Seasonal Trends
Visibility Vs Authority
Social Influence
Content Performance
Join the 5000+ marketing decision-makers using our data to improve their decision-making.
✅ No data sharing
✅ No spam
✅ No newsletter auto-enrolment, although you should subscribe 👀
10 minutes
Reading time
20 pages
Page Length
November 2019
Whether you’re building a wall or building a house, you’re going to need a builder’s merchant to sort out the supplies. But if you go to search Google for merchants, who’s the first one you’re going to see? That’s what we’ve aimed to discover in this in-depth analysis of the UK construction industry.
We’ve dug up the building merchant’s industry and uncovered the sites which are built to last and the ones who are about to crumble. If you think your site could do with some reinforcing, this building materials report will give you the knowledge and know-how to do so.
We comprehensively dove into builder trends data related to visibility, page speed, keyword opportunities and more. As well as these well-known statistics, we also dove into the brand reach and social scores of these companies– exclusive metrics only available in our reports.
Download the builders merchant report now to reveal how you can build a rock-solid SEO strategy to take control of the SERPs, improve your awareness, and bolster your profits.
The building supply industry as a whole is looking pretty good, with increases in visibility across the board. In fact, aside from the top competitors, there has been a 9% uplift in visibility across the board. A lot of the top sites have seen large increases, with some seeing a visibility increase as large as 300%. Of course, where there are winners, there are also losers. For example, one site fell by 67%.
Here is a quick rundown of the top 10 sites:
This is a lot of opportunity for builder’s merchants in terms of keywords. Some of the search volumes for important keywords go as high as 49K, so seeing where the analysed sites sit in the SERPs for these keywords is very important.
Build Base, Jewsons, and Selco BW are doing well, ranking on the first page for the most competitive keyword in the industry – ‘building merchants’. This is especially challenging and something worth celebrating over since the majority of search results tend to be from local building suppliers.
Things aren’t looking so great for the second most competitive term – ‘loft insulation’. None of the sites on the analysis make the first two pages. The first site that comes up on the third page (P21) is Selco BW. Build Base follows by 6 positions. These brands are going to need to step up if they are to compete for the first page.
As well as high competition keywords with high search volume, there are also opportunities that these brands are completely missing out on, some of which have search volumes as high as 4K. We reviewed these keywords to see what these brands can do to snatch up them up like low hanging fruit.
With opportunity keywords, it is very clear that creating practical, useful guides is the best route to take if these brands are to plaster themselves on to the top page of Google. A quick search for some of the main opportunities brings up a lot of information-based article, detailing the specific process for the application of things such as foam insulation and lime mortar.
Guides and informative articles are not only a fantastic way to obtain easy keywords with high search volumes, they’re also superb for showing off your expertise and authority in the building supply industry. It tells consumers that you’re not just some faceless brand and are instead here to help them achieve their building goals.
Featured snippets and questions have been big news in SEO for some time now. Featured snippets are the little boxes of information that sit at the top of search results and attempt to answer the users question without the need of clicking on a result. If you end up obtaining one, you’ll not only be at the very top of the SERPs but you’ll also (technically) have two positions on the first page.
Many of the opportunity keywords we found display featured snippets at the top of SERPs. With the correct guidance, these brands could be sitting at the top of the results page reaping the rewards.
One way that snippets can be achieved is through the application of questions and answers. If you use a searcher question in your copy and answer it simply and effectively, there is an improved chance of getting a snippet for informational-based searches. If the sites in this analysis want to get these snippets with ease, they need to answer questions in their articles.
Social media is essential if you want to remain relevant, especially to a younger audience. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram get millions of impressions every day and if you aren’t on them, you’re losing out on the possible profit.
In our large-scale report, we also look at social media score and brand reach, assessing who is creating and captivating an audience and who’s falling behind. So, the real question becomes this: who is doing the best and what can their competitors learn from them?
The first brand to stand out is Bradfords, with an owned social score of 174 and a brand reach score of 72,000. They have a total of 168,882 follows spread over multiple platforms, mainly Pinterest. When looking at their socials, it’s clear to see why they hit such high numbers.
Their Facebook has pictures of jobs, store members, and competitions which get fairly good engagement. As for their Instagram, the same thing can be seen. They post a combination of product marketing and content marketing, which is recommended in this day and age of social media.
Although Bradfords have the best blend of brand searches and social score, they get beat by Trade Point when it comes to raw social score, totalling to 280 with a follow count of 143,050 across multiple platforms, with Facebook being their main driving force.
On Facebook, they have short, engaging videos as well as competitions. As a result, they have over 100K followers on Facebook. Unfortunately, they don’t have any followers on Instagram, so this could be an area they can improve on.
Page speed is an important factor for both SEO and consumer UX; it’s definitely something you can’t ignore. If you want to maximise your SEO strategy, you need to be making sure your website is loading fast, making sure everything is optimised to ensure smoothing speeds.
We looked at the page speed for all the sites in the report, seeing who’s a quick builder and who’s sleeping on the job.
Here’s what PageSpeed Insights identified as the top 5 fastest brands:
Read more about the importance of page speed here.
This report is completely free for public viewing, you just need to download it using the button above. We analyse and dive into industries that we think we could add value too, therefore, we don’t believe the data we find should be hidden.
Every now and again, we might miss someone from our report. If you have a building merchant company and are not featured in our report, get in touch and we can send you a personalised report with all the data you need.
If you want know anything about the report or are curious about how we can create a bespoke SEO strategy for your brand, get in touch today.
