The Q2 2022 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.
4th July 2022
The latest Q2 2022 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, The Good Care Group, Elder, Consultus Care, Helping Hands, Cavendish Professionals, Abbots Care, and Bluebird Care - it highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons in 20+ online performance metrics.
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, and drive 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 Q2 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.
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 & 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 live-in care providers have varying degrees of technical errors that will be hindering organic traffic and conversion performance. An example includes Bluebird Care seeing 157 4xx errors on their site. Bluebird care should aim to implement redirects where possible, as opposed to 404 pages that could confuse and frustrate users in what can be an emotionally charged time.
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.
In our research, we discovered that the only live in care provider achieving an ‘okay’ score of 54 is Cavendish Homecare, with all others falling short of the 50-89 score range. Looking in more detail, both Elder and Helping Hands have very high First Input Delay scores, meaning that it is taking a significant amount of time for their websites to respond to user interaction. As with ensuring their websites are easy to navigate, live-in care providers must avoid adding any stress and frustration to the user experience.
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, ie. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads.
Domain authority is considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. ‘Good’ DA score depends on the competition level of the industry. In our research, UK live-in care providers saw their domain authorities range from an excellent score of 66 to a concerningly low score of 10 from Cavendish Homecare.
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.
Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. As with our research into Childcare, we found that, while many of the retail sectors we’ve investigated are seeing an overall decrease in traffic, live-in care providers have generally seen an increase in visitors to their sites. The biggest winner here is Bluebird Care, who increase organic mobile traffic by 34%.
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.
Reviews are especially important for any business in the care sector as users want to feel they are putting their loved ones in safe hands. For Helping Hands, who have 1,800 reviews, this is proved through a simple Google search. Potential users are able to judge their reputation, and Google gives them a boost in visibility too.
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.
As well as leading the way on reviews, Helping Hands have achieved the most top 3 long-tailed keywords, with a total of 1,028 (with a further 1,755 in positions 4-10). This indicates a strong SEO strategy poised for answering key questions users may have about at home care, which will increase user confidence in the provider.
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 that Home Instead have used personal stories in their Facebook ads, which will fit naturally into users’ feeds. We felt that their Facebook ads stood out from the other live-in care providers in our report, though we did notice that many of the UK’s live-in care providers use Facebook ads for recruitment purposes, as opposed to driving customer interest.
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.
Generally speaking, we saw that our UK live-in care brands were not consistent content producers and have not been regularly pushing content out on their website. Home Instead are the most consistent content creators in the sector and achieve steady levels of engagement as a result.
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.
Though each live-in care provider is delivering accessibility errors, Elder’s 190 alerts pose a significant problem on their website. Reviewing options for elderly care can be a frustrating time in itself - Elder must improve their accessibility for users, and ensure that their site is straightforward to use and doesn’t add any frustration to their experience.
3.42 seconds are all it takes for a user to judge a site solely on its appearance. For sites with a low clarity score, this means users are getting a poor impression of your brand and aren’t seeing your vital cues to convert.
Abbots Care achieved an excellent clarity score of 93%. With the second highest score we recorded coming in at 81%, other live-in care providers must all look to make improvements to their readability, usability, and competitor benchmarking in order to meet the high standards set by Abbots Care.
Additionally, we use attention maps to judge user behaviour and assess how customers are interacting with a site. You can see from these examples just how wildly different site designs can impact user attention;
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;
If you want to explore how you can improve your performance relative to your competitors, reduce media spend wastage and drive more performance from less, read the 10 Week Performance Accelerator Programme for CMO’s & Marketing Leaders.
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 Phil Robinson.
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