
Sep 15 2023
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Why Are The Range Buying Wilko.com
The Range has paid £5m to buy the Wilko brand. It appears that this move will see the retailer take on the wilko.com domain as part of the deal. So why is The Range Buying Wilko?
In my opinion, the deal to secure the wilko.com domain is a shrewd move if my suspicions are correct and The Range opt to close the Wilko site.
Why Is This A Good Move For The Range?
According to Semrush, Wilko.com has a domain authority of 65, with 4.1 million in monthly organic worldwide traffic. They have a strong social following on both Facebook and Instagram and therange.co.uk is classed as their top organic competitor according to Semrush.

By purchasing the domain and presumably having a plan to put relevant redirects in place, The Range will not only be taking a big competitor out of the SEO landscape, they will also be making their site stronger. By purchasing an in-segment domain, it will help strengthen their offering.
The Range have stolen a march on their competitors like B&M, B&Q and Homebase by securing the domain. If the SEO migration is done correctly, this could be a very smart move. It is a similar tactic deployed by the JD Group and Frasers Group when they have bought out numerous fashion labels and used it to their SEO advantage.
Comparing the two businesses, The Range are currently sitting on a healthy authority score of 75 with 6.5m in organic search traffic worldwide which is already larger than that of wilko.com. Trying to secure high quality backlinks in 2024 is no mean feat so this could be a shrewd move.

A Quick Wilko Backlink Inspection
When glancing at Wilko’s backlinks, you can see they have a 98% Follow to 2% Nofollow rate which is very high with 3.2m of those Follow and only 70.2K Nofollow. 2K are sponsored and 4.2K is UGC. They have a good mix of high page authority backlinks which will help if redirected correctly.

To discuss how you can use SEO to your advantage with your online store, check out my SEO services page.