www.uswitch.com was primarily a utilities comparison website however it has recently branched into home insurance and car insurance.

The Site offers:

Gas and Electricity Comparsion, Heating Cover, Broadband Internet, Mobile phones, Bundles ie package quotes that offer broadband and phone and TV etc, Credi Card comparison, Personal loans, Mortgages, Bank Current accont rates and Digital TV.

Wow thats a good selection and the site is marketed very well.

The Process is different for each product to get a quote and compare against your current annual bill giving a saving along with a recomeneded company/s offering the best rate.

Essentially Uswich make money by obtaining commission from utilities suppliers for reffering customers who then go on to sign up to the service offered. The rate of commission is unknown and probably dependent on the product. Although this by no means makes the company bias it does make them middle men effectively taking a cut from us even though the energy company is ‘paying’ the commission the money has to come from somewehere and at the end of the day the buck stops with the customer. 

The Uswich website is a great site to visit when looking for a quote and is one of the best we have found.

 1) 7/10 Useability and presentation
Clean easy to use site, but could probably do with a bit spicing up and it is rather drab especially considering how stong the advertising on the TV campaign is.

2) 8/10 Marketing
Very good results in serps and marketing on the TV for USwitch is great very attention grabbing. The site itself was awarded No1 Website by the internet traffic monitoring gurus over at hitwise for Jul to sep 2007. I dont think it has retained this top spot as sites like money supermarket are very strong currently so may have knocked them off the top spot.

3) 6/10 Credibility
All data appears to be live feed from utility suppliers and the like however there is no proof of this credibility on the site, if USwitch can validate it for us we will certainly amend this post! But there are not quotes from energy suppliers or telecoms providers to validate this. Also it would be nice to have seen customer testimonials and quotes from peeps who have saved money online.

The majority of the home page is littered with links direct to sub-categories all part of there clever marketing tactics, but mainly you are presented with a big search box to help you find what your shopping for, ok so here goes I’m after a specific DVD so I whap it into the search box and fire away.  ‘300 the movie’ a pile of results are found two many to check them all over 6000, I fancy the special edition version so lets try that.  ‘300 special edition’  ohh not so good only 5 results found and only 2 are for DVD’s got a couple of motherboards and a car sneaking in there. Both DVD’s are from the same shop, so I guess we are not so hot on specific’s. Back to basics will just put 300 in and i’ll use the bar at the top to specifiy just DVD’s, we are struggling here…. still lots of results but loads of old DVD’s have come up, I plough through a load of pages and find 300 on offer for £10.93 standard edition and £13.99 special edition Region 1. So all good got there in the end my shopping experience didnt take all that long, the shop has 4.5* rating which is good enough for me a follow the links and make a purchase deal done.

 Ok lets see the scores on the doors george doors:

1) 7/10 Useability
Although it is very easy to use the site is more search focused than customer focused, the more visitors they can get the better as far as I can tell. The site could do with a better search facility maybee something using the big G’s simple search or based on that theory could help it alot. Some sort of odering based on date of the product like date it was first available for sale or similar, most people will want the most recent products and not compare old to new.

2) 9/10 SEO
WOW these guy invest alot of time in making this site very popular with the serps, massive numbers of results for seemingly random keywords, excellent site and an advertisers dream. They must surely be in the top 10 in terms of best search performance of all price comparison sites, hitwise will probably confirm it.

3) 6/10 Credibility
They dont really care what companies advertise on the site as long as they are getting paid, I was able to create an acount and start whapping products on for an imaginary retailer within 24 hours so that does not say alot for the credibility, however it is user dictated so a company who has 1 star rating is definaly not going to get repeat business, however whats to stop them creating another account and stating again …. and again…. with fresh results and no ratings, if a site has no rating somebody has to be the first so what have they got in place to stop the rip off merchants? Come on Kelkoo have some boundaries please we should expect as much protection in the products they are refering us to as we get from say ASDA or Tesco’s? This argument could go on all night!

 Ok the results…

22 / 30  not bad, good all round site and would use again.

But wait why listen to me waffling on try it for yourself
www.kelkoo.co.uk

The Price comparison online website offers a range of services, first impression of the site is very good, it offers a range of services from Insurance to Business comparison. The home page directs you to the main categories namely:

Car Insurance
Home Insurance
Van Insurance
Motorbike Insurance
Breakdown Cover
Travel Insurance

The Go Compare site allows a little more than just direct comparisons of insurance they try to provide a better service by adding a 5star rating system to the providers listed.

There automated algo’s compare quotes from a massive 50 insurance companys most are very major players with stong websites of there own.
A sample of some of these include, theAA.com, AIG Direct, Motor Cycle Direct, Norwich Union, the RAC (part of Aviva) and Sainsburys bank.

By Comparing this many sites it should offer us optimum results for potential customers ok so on with the tests.

 1) 7/10 Useability
Very simple to navigate and quickly into the quote process, BTW I hate popups so have maked them down for making me have multiple windows open in explorer.

2) 6/10 Search Engine performance
Although not quite at the top spot for major keywords, I was impressed as they were first page for many such as ‘Car Insurance’ however they were recently penalised by google for doing very naughty link buying, tut tut. BTW could this be a search engine trick in itself? by getting banned or doing something outrageous gets everybody talking so all the bloggers are now out there nattering about the ban creating hundreds more links for the site either the guys at Go Compare are very very clever or completley crazy.

3) 7/10 Credibility
Until they performed the sneaky trick by trying to manuipulate google results I would have given them a 10, but unfortunately I can only justify a 7 now. Great site guys and very good content and by comparing so many top products gives you excellent credibility, but I just cant give you the ten as buying links is a no no!
Overall = 20/30  Fair

Enough listening to us chunter on, why not visit them yoursleves at:
www.gocompare.com

Then please feel free to post your own comments back here.