The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK flooring suppliers has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK flooring suppliers perform across the digital space.

 The latest Q1 2023 benchmarking report for UK flooring suppliers has just been published. It covers the largest 11 national flooring suppliers, including Tile Giant, Total Tiles, Flooring Superstore, Tapi Carpets, United Carpets, Walls and Floors, Tile Choice, UK Flooring Direct, Topps Tiles, TradeChoice Carpet & Flooring, 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 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 11 flooring suppliers on, check out our quick-look table below;  

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing flooring suppliers, 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 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 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 flooring suppliers was £6,944, 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 £6.6 . 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, Flooring Superstore has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £2, and UK Flooring Direct has the highest at £25.

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, UK Flooring Direct has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £188,000, and Flooring Superstore has the lowest at £2,810.

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 sites in e-commerce sectors, such as flooring, they'll need to keep on top of large numbers of changing stock pages, which could lead to customers being driven down dead ends if pages are removed without effective redirects put in place.

Tile Choice flagged the highest 4xx errors (39). 404 errors can indicate to a search engine that a website is poorly maintained and contains outdated/broken links, which also makes it difficult for users to navigate a website efficiently.

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 often see brands within the home improvement space struggle with this, as the temptation generally lies in showing products at their best through high-definition images, over reducing quality in favour of page speed.

The overall mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 67 and 16, with United Carpets flagging the lowest site speed. Three of the 11 flooring suppliers scored 50+ (the recommended mobile site speed score), with UK Flooring Direct reporting the fastest mobile speed. Brands can increase their mobile site speed by avoiding unnecessary redirects, optimising images, and reducing service response time (by improving server response time).

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. Flooring suppliers can look to collaborating with online publications and bloggers within their niche to build out their backlink profile and gain visibility in areas they can gain relevant referral traffic.

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 score for UK flooring suppliers ranged between 66 and 26, with Tile Choice and TradeChoice Carpet & Flooring the lowest DA (both scored 26). A high DA score (scoring 60+) can have a positive impact on a brand’s reputation and recognition. As a website has a higher DA score, this communicates to search engines that the website is trustworthy, helping to increase their position in search engine rankings.

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. At a time when fewer people are taking on home improvement projects, in order to save money in the cost-of-living crisis, flooring suppliers are competing for a smaller pool of organic users.

Seven flooring suppliers reported a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, and seven also saw a decrease on mobile. Total Tiles flagged the biggest loss on desktop (-52%), while United Carpets flagged the biggest loss on mobile (-54%). A comprehensive keyword strategy can increase organic traffic on both mobile and desktop. Tools such as Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner can help brands to locate high-volume keywords, including a mixture of shorttail and longtail, which are relevant to their target 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 pack' results could be of particular use to flooring suppliers, who can use the opportunity to show their products directly from the SERP.

Tapi Carpets secured the most overall Universal Search appearances (23,671), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’. On the other hand, TradeChoice Carpet & Flooring didn’t secure any results for ‘reviews’ and should encourage past customers to leave a positive online review. All brands should use descriptive, keyword-rich alt text for all images to help search engines understand their content and relevance. High-quality, relevant images can also drive significant traffic and increase overall Universal Search appearances.

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 flooring suppliers, they may want to look at long tail phrases that indicate a customer ready to order, such as 'white kitchen floor tiles next day delivery' or 'laminate floor samples delivered tomorrow'.

Topps Tiles secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (4,948) and positions 4–10 (5,188). On the other hand, TradeChoice Carpet & Flooring reported the fewest for position 3 (62) and positions 4–10 (90). Longtail keywords are less competitive than shorttail keywords. Brands can utilise longtail keywords in URL slugs, internal links, image alt tags, headers, titles and meta descriptions.

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 provide an opportunity for UK flooring suppliers to quickly reach audiences with offers, new lines, and key products they’re looking to push.

We’ve included examples of Tile Giant’s sponsored posts. While this flooring supplier used sentences that are easily scannable, they should consider diversifying the flow of their sentences for each post to make their content more enticing to social media users.

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. Flooring suppliers can look to sites such as Pinterest and Instagram as a great place to share content, due to their highly visible approach and comparatively more affluent audiences.

Tapi Carpets has the most Facebook Likes (45,200), while Topps Tiles has the most Instagram followers (92,300). Flooring suppliers should stick to a regular social media content strategy so that their audience knows when to expect posts. The heart of a successful social media strategy is posting content that’s original, on-trend and resonates with their followers and target audience.

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. When handling big sites with large volumes of content and products, flooring suppliers will want to ensure their sites are easy to navigate for any visitor, of any ability.

Total Tiles flagged the most accessibility alerts (268) and the most errors (206). Flooring suppliers should take steps to reduce their accessibility alerts, such as incorporating video and audio captions; adding clear, relevant keywords for anchor text; and reducing colour contrast across the entire website. 

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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