The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for English football clubs (group2) has just been published. Learn how 10 of England's top teams perform on the digital pitch.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for English football clubs has just been published. It covers 10 English football teams including Nottingham Forest, Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, Fulham Football Club, AFC Bournemouth, Brentford Football Club, Leicester City Football Club, Crystal Palace Football Club, Ipswich Town FC, Wolves, and Southampton Football Club.

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for each team to drive traffic to their site. Though, with built-in brand loyalty, these teams aren't strictly competing with one another on a digital level, the report highlights quick wins that will improve enquiries from their online strategies and identifies the barriers that may be reducing a site’s ability to optimise digital performance and drive sales to tickets and merchandise.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q1 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q1 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just six of the metrics we evaluated these 10 English football teams on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing English football clubs or request a copy of the report for the full review.

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What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site based on 50+ metrics and indicators of a successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.  

Driving Optimal ROAS from Paid Media Channels

Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing and Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from £30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing.  Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long-term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.

Technical Website Compliance

Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance.  For the football teams in our report, they'll want to ensure key, profit-driving pages such as ticket sales and merchandise stores are easily accessible, and that fans aren't struggling to find what they need by being directed through old or broken links.

Southampton Football Club reported the highest 4xx errors (92) and 566 3xx errors. 404 errors can make it more likely that visitors will leave a website, resulting in increased bounce rates. These errors can also damage a website’s reputation, reducing the occurrence of visitors returning. Internal links to 404 pages can also dilute link authority, and brands should adopt a linking structure to monitor broken links and update them accordingly.

Site Speed & Conversion Rate Performance

When 62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load will see a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. English football clubs will want to ensure every touchpoint for their fans is high-performing and provides an excellent user experience - especially if there is frustration elsewhere!

The overall mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 51 and 22, with Nottingham Forest flagging the lowest site speed. Only Crystal Palace Football Club scored above the recommended 50% for mobile site speed — a result that all football clubs should aim for. Reducing page weight is one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase mobile site speed, as a lighter page will be quicker to load on mobile. A heavy page usually consists of videos, images, scripts, fonts, making it slower to load. Resizing and compressing images is one way to reduce page weight.

Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority

Domain authority (DA) is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Football clubs are likely to have high DAs, due to them being long-standing institutions which will naturally gain significant press coverage from highly-reputable sites.

A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it is generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA score for this quarter ranged between 74 and 68, with Ipswich Town FC reporting the lowest DA. Backlinks can have a positive impact on a brand’s DA score, but more doesn’t automatically equate to better. Brands should focus on quality backlinks, rather than quantity, by securing them from relevant, trustworthy websites. Low-quality backlinks can harm a website’s reputation, and so it’s important to build connections with high-authority websites by linking to them, too.

Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop

A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for core, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. For English football teams, they'll need to ensure their targeted keywords meet their business goals for their site and are optimised in line with any commercial targets that are in place.

Only AFC Bournemouth reported a decline in organic traffic on desktop (-3%), while 9 football clubs saw a decline on mobile. With this in mind, all football clubs should ensure their website is mobile-friendly with a responsive theme. Mobile users are more likely to make purchases or take actions based on local searches, immediate needs, and convenience. On the other hand, desktop users are typically looking for longer-form content, so brands should take into consideration the popularity of devices for their target audience.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results are an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Football teams can use the 'image pack' search result to highlight their merchandise to fans looking for their store, or 'people also ask' results to quickly answer questions about their stadium or facilities.

Wolves secured the most overall Universal Search appearances (4,477), with the majority of these coming from ‘images. Securing Universal Search results is important for brands, as they can help user engagement by providing direct answers to their queries. Universal Search results also reinforce brand trust and visibility, helping to have a positive impact on rankings in search engines.

The Longtail Keyword Opportunity

Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Longtail keyword opportunities for English football teams can tie nicely into merchandise and ticket sales, including terms such as "Southampton FC season ticket price" or "new Bournemouth kit full range".

Southampton Football Club secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (2,221), while Crystal Palace Football Club secured the most for positions 4–10 (2,630). To follow a successful longtail keyword strategy, all brands should identify longtail opportunities, taking into account search volume and competition. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner are great resources for websites to navigate keywords. Most importantly, keywords should be incorporated into text naturally into titles, URLS, subheadings, alt information and content body. Keyword stuffing can have a negative impact on websites.

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) hitting over 44 million users in 2023, it is not surprising that companies have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached 2.6b GB pounds in 2019. Football teams can use paid social advertising to drive awareness of new kits, special fixtures, or featured deals on either merchandise or tickets.

We’ve included examples of Fulham Football Club’s sponsored posts. This UK football club used carousels, which is a great way to add multiple imagery to a single post.

Top Social Shares & Content

When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for a long period of time. It's great for your engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Social media could be especially useful for sharing information about team news, post-match analysis, new kits, and upcoming fixtures.

Leicester City Football Club has the most Facebook Likes (9.5 million) and the most Instagram followers (8 million). However, Southampton Football Club secured the highest total engagement rate (431,403). Brands should use social media as an opportunity to engage with their audience, rather than just to sell their services. They should focus on uploading educational, entertaining, or inspiring posts, videos, and infographics that resonate with their audience and continually monitor their social media metrics to identify areas to improve.

Website Readability & Accessibility

Around 20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. Football teams will want to ensure they are welcoming to all fans at any point in their customer journey, so should take care to consider accessibility when planning their digital strategy and image.

Wolves flagged the most accessibility alerts (185), while Brentford Football Club received the most contrast errors (64). All football clubs should look for ways to reduce their accessibility alerts, contrast errors, and readability issues. To make a website more accessible, brands should use descriptive headings, incorporate relevant links and anchor text, use keyboard and mouse navigation, incorporate adequate colour contrast, and more.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 2025 REPORT

To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Mike Movassaghi.

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