The Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK animal attractions has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK animal attractions perform across the digital space.

The brand new Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK animal attractions has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK animal attractions, including Chester Zoo, London Zoo, The Aspinall Foundation, Edinburgh Zoo, Whipsnade Zoo, West Midland Safari Park, Longleat, Colchester Zoo, Yorkshire Wildlife Park, Dudley Zoo, Birdworld, and Paignton Zoo Environmental Park.

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 other animal attractions to win brand exposure, sell online tickets, and even improve digital footfall. The report highlights quick wins that will improve enquiries from your online strategy and identifies the barriers that may be reducing your site’s ability to optimise digital performance.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q4 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key take-aways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q4 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 animal attractions on, check out our quick-look table below;

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

Request the report

What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer based on 50+ metrics and indicators of 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 & 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 under-perform. 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 animal attractions, they’ll want to ensure their checkout process is simple and that they regularly assess their internal linking structure to ensure they’re directing consumers to links that are working.

Dudley Zoo reported 258 4xx errors — the highest of all UK animal attractions. It’s important that brands regularly check for broken links to maintain the website’s health and enhance its SEO health.

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 makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. When you're competing to sell tickets to events, such as an animal attraction park, an unappealing site (or one that doesn't signpost well to tickets) can mean users turn to your competitors instead. Animal attractions should ensure that their websites load quickly — ideally, no longer than 3 seconds. Otherwise, there’s a risk that consumers should grow impatient and leave the website.

The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 72 and 1, and all brands should aim for at least 50. However, the animal attraction to watch is Longleat. After examining its website from a mobile, Longleat should reduce image size and ensure that all images are compressed and optimised.

Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority

Domain authority is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gage of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Animal attractions can look to collaborate with high-authoritative websites, along with any publications within their niche, to gain high-authority backlinks that will improve their DA. Animal attractions should focus on increase backlinks, and uploading content that’s unique, informative, and selfless will encourage other websites with a similar target audience to link back to. 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 rating for this quarter ranged between 73 and 45, with Colchester Zoo reporting the lowest DA. This animal attraction should consider adopting a PR strategy to develop a relationship with websites with a similar target audience to increase its backlinks.

Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop

A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, 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. Due to the cost-of-living crisis, we're seeing that many potential customers across a number of sectors are either cutting back on expendable items, or opting for cheaper alternatives. Animal attractions may feel the impact of this, though they can continue to follow a keyword strategy to improve the results for this category.

Three of the animal attractions reported a decline in organic traffic on desktop, while 11 out of 12 saw a decline in organic traffic on mobile. With this in mind, all animal attractions should ensure that their website is simple to follow and easy to navigate, which will help to increase traffic for users on their mobile.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results  is an evolving opportunity to make your pages more visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, 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 brand can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. For animal attractions, they'll want to ensure they're appearing for 'Local Pack' results, ensuring they are prominent when potential customers are looking for a nearby visit.

London Zoo secured the most Universal Search appearances (7,329), and Chester Zoo was a close second with 7,133 appearances. All animal attractions can make improvements to their total results by encouraging past customers to leave an online review.

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 brand-new search terms as they enter Google’s index. For animal attractions, long-tail keywords could be focused on specific offerings that potential customers are looking for, such as ‘London conservation zoo’.

London Zoo received the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (1,173) and positions 4–10 (1,607). On the other hand, Birdworld reported the fewest keyword appearances (42 for position 3 and 51 for positions 4–10). All brands should regularly assess that their keywords are receiving impressions.

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. Animal attractions can adopt a social media strategy to expand reach to help increase ticket sales.

We’ve included examples of Edinburgh Zoo’s sponsored posts. This animal attraction included a maximum of 2 lines of text, which is great to help with social media users retrieving information quickly as they scroll.

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 longer. It's great for your brand engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Content creation also helps with DA, appearances for longtail keywords and 'people also ask' results, so animal attractions look to creating shareable pieces that can support performance in all of these areas. 

Chester Zoo has the largest Facebook page (1.2 million Likes) and the largest Instagram account (355,100 followers). All brands should adopt a social media strategy to promote their services but also to provide their followers with useful content to give them a reason to follow them.

Website Readability & Accessibility

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. Sites such as animal attractions often focus on their need to appear visually appealing and can therefore fall short of the accessibility requirements their users with visual challenges will need. For consumers using a screen reader, all brands should look to eradicate any accessibility alerts and contrast errors.

West Midlands Safari Park reported 193 accessibility alerts, with the majority of these alerts due to redundant title text. When brands have accessibility alerts on their website, they risk impacting the readability for users, and this can also have negative impacts on SEO.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q4 2024 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.

Photo by Bradley Ziffer on Unsplash