The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK building societies has just been published. Learn how the top 10 UK building societies perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK building societies has just been published. It covers the largest 10 national Building societies, including Nationwide, Yorkshire Building Society, Leeds Building Society, The Nottingham, Coventry Building Society, Principality Building Society, The Cumberland, Skipton Building Society, The West Brom, and Newcastle Building Society.

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 building societies to win brand exposure, drive online enquiries, and even increase in-branch visits. 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 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 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 10 building societies on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing building societies, 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 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 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.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-Per-Click marketing is constantly evolving, with more and more advertisers being forced to hand over a lot of control to Google's algorithms as the push for automation grows ever stronger. There are still key elements of control that we have though, the main one of these being budget which is ultimately something the algorithms can't take from you. That's why being smart with your budget and ad coverage is essential to achieving strong results and bettering what your competitors have to offer.

For Q1 2025, the average budget wastage across these UK building societies was £5,101, with some of the top players in the market spending a considerable amount on areas and audiences unlikely to deliver a return. We can see this in more detail when looking at the average monthly cost per cost-per-click (CPC) amongst advertisers, with the average of this metric being £4.7 . This highlights how competitive the market is and how important it is to control your budgets effectively.

There are varying monthly ad budgets across the competitors in the report. While this gap highlights the competitive advantage that larger budgets can provide, it's not just about spending more; it’s about spending smarter. By focusing on driving efficiency in campaign management, targeting, and budget allocation, businesses with smaller budgets can still effectively compete with larger players. Investing in data-driven strategies and refining ad performance can help close the gap and maximise the return on every pound spent, enabling growth even in a competitive landscape. Relative to their spend, Yorkshire Building Society has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £3, and Nationwide Building Society has the highest at £23.

The report highlights the importance of budget efficiency by comparing monthly ad spend with estimated CPC in relation to your competitors, see who has the highest and lowest CPC. To maximise the effectiveness of your budget, it’s essential to focus on driving CPC down while maintaining or improving campaign performance. In this report, Nationwide Building Society has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £140,000, and Cumberland has the lowest at £2,660.

By optimising targeting, refining ad copy, and leveraging data to identify high-converting opportunities, you can ensure every click delivers maximum value. This approach not only stretches your budget further but also boosts your return on ad spend (ROAS), enabling you to achieve stronger results without simply increasing expenditure.

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 any brand operating in the financial sector, building absolute trust is essential for winning new customers. Building societies will need to ensure that their websites are easy to navigate, and that key pages such as local branch information and comparison tools are clear and not blocked off by broken links.

Principality Building Society reported the highest 4xx errors (239). This building society can reduce these errors by regularly auditing internal links to see which links are broken, use link-checking tools to recognise broken outbound links, and implement 303 redirects for moved or deleted pages.

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. As with ensuring their sites are technically compliant, building societies must be delivering a quick user experience that improves faith in the brand and encourages conversions.

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 gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Building societies can look to creating PR content on any subject in the financial space, whether that's saving for a new home, putting money aside for children, or identifying the best building society product for your situation. Topics like these are likely to be picked up by national and local press, generating both referral traffic and new, high-quality backlinks.

A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it’s generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA score for this quarter ranged between 77 and 47, with The Nottingham flagging the lowest DA. This building society wasn’t in the bottom two for the fewest backlinks or backlinks from the fewest domains, though they can still focus on increasing the backlink strategy as this will only benefit their DA score. They should also keep their website fresh with updated content, as this will encourage backlinks and show search engines that they’re reputable and active.

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. Though many sectors are seeing a reduction in traffic sector-wide, with building societies remaining a cost-free product that will be ever-needed, we wouldn't expect to see any negative impact directly stemming from the cost of living crisis.

Two of the building societies reporting a decline in organic traffic on desktop, while 4 reported a decline on mobile. With this data in mind, all building societies should check they’re using a mobile-friendly theme, which is simple for users to navigate to encourage them to access the website from mobile.

Universal Search Opportunity

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 that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. 'Reviews' will be a key way for building societies to gain trust from users directly from the SERP, while 'local pack' results will help increase in-branch footfall.

Nationwide remains the brand to beat, with 14,568 overall Universal Search appearances — the majority of these coming from ‘people also ask’. On the other hand, The West Brom reported the fewest overall appearances (302) and should ensure that they’re following best practices to increase these rankings.

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 building societies, they'll want to look at high-conversion potential keywords, such as phrases from users looking to book in-branch meetings, 'sign up' for new accounts, or using heavily detailed key terms (or even specific products).

Nationwide continues to secure the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (12,971) and positions 4–10 (24,913). All building societies should ensure they’re monitoring their longtail keyword strategy so that they’re using keywords that are relevant to their target audience, and it’s possible that these terms could change regularly.

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. Facebook ads are a great way for blinds and shutters brands to reach people who are specifically looking to make improvements to their homes.

We’ve included examples of Nationwide’s sponsored posts. This UK building society included vertical videos, which tailors to mobile users and can help to increase engagement rates.

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. Building societies can look to their digital PR content used to boost DA to help increase social shares too, creating engaging, widely appealing content that is both educational and informative.

Nationwide has the most Facebook Likes (106,100) and the most Instagram followers (15,900). However, Leeds Building Society reported the highest total engagement rate (5,713) – which is a metric that all brands should monitor regularly.

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. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, brands lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. Building societies must ensure their content is accessible by all, as users with visual impairments will be less trusting of a site they're not fully able to navigate. 

Last quarter, The Nottingham was the one to watch for accessibility alerts. This quarter, The Nottingham is still the brand to watch, with 127 accessibility alerts — an increase from 119 previously.

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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