advanced Web Ranking.

  • Within three months, organic revenue swung from a 60% YoY decline to positive growth, setting up a strong peak in January and February
  • By the end of a six month period, March revenue was up 160% YoY, and reached it's highest level on record, beating the previous 2024 high
  • New user acquisition through organic search rose 22% YoY, driven by Tile Trends content and coverage in AIO Overviews and search features
  • Tile samples ordered rose by 20% YoY, confirming the campaign reached inspiration and decision-stage customers
  • Organic keyword visibility grew 43%, the fastest in the market, and Tile now ranks above Topps Tiles and inside LLMs for 'tile trends'



Why this worked

An organic media team that specialises in delivering commercial value, rather than improving vanity metrics.

We combined data from across search and non-search platforms to forecast demand, and grew organic revenue in a market that was receding. A modest budget achieved more than brands spending many times as much with large internal teams, because being first to respond to demand mattered more than the size of the budget. It usually takes expensive proprietary tooling to work this way, and we did it on a fraction of the spend. The result is a proven framework for helping clients outperform much larger brands in search.

Next case study

PDHSports

Discover more
PDHSports