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

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK house builders has just been published. It covers the largest 11 national house builders, including Barratt Homes, Berkeley Group, Crest Nicholson, Taylor Wimpey, Bellway, Redrow, Persimmon, Bloor Homes, Countryside, Miller Homes, and Bovis Homes.

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 house builders to win brand exposure, drive online enquiries, and generate show home viewings. 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 Q1 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.

Q1 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 11 house builders on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing house builders, 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 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.  

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.

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 monthly budget wastage across these UK house builders was £,1181, 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 £17.55 . 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, both Bellway and Barratt Homes have the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £1, and Taylor Wimpey has the highest at £96.

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, Taylor Wimpey has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £20,300, and Barratt Homes has the lowest at £895.

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. House builders have the benefit of not needing to juggle large volumes of product pages, which can often be a stumbling block for ecommerce sites, but they must still ensure that key pages are clearly signposted and easy to find.

Bovis Homes flagged 47 4xx errors — the highest of all brands — and Bellway reported 585 3xx errors. 404 errors can result in a negative user experience, as visitors are likely to become frustrated with being sent to dead ends. All websites can avoid this by regularly monitoring broken links and, if applicable, providing alternative 303 links.

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. House builders will want to give a positive impression of their brand from each digital touchpoint, ensuring that their site is quick and easy to use, so as not to put off potential home buyers.

The overall mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 72 and 33, with Persimmon reporting the lowest site speed. However, 8 of the 11 brands reported at least 50% for mobile site speed (the minimum recommended score for this category). A one-second website delay can reduce conversions by 7%, and a slow-loading mobile website can directly impact a brand’s revenue.

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, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. House builders can look to include outreach to local news sites (in areas they're building in), home-bloggers, and interiors publications to gain backlinks and improve 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 this quarter ranged between 71 and 55, with Countryside reporting the lowest DA, and Taylor Wimpey reporting the highest DA. Websites with a high DA score are perceived as being more trustworthy than low-scoring websites, leading to higher click-through rates and enhance engagement.

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. Changing consumer habits and mortgage rates will have impacted the new home sector, as prospective buyers may be holding off on a new house purchase for when interest rates fall.

All of the house builders reported an increase in organic traffic on desktop, with Countryside securing the biggest increase (+93%). Meanwhile, 7 of the brands reported a decline on mobile, and Countryside reported the biggest increase here, too (+56%). Brands should adopt a keyword strategy, where they find high-volume, low-competition keywords and include these phrases throughout titles, meta descriptions, image alt information, headings and URLs.

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 retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. 'Image pack' and 'local pack' results are key for house builders to raise interest in their homes directly from the SERP, and build awareness of new developments in key areas.

Taylor Wimpey secured the most overall Universal Search appearances (19,451), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’ (17,100). On the other hand, Bloor Homes reported the fewest appearances for ‘images’ (786) and should ensure they’re compressing and optimising images. Websites can optimise for Universal Search results by writing clear, concise answers for featured snippets, leveraging image SEO, improving local SEO and publishing fresh content.

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 retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index. For house builders, they will want to keep an eye on high-conversion potential keywords, including mentions of bookings, mortgages, locations, and availability.

Longtail keywords are more specific than short-tail keywords, resulting in reduce competition, which can help a website to rank higher in search engines. Taylor Wimpey secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (4,189), while Barratt Homes secured the most appearances for positions 4–10 (4,762). Securing appearances for positions 4–10 is an effective way for brands to improve their rankings in search engines.

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. 

We’ve included examples of Bloor Home’s sponsored posts. This UK house builder included a maximum of 2 lines of text per post, which will help improve scannability as social media users scroll their feed.

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 retailer engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. As with developing DA scores, house builders can look to creating informational content on anything to do with home ownership, from mortgage applications, to facilities in local areas, and even house maintenance.

Barratt Homes continues to be the brand to beat, with 190,600 Facebook Likes — an increase from 189,200 in our previous report. Taylor Wimpey is also the brand to beat, with 94,800 Instagram followers — the exact same as the previous quarter. A social media strategy is a powerful way for brands to directly interact with their customers and target audience. Brands should also use social media as an opportunity to share links to landing pages and product/service pages.

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, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. For house builders, having an non-accessible site will also send the message that their homes themselves may not be accessible for those with vision deficiencies.

In our previous report, Berkeley Group reported the most accessibility alerts (71). This quarter, Berkeley Group continues to report the most accessibility alerts and has increased their previous figure to 96. Search engines favour highly accessible websites, so it’s important that brands take steps to enhance the readability and accessibility of their websites, such as including alt information for all images, considering contrast errors, ensuring buttons are clickable and more.

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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