The Q3 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.
The latest Q3 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, Bluebird Care, Elder, Cavendish Homecare Professionals, The Good Care Group, Consultus Care, Abbots Care and Helping Hands. 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, organic visibility and 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 Q3 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
You can also recap on how our eight live-in care providers performed last quarter, in the Q2 digital benchmark report.
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 spending 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.
In our last report, we came across 157 Bluebird Care 4xx errors on the Bluebird Care website. This quarter, the standout result comes from Elder’s website, where we found 540 4xx errors. When family members are looking to make a choice about an older relative’s care, ensuring they have a good impression of your brand at every touchpoint is essential. The risk of users meeting dead ends on your website should not be taken lightly.
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.
Just as with ensuring their site is easy to navigate, any elderly care provider must ensure their site is quick to use, to avoid any user frustration. Last quarter, only one of the eight providers were achieving even an ‘okay’ score of 50-89. However, looking at the most recent results, four live-in care providers have hit this ‘okay’ range. Looking at the other end of the scale Consultus Care have the most work to do, currently only producing a mobile page speed score of 28.
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, 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. However, a ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing.
There has been very little movement since our last report on DA, though scores now range from 65 to 12. Cavendish Homecare have improved by two points, going from 10 to 12. Even a two-point improvement is a fantastic result after three months and, if they continue to work on improving their backlink profile, can soon expect to effectively challenge their competitors on DA.
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.
As we saw in our last report, live-in care is one of the few sectors seeing an overall increase in organic traffic YoY. In Q3, however, five live-in care providers did see a fall in YoY traffic, the biggest fall belonging to Cavendish Homecare who last 80% of their traffic YoY. As most of the brands in our report saw similar drops in performance, this could be down to a reduced interest in certain keywords that these brands may have been targeting. We’d recommend Cavendish Homecare, along with the other four providers seeing a decrease, reassess their keyword targeting to cover high-traffic keywords and phrases.
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.
We’ve pinpointed reviews in both our Q2 and Q3 reports as these help searchers feel they are putting their loved ones in safe hands. Helping Hands remain ahead here, with 1,600 reviews of their services. Helping Hands have also appeared for 742 people also ask queries, another strong opportunity in universal search for any care provider to answer key questions that relatives (or even those who need care) may have.
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.
Helping Hands remain ahead on longtail keywords in the top 3, with a total of 869. However, Home Instead are also performing well, with 517. Three of our live-in care providers, however, are ranking in the top three for less than 50 longtail keywords. The easiest way to secure improvements in performance is to assess which longtail keywords they are ranking for outside of these top three positions, and optimise for them accordingly, before moving on to wider keyword research.
Facebook Adverts
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.
We’ve highlighted Bluebird Care’s Facebook ads below, as we felt they stood out from other brands. Bluebird have avoided using heavily branded creative and have, instead, focussed on people to convey a more personal message. On this occasion, Bluebird have used Facebook ads to run recruitment campaigns for new carers. The benefit of paid campaigns is the ability to turn ads and campaigns off and on depending on need, allowing live-in care providers to focus on recruiting in areas they are seeing the most demand in.
Top Social Shares & Content
When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is vital 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.
Home Instead remain the most consistent content creators in the sector, with their engagement levels remaining at a healthy level, indicating they are creating relevant, informative content that users find useful. Elder are showing the biggest recent increase in content production, with 22 articles published in October. Though it wouldn’t be realistic to maintain this level of content production month to month, if these content pieces are evergreen and properly optimised they will yield the benefits of high engagement in months to come.
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.
Last quarter we spotted that Elder had 190 accessibility alerts on their website. In Q3 this has grown to 353. Growth of this level is concerning, and Elder must ensure they are periodically cutting down this number before it becomes unmanageable and time-consuming to fix.
User Journeys & Conversion Rate Performance
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.
Consultus Care now have the highest clarity score, with 93%. While The Good Care Group have the lowest score of 71%, this still outperforms many other sectors we have reviewed. However, with users needing to feel comfortable with their choices for live-in care, any brand in this space must be aiming for an excellent score, as near perfect as possible.
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;
Q3 2022 Winners and Losers Summary
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;
We’ve seen some movement among the top three since our Q2 leaderboard, with Helping Hands climbing from second to first place and Home Instead falling from first to third place. Abbots Care have also improved, moving from seventh to sixth place.
GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q3 2022 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..
Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash
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