The Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK funeral and cremation services has just been published. Learn how 12 UK funeral and cremation services perform across the digital space.

The latest Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK funeral and cremation services has just been published.  It covers the 12 national funeral and cremation services, including Co-Op Funeralcare, Simplicity Cremations, Avalon Funeral Plans, Dignity Funerals, Pure Cremation, Golden Charter, Choice Funeral Plans, Age Co Funeral Plans, Memoria, Open Prepaid Funerals, With Grace, and S. Stibbards & Sons.

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 funeral and cremation services to win brand exposure locally, drive online views, and generate 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 takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q2 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just six of the metrics we evaluated these 12 funeral and cremation services on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK funeral and cremation suppliers, 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 a 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 and 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.

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 Q2 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK funeral services was £12,107, 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 £32 . 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, Dignity Funerals reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £0, followed by With Grace at £16, and Choice Funeral Plans has the highest at £140.

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, Choice Funeral Plans has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £8,270, and Co-Op Funeralcare has the highest at £619,000.

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. During times of stress and grief, cognitive abilities are often impaired, so it's essential that funeral and cremation services maintain straightforward, easy-to-navigate websites that meet clients' needs. Particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages, such as contact pages, pricing options, and FAQs.

In our previous report, Dignity Funerals flagged 133 accessibility alerts. This quarter, Dignity Funerals is still the brand to watch and has increased their accessibility alerts to 157. These errors can cause visitors to become frustrated, so it’s important that brands have a linking strategy in place to rectify these errors.

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 will see a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. No one wants to be researching funeral providers, so funeral and cremation services need to ensure their customers have as positive an experience as possible on their mobile site, providing answers quickly with minimal frustration.

The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 78 and 26, with Avalon Funeral Plans flagging the slowest mobile site speed. All brands should aim for 50%+ for mobile site speed, as fast-loading websites have fewer bounce rates than slow-loading websites.

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. Funeral and cremation services should be continually pushing to improve their DA - though it may be a challenging sector to build authority in, they can do this by exchanging content with vendors they frequently use, or by using a good PR strategy in building new links (and claiming existing ones).

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 score for this quarter ranged between 85 and 26. All UK funeral services should adopt a PR strategy to help build connections with authoritative websites with a similar target audience to help increase the quantity and quality of their 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. While funerals and cremations are in a niche group where the ‘popularity’ of the service never changes, without an effective organic search strategy, they can quickly lose ground to competitors. Care should be taken to monitor any fluctuations in rank, along with regular reviews of changing search terms, so they can optimise for topical, popular keywords.

Four brands reported a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, while With Grace saw the biggest increase (+553%). Meanwhile, 9 brands saw a decrease on mobile, and With Grace also saw the biggest increase on this device (+7578%).

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 site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Funeral and cremation services should be utilising all universal search features as potential customers will want to see how previous customers have found their experience via 'reviews', 'FAQs' and 'people also ask'. This is also an opportunity to provide useful, quick content for commonly asked questions that show high potential for conversions.

Dignity Funerals saw the most overall Universal Search appearances (8,702), with the majority of these results coming from ‘people also ask’ (3,600). On the other hand, Age Co Funeral Plans reported the fewest overall Universal Search results (8).

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. There are many longtail keyword options that funeral and cremation services could be optimising their content for such as ‘funeral prices in Birmingham’ and ‘cremation services with payment plans’.

Dignity Funerals secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (2,469) and positions 4–10 (3,828). Co-Op Funeralcare was at a second close place, with 2,408 results for position 3 and 3,414 for positions 4–10.

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 screenshots of Dignity Funerals’ sponsored Facebook posts. This UK funeral service included vertical videos to cater to mobile users and stuck to 3 lines of text, helping to increase the chances that social media users will stop and read the content compared to a lengthy post.

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. Social media could be especially useful for sharing information about different financing and buying options.

Age Co Funeral Plans has the most Facebook Likes (259,100) and the most Instagram followers (64,100). All funeral services should use social media as a way to connect with their current followers and use it as an opportunity to expand their online reach by posting content regularly and serving their audience content they appreciate and want.

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. As all funeral and cremation service providers know, death does not discriminate, so they will therefore need to ensure their website is accessible for all customers looking at funeral and cremation options.

Pure Cremation reported the highest number of accessibility alerts (108), while Simplicity Cremations received the highest number of contrast errors (75). These alerts and errors can harm the users’ web experience, so it’s important that brands take into account how important it is to take steps to reduce them.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q2 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 Rory Tarplee.