'Wallpaper' and 'DIY' were the most popular keywords used for online searches on Google UK in August, within the furniture, garden products, decorating products and homewares categories.
According to a new report from digital marketing agency Greenlight, 15.8m online searches were made within those market sectors during the month, with queries pertaining to furniture and garden combined accounting for 67%. Décor accounted for 19% and homewares 14%.

'Wallpaper' and 'DIY' topped the list of the 10 most popular keywords, with each searched 246,000 times and each accounting for 2% of all home and garden searches online.

'Garden furniture', 'beds', 'sofas', 'curtains', 'oak furniture', 'gazebo', 'garden shed' and 'sheds' followed.

Greenlight also ranked the websites most visible to consumer searches for the 11,659 keywords analysed in the report, and found ebay.co.uk to be the most prominent. It attained a 17% share of visibility, meaning that it was visible to 2.7m searches for home and garden goods.

Greenlight says that between May and August, a monthly average of 17m searches were made on Google UK for homeware, décor, furniture and garden products.

Commenting on the report's findings, Neil Saunders, managing director of research agency and consulting firm Conlumino said: "The housing market is key for all these home retail sectors and the outlook for the next five years, whilst not as rosy as pre-recession, is certainly much better than it has been since 2008 and the onset of the downturn.

"As the housing market improves and strengthens, all of these sectors will grow more strongly and they will pick up in terms of the number of consumers looking to make purchases."

He added that sales of furniture and floorcoverings, sales of which have really suffered over the downturn, should see 1% growth next year.