How your ugly website affects your marketing efforts

Written by Carly Snider | 1/26/16 7:29 PM

Are you the type of business that allots a large chunk of your annual budget into marketing efforts each year? 

What if we told you that your marketing efforts are being wasted because of your ugly website?

Your website is your online brand and visitors directly align the quality of your website with the quality of your business or product. On top of that an ugly website is just bad for new business.

Here’s how your ugly website is affecting your overall marketing efforts

Your credibility is being questioned

The largest way an ugly website affects your credibility is that is tells users that your business doesn’t care, especially if your competition has a strong web presence in comparison.

A website that does build credibility is usually easy to navigate, demonstrates markers of expertise and trustworthiness, is visually appealing and if full of content that is relevant to potential customers.

Money spent on lead generation stops when a visitor reaches your site

Are you spending money on social media marketing, pay-per click campaigns or incorporating your website name on traditional marketing pieces? These are all effective lead generation tactics, but with your unappealing website, they are likely are going to waste. It becomes a disjointed experience for new users who visit your site because appealing content has drawn them in and then they are met by an ugly website. If your website can not immediately start effectively selling your business, you'll loose those leads that you have spent good money to generate.   

Your metrics are suffering

When a visitor reaches your website, there is a window of about 5 seconds where they make a decision to stay or leave. If you don’t have content or visuals that peak their interest, you shouldn’t expect to have visitors stay.

If you run Google analytics on your site you will be able to review your bounce rate, browse rate and time-on-site. This information will tell you just how new visitors interact and feel about your website. If these numbers are not satisfactory you’ll want to change the trajectory of current user behaviour by working on the quality of your website.  

It’s important to know that a visually appealing new website doesn't necessarily translate to a hard working technical website. For your website to work for both your customers and your searchability through engines like Google, SEO tactics must be implemented. If you’re site needs a face lift and a boost in searchability, check out our free website grader. It will give you an idea of the quality of your site and areas where you can start to improve.