The Q4 2022 benchmarking report for UK flooring suppliers has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK flooring supplier perform across the digital space.

 The latest Q4 2022 benchmarking report for UK flooring suppliers has just been published.  It covers the largest 12 national flooring suppliers, including Tile Giant, Total Tiles, Carpet Right, Flooring Superstore, Tapi Carpets, Carpet & Flooring, United Carpets, Walls and Floors, Tile Choice, UK Flooring Direct, Topps Tiles and Tile Mountain.

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest marketing share online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for flooring suppliers to win brand exposure, drive online orders, and even secure in-store footfall. The report highlights quick wins that will improve the performance of 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 takeaways, 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

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.

Whilst most of the flooring supplier suppliers had fairly low levels of website errors, almost all the brands had some 4xx error codes showing in their site crawls. Tile Choice saw the most error codes on their sites, hitting an abnormally high 1,901 5xx error codes. Though eCommerce sites are where we do see higher levels of these errors, Tile Choice must still ensure their site doesn't lead their users to dead ends, as this could lead potential customers to use other sites out of frustration.

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.

We would expect most to achieve at least an ‘okay’ score of 50-89, whereas only one of the twelve flooring suppliers did. The mobile page speed scores are currently between 10 and 54, with Tapi Carpets leading the way. All twelve flooring suppliers have some serious work to do on improving their mobile page speed.

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.

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. Only three of the twelve flooring suppliers achieved a score of average or above, with Tile Choice being the lowest scoring brand, hitting only 25. Those at the lower end of the scale need to be focusing on building a stronger backlink profile to compete with the higher scoring brands.

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.

We looked at how all twelve flooring suppliers have performed compared to last year. Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. We found that none of the twelve flooring suppliers have achieved year-on-year growth in mobile traffic. Carpet & Flooring have suffered the worst YOY loss with a 100% decrease.

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.

We could see that image pack was the highest used universal search feature, with Topps Tiles reaching 4,100 results. Most of the companies are achieving great results with all the universal search feature options, however some companies are underusing them, and only seeing a handful of results. Those getting a small amount of results need to work towards the numbers their competitors are achieving.

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.

Although some of the brands are using a high number of longtail keywords, most of these aren’t within the top 20 ranking longtail keywords. Some brands, such as Tile Choice aren’t using anywhere near as many longtail keywords as their competitors. To compete with those top companies, most of the flooring brands need to expand their strategy to include new specific search terms along with improving their existing longtail keywords.

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.

Below, we can see examples of Total Tiles’ Facebook ads. The use of images of a range of different homes and products is a great way to capture a diverse range of customers' attention, along with having the deals visible and eye-catching on the images themselves.

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.

With flooring suppliers offering a range of different style options, there should be a wide variety of content opportunities for these brands to jump on. However, while some of these brands are showing a consistent content output, Tapi are lagging behind when it comes to content production when compared to their competitors. This is a missed opportunity for these brands, who could be sharing content, getting involved in the social media crazes, and sharing information about special offers. 

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.

Most of the flooring supplier suppliers appear to be struggling with accessibility within their sites, with higher errors across the board than we typically see. Total Tiles are seeing a huge 1,008 contrast errors on their websites. All twelve flooring supplier suppliers should always be reviewing and optimising their accessibility, however those seeing high numbers of errors and alerts need to investigate what the issues within their websites are.    

Q4 2022 winners leaderboard

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

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q4 2022 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 Javier Miranda on Unsplash