The Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK flooring brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK flooring brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK Flooring brands has just been published. It covers the largest 10 national flooring brands, including Tile Choice, Tapi Carpets, Carpetright, Flooring Superstore, United Carpets, UK Flooring Direct, Topps Tiles, Tile Giant, Carpet & Flooring, Walls and Floors, Total Tiles, and Tile Mountain - it highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons in 20+ online performance metrics.
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 flooring brands to win digital brand exposure, and secure online orders. 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 Q2 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.
What The Industry Research Report Covers
The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each brand 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
Many 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.
Many of the UK flooring brands have varying degrees of technical errors that will be hindering organic traffic and conversion performance. An example here is Just Flooring’s 116 4XX errors. These will be making their site difficult to navigate and frustrating to use. This is likely to also give a negative impression of Just Flooring to the user, who need to trust them to provide an excellent level of service.
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.
In our research, we discovered that the only flooring brand achieving an ‘OK’ mobile page speed score of 50 was Walls and Floors. The biggest cause for concern is United Carpets, who have a page speed score of just 5 – including a huge Speed Index of 8 seconds. United Carpets must ensure they are improving their site experience in order to avoid losing conversions to competitors.
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, ie. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads.
Domain authority is generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. However, a ‘Good’ DA score really depends on the competition level of your industry. In our research, UK flooring domain authorities range from just 23 to 66. Tile Choice sit at the bottom of this scale. Tile Choice must seriously consider building their backlink profile up, with strong links, in order to improve visibility (and authority).
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.
Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. Many of the sectors we have been researching, particularly in the home improvement sector, have seen industry-wide falls in organic traffic, with flooring being no exception. Despite this, Carpet and Flooring have seen an impressive 189% increase in mobile traffic YoY. Though Carpet and Flooring aren’t achieving the highest levels of organic traffic in our report, they’re clearly well-tuned in to how they can grow this audience.
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 brand can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings.
Image packs appear to be the most frequently used universal search opportunity when looking at flooring brands. In total, across all our top 12 flooring brands, we saw 22,193 image pack results, with Tile Mountain leading the way with 5,600. Images are particularly important for marketing anything visual, as brands must make sure their products are catching home owners eyes.
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.
Topps Tiles are doing exceptionally well, ranking in the top 3 for 8,324 longtail keywords. With these queries having strong conversion-potential, other flooring brands must pay attention and include them in their SEO strategy. By beginning with any keywords they are already ranking for, they can focus on improving existing content for quicker wins.
Facebook Adverts
With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) forecast to hit over 42 million users by 2022, 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 thought that Flooring Superstore’s Facebook ads below were bold and eyecatching. Flooring Superstore have maximized their messaging by using their copy, captions, and images to highlight offers, and have included clear shots of their products. Rather than being heavily branded with Flooring Superstore’s own colours, they have used complementary shades for the products included – a bold choice but one that makes the ads seem more organic.
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.
Carpet & Flooring, Tile Choice, Topps Tiles, and Total Tiles recorded no social web shares (Buzzsumo, June 2022). To improve brand visibility and win points in domain rating and organic sessions, these brands should consider looking at their content production strategy more closely to win organic visitors in an increasingly challenging sector.
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.
Carpetright have a significant 397 errors on their website, posing potential problems for anyone with additional accessibility needs. These errors are also likely to be making their website generally difficult to navigate, for any of their visitors. Carpetright, along with any brand facing similar challenges, must ensure that their website is accessible for everyone.
User Journeys & Conversion Rate Performance
3.42 seconds are all it takes for a user to judge a site solely on its appearance. For sites with a low clarity score, this means users are getting a poor impression of your brand and aren’t seeing your vital cues to convert.
Carpetright achieved the lowest clarity score of 66%, while Topps Tiles scored the highest with 77%. You can see that this range is pretty narrow, with none of our flooring brands achieving exceptional clarity scores on their sites.
Additionally, we use attention maps to judge user behaviour and assess how customers are interacting with a site. You can see from these examples just how wildly different site designs can impact user attention.
Q2 2022 Winners Summary
You can see all these brands performance at a glance in our quick-look table below;
If you want to explore how you can improve your performance relative to your competitors, reduce media spend wastage and drive more performance from less, read the 10 Week Performance Accelerator Programme for CMO’s & Marketing Leaders.
Get the full 70-page 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 Rob Allen.
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