The Q4 2022 benchmarking report for UK home improvement brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK home improvement brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q4 2022 benchmarking report for UK Home improvement brands has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national home improvement brands, including Travis Perkins, Plumbworld, Screwfix, Tool Station, Wickes, Selco Builders, B&Q, City Plumbing, Homebase, Bradfords, Jewson and Wolseley.
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 home improvement brands to win brand exposure locally, online and in-store footfall. 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 take-aways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
You can also find out how these 12 home improvement brands performed against last quarter, by revisiting our Q3 report round-up.
The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer 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 & 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.
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 home improvement brands have varying degrees of technical errors that will be hindering organic traffic and conversion performance. An example here is B&Q’s 1,000 5XX errors, this is the highest of all the home improvement brands. All companies seeing errors need to continue looking into the causes, as these will be making their site difficult to navigate and frustrating to use. This is likely to also give a negative impression of the brand to the user, who need to trust them to provide an excellent level of service.
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.
Jewson are still the only company scoring within an ‘okay’ range of 50-89, with a score of 62. The other eleven brands need to be looking at how they can increase their scores, ranging from 48-8.
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, 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. In Q4 we saw the DA range from 78 to 48. We can see that since Q3 Bradford’s have increased from 47 to 48.
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 home improvement brands have performed compared to last year. Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. We can see that all twelve brands have lost traffic compared to last year, with Bradfords seeing the highest drop of 54%.
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 retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings.
We could see that Reviews was the highest used universal search feature, with B&Q taking the top spot reaching 152,700 results. Some companies are underusing most universal search feature options, with some companies only seeing a handful of results. Those getting a small number of results need to work towards the numbers their competitors are achieving.
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 retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index.
Wolseley and Bradfords are still ranking for a much smaller amount of longtail keywords when compared with their competitors. They should be looking at how to improve their rankings on existing longtail keywords, but also at how they can expand their strategy to include new specific search terms.
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 Selco Builders’ Facebook ads. The use of clear CTA’s and contrasting colours, make the advert eye-catching to scrolling social media users.
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 retailer engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time.
We saw in our research that many of the home improvement brands are falling behind on content creation. We can see that Jewson are lagging in content over 2022, when compared with their competitors. This is a missed opportunity for these brands, who could be creating home content, jumping on social media trends, and sharing information about special offers.
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, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere.
All of the home improvement brands appear to be struggling with accessibility within their sites, with all twelve seeing an array of errors, contrast errors and alerts. Plumbworld are hitting 559 contrast errors in Q4. Plumbworld should look into the causes of these. We would expect all the home improvement brands that are seeing accessibility issues to be reviewing and optimising their accessibility.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 12 home improvement brands on, check out our quick-look table below;
We can see that compared to Q3, there has been changes across the board. With Wickes jumping from #3 to #2, and Wolseley dropping from #7 to #12. To see the Q3 report and leaderboard, click here.
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 Roselyn Tirado on Unsplash