The Q3 2024 benchmarking report for UK bike brands has just been published. Learn how the top 7 UK bike brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q3 2024 benchmarking report for UK bike brands has just been published. It covers the largest 7 UK bike brands, including Planet X Bikes, Ribble Cycles, Raleigh UK, Brompton Bicycle, ORANGE BIKES, Boardman Bikes, and Pashley Cycles.
The research gives bike brands an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online and quantifies the gaps, risks, and missed opportunities for other bike brands to win brand exposure, drive online views, and increase recognition and purchases. 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 Q3 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 7 bike brands on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK bike brands or request a copy of the report for the full review.
The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site 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.
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 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.
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. UK bike brands should aim to limit the number of errors on their website, such as 4xx errors. One way they can do this is by regularly assessing their linking structure and ensuring that they’re not sending consumers to broken links that will lead them to a dead end.
Raleigh UK flagged 112 4xx errors. This UK bike brand should fix any broken links, as links that are no longer working on a website tell search engines that the website isn’t trustworthy, which can affect its SEO.
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. All websites should take steps to limit their download speeds — aiming for no longer than 3 seconds. Thankfully, brands can make improvements to site speed quickly, so we can expect to see a lot of movement for this category.
The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 44 and 8, with no suppliers scoring above the recommend 50% for this category. However, ORANGE BIKES reported the lowest site speed, and it should ensure that all images are compressed and using the most suitable format for its website theme.
Domain authority 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 is not gained through sponsored ads. UK bike brands should focus on creating content that other websites will want to direct their audience to, which means ensuring that the topics are relevant, accurate, and unique.
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 for this quarter ranged between 74 and 40, with Boardman Bikes flagging the lowest score. Upon closer inspection, this UK bike brand also reported the fewest backlinks, which it can increase by guest blogging on websites with a similar target audience.
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. UK bike brands have an opportunity to gain organic traffic by using an effective keyword strategy — particularly incorporating longtail keywords. They can also follow other methods, such as including links to their website in email newsletters on directing social media followers to visit their website.
Five of the 7 brands reported a decrease in organic mobile traffic, while just 2 saw a decline in organic desktop traffic. With this data in mind, all brands should take steps to make their website more mobile-friendly, such as choosing a responsive theme and sticking to a minimalist design to help with site speed.
Google Universal Search Results is 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, and a site can appear for Universal Search results without being strong in standard rankings. UK bike brands will want to ensure they have a strong performance for 'reviews' and ‘images’ to help increase their online rankings.
Planet X Bikes secured the most Universal Search appearances (7,171), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ (4,000). Other websites can increase their results for ‘reviews’ by asking past customers to leave an online review.
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. UK bike brands can optimise towards high purchase-intent phrases, such as ‘commuter eBike' or ‘carbon road bike.’
Planet X Bikes saw the most longtail keyword appearances (513 for position 3, and 1,328 for position 4–10). Brands should regularly conduct keyword analysis to ensure they’re using longtail keywords their target audience types into search engines.
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.
We’ve included examples of Planet X Bike’s sponsored Facebook posts. This bike brand included branded media, which is an effective way to spread awareness of their brand online. However, they should focus on making their written content more personable to resonate with their online followers.
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. UK bike brands can create shareable social content that isn’t just focused on the brand to build a relationship with its online community.
Ribble Cycles has the largest Facebook page (137,400 Likes), while Brompton Bicycle has the largest Instagram account (171,800 followers). It’s important that brands post content regularly to keep their followers update with their brand.
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. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. Brands should focus on reducing accessibility alerts, errors, and contrast errors to improve readability for those using a screen reader.
Planet X Bikes reported 86 accessibility alerts, with Pashley Cycles at a close second with 84 alerts. Planet X Bikes also flagged 30 contrast errors. Thankfully, reducing alerts and contrast errors are quick fixes, and brands should aim to reduce them to improve readability for all consumers across all devices.
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 Alessandra Caretto on Unsplash