The Q1 2024 benchmarking report for UK live-in care providers has just been published. Learn how the top 8 UK live-in care providers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2024 benchmarking report for UK live-in care providers has just been published. It covers the largest 8 national live-in care providers, including Home Instead, Bluebird Care, Elder, Cavendish Homecare Professionals, The Good Care Group, Consultus Care, Abbots Care, and Helping Hands Home Care.

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 live-in care providers to win brand exposure locally, improve organic visibility, and generate online enquiries. 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 takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q1 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 8 live-in care providers on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK live-in care providers 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.

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 live-in care providers, they'll want to ensure that potential clients and their families can easily get the information they need to feel comfortable in their care decisions. Live-in care providers should therefore be ensuring they have clear pathways to key informational pages, such as locations, fees and funding.

In our last audit, Helping Hands Home Care flagged 275 4xx errors. In this quarter, this live-in care provider increased its errors to 606, and it must make its website more user-friendly to prevent customers from getting impatient and resorting to competitors. Elder has nearly doubled its 4xx errors from the previous quarter to Q1 2024 — from 130 previously to 253 in this report.

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. As with ensuring key pages are easy to find, live-in care providers will want to ensure their sites are quick and simple to use, to help potential clients make decisions faster.

Only three of the 8 providers scored at least 51% for site speed — a benchmark all brands should reach. The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged from 60 to 9, with Home Instead at the bottom of the leaderboard. This provider should consider fonts that don’t increase loading times and optimise images so they download quicker.

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. Live-in care providers can look to improve their domain authority with a comprehensive digital PR strategy, that targets relevant publications (such as local press or partner vendors) to gain authoritative backlinks.

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. The DA rating for this quarter ranged between 66 and 17, with Cavendish Homecare Professionals scoring the lowest. This brand should implement a PR strategy to increase its backlinks, as it current ranks in the bottom 2 for backlinks.

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. Live-in care providers may be impacted by the cost-of-living crisis, as families could be looking to alternative care routes in order to save money. Therefore, our providers could be battling for a smaller pool of organic visitors.

Cavendish Homecare Professionals was the only provider to see an increase in organic mobile traffic (354%). On the other hand, Abbots Care experienced the biggest loss (50%). Brands can adopt a longtail keyword strategy and find and remove content on their website that isn’t performing well.

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. For live-in care providers, 'local pack', 'reviews' and 'people also ask' will be key opportunities in universal search to grow trust in their service, along with provide more information, directly from the SERP.

The Good Care Group reported the most appearances for Universal Search results, scoring the highest in ‘reviews’. Interestingly, four of the other providers out-performed The Good Care Group for the ‘local pack’ 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 live-in care providers, longtail keywords are an opportunity to rank for more in-depth information that potential clients may have, which can help build much-needed trust from the early consideration stages.

Home Instead is at the top of the leaderboard for the top 100 longtail keyword appearances, but Helping Hands Home Care out-performs it in the top three search engine pages, so Home Instead will need to address its keyword strategy to increase its ranking by the next quarter.

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. For live-in care customers, Facebook presents an opportunity to see 'local' relevant content, build brand awareness and a positive image of their service, and even be used to recruit new carers in key areas.

Below, we’ve included examples of Abbots Care’s sponsored Facebook posts. All three posts include the same image — which is vertical to adhere to mobile users — suggesting that it’s testing its text performance. However, Abbots Care should stick to a maximum of 3 lines of text.

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. Content about life as a client would be both interesting and engaging for live-in care providers to share, and also encourage potential clients and their families to make an enquiry.

Most brands favour Facebook, which is a wise move given that all providers have a larger Facebook following than Instagram. Elder boasts 62,700 Facebook likes, putting it at the top of the scoreboard, and Bluebird Care has 3,700 Instagram followers (the largest of all brands).

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. For live-in care providers, accessibility is particularly important as they must ensure everyone is able to engage with their website.

In our last audit, Consultus Care reported the most alerts. In this quarter, Consultus Care had 108 alerts — only a decrease by 1 point from the previous report. Under closer inspection, these alerts mainly come from redundant title text and redundant links, which are quick fixes to increase accessibility.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 2024 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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