The Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK health and fitness clubs has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK health and fitness clubs perform across the digital space.
The latest Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK health and fitness clubs has just been published. It covers the 11 largest clubs in the UK, including Virgin Active, The Gym Group, énergie Fitness, LivingWell Health Clubs, TotalFitness, Anytime Fitness, The Bannatyne Group, Fitness Space, Snap Fitness 24/7, PureGym, and Fitness First.
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 health and fitness clubs to win brand exposure, drive online views, and increase membership figures. 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 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.
For a glance into just six of the metrics we evaluated these top 11 health and fitness clubs on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK health and fitness clubs or request a copy of the report for the full review.
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.
Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing and 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. Health and fitness clubs have the benefit of not needing to maintain an ever-changing array of stock, so it should be relatively straightforward for these brands to avoid large volumes of 4xx errors.
With this in mind, Virgin Active surprisingly reported 809 4xx errors (the highest of all health and fitness clubs). This club should ensure it’s regularly assessing links across its website and update any broken links, when applicable.
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 will see a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. Health and fitness clubs must ensure they are primed and ready for an increasingly mobile-first audience and are serving quick, easy to use mobile sites.
In our previous report, TotalFitness received the lowest mobile site score (21), which it’s increased to 38 this quarter. Currently, The Gym Group is now the club to watch, as it scored 38 for mobile site score. After examining this website on mobile, this health and fitness club should include lazy loading to improve loading times and web performance for users.
Domain authority (DA) 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. Health and fitness clubs may want to collaborate with fitness publications and bloggers within the health niche, to expand their backlink profile and increase levels of 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 rating for this quarter ranged between 73 and 30, with Fitness Space reporting the lowest DA. This health and fitness club also received the fewest backlinks and backlinks from the fewest domains — factors that can affect a brand’s DA score. Adopting a PR strategy to build relationships with high-authoritative websites will help to enhance its DA score.
A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for core, 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. Due to the cost of living crisis, consumers may be cutting back on small luxuries such as gym memberships, and opting for at-home workout options or a membership at a cheaper club. Health and fitness clubs should be mindful that they are optimising and ranking for relevant terms, depending on current events and topics, in order to maintain traffic.
All health and fitness clubs received an increase in organic traffic on desktop, while 6 reported a decline in organic traffic on mobile. Brands can increase their traffic on mobile by ensuring their website is simple to navigate and downloads quickly on mobile.
Google Universal Search Results are 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. Health and fitness clubs may find any of the Universal Search opportunities useful for sharing information and building brand awareness directly from the SERP. Results such as 'FAQs' and 'people also ask' questions will provide an opportunity to share knowledge of exercise and build authority, while 'local pack' will improve visibility in local areas.
PureGym continues to secure the most Universal Search appearances (26,900), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’ and ‘people also ask’. Alternatively, Fitness Space reported the fewest appearances, and this health and fitness club should optimise all images to help increase overall appearances.
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 new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Health and fitness clubs can either look at developing content giving specific exercise advice, which will help funnel users from the brand awareness to consideration stage, or focus on building visibility around high-conversion-intent keywords, that may mention terms such as fees.
PureGym remains the club to beat for the most longtail keyword appearances (10,481 for position 3 and 14,109 for positions 4–10) — over double the results of the runner-up.
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. For UK health and fitness clubs, Facebook ads are an opportunity to reach more customers and share updates to their facilities.
We’ve included 3 examples of Fitness First’s sponsored Facebook posts. This UK health and fitness club should limit lines of text to help increase readability as social media users are scrolling their feed.
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 a long period of time. It's great for your engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content that achieves traffic over a long period of time. Health and fitness clubs with a strong blog presence are likely to see more engagement from social media, with users keen to improve their technique or even copy some exercises at home.
PureGym has the largest Facebook page (530,400 Likes) and the largest Instagram account (217,700 followers). It’s important that all brands establish a consistent social media strategy where they’re posting content regularly and posting material that benefits its audience.
About 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. Health and fitness brands will want to carefully consider the impression they are giving users, from the first digital touchpoint. Prospective members who have a vision deficiency, or other additional needs, will need to know that they will be welcomed and supported in accessing facilities, beginning with the health and fitness club's website.
Fitness First reported the most accessibility alerts (109), with the majority of these coming from redundant title text. This health and fitness club should modify the title text across each page and include more descriptive language to help reduce its accessibility alerts.
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.