The Q1 2023 benchmarking report for UK Tyres and servicing brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK Tyres and servicing brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q1 2023 benchmarking report for UK tyres and servicing brands has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national tyres and servicing brands, including ATS Euromaster, Tyre Shopper, Kwik-Fit, Formula One Autocentres, blackcircles.com, BookMyGarage, WhoCanFixMyCar, Evans Halshaw, Mr Clutch Autocentres, Halfords, National Tyre & Autocare and Protyre.
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 tyres and servicing brands to win brand exposure locally, drive online views, and encourage either online purchases or visits to branches. 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.
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 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. For tyres and servicing brands, having an easy-to-navigate site is essential for drivers needing to locate local retail and garage options for their vehicles and particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages such as branch locators, or for key product lines.
Whilst most of the tyres and servicing brands we researched had a fairly low amount of website errors, all twelve of the brands had at least a few 4xx or 5xx errors showing. Protyre are seeing by far the worst level of 4xx error codes, with 345. Protyre need to be looking into the cause of these errors.
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 your site is technically compliant, tyres and servicing brands must ensure their site experience is fast and efficient so users don't turn elsewhere.
We would expect most to achieve at least an ‘okay’ score of 50-89, whereas only seven of the twelve tyres and servicing brands did. The mobile page speed scores are currently between 14 and 73, with Protyre lagging behind. All the brands that are scoring below 50 have some serious work to do on improving their mobile page speed.
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.
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. Only nine of the twelve brands achieved a score of average or above, with the DA ranging from 29 to 76. Formula One Autocentres are the lowest scoring brand. Those at the lower end of the scale need to be focusing on building a stronger backlink profile to compete with the higher scoring tyres and servicing brands.
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 tyres and servicing brands have performed compared to last year. Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. We discovered that only two of the tyres and servicing brands in our report have gained organic mobile traffic year on year. Mr Clutch Autocentres saw the biggest gain with a 46% increase, whilst Protyre saw the biggest loss of 62%.
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 Halfords taking the top spot reaching 26,600 results. Some brands are underusing all universal search feature options and only seeing a handful of results. Those getting a small amount 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.
Mr Clutch Autocentres are ranking for a significantly low number of longtail keywords compared to their competitors, with very few of their longtail keywords ranking in the top 20. Mr Clutch 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 brands 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. Facebook Ads can be useful for both national and local garage reach.
Below, we can see examples of BookMyGarage’s Facebook ads. The use of images of their different areas, along with clear CTAs and mixing still images and video content, 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 Tyre Shopper are falling behind their competitors when it comes to both Facebook Likes and Instagram Followers. Tyre Shopper need to look into how they can compete with the other tyres and servicing brands.
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 Tyres and servicing brands appear to be struggling with accessibility within their sites, with all twelve seeing an array of errors, contrast errors, and alerts. Halfords are seeing the worst amount, hitting 169 alerts on their website. The tyres and servicing brands seeing issues should be reviewing and optimising their accessibility, and investigating to see what the issues within their websites are.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 tyres and servicing brands on, check out our quick-look table below;
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 Robert Laursoo on Unsplash