A poorly designed and or a poorly maintained website will cost you money. How much is dependent on your business but lets face it, nobody likes to waste money. Sub par websites will struggle to rank well organically against competitor sites that are focused on delivering a quality experience for their online prospective, client base.
From the get-go, you have spent X amount to have your site designed and hosted, possibly poorly. The chances of a reasonable amount of traffic coming to your site via search engines is, as a result, negligible. The visitors who do manage to find you organically, bounce (leave your site) rather quickly. So what is causing that bounce rate?
What Constitutes a Poor Website Experience?
Slow Loading Times:
The main culprits for slow loading times range from a poor choice of hosting, bloated coding, non optimised images, too many plugins / unnecessary plugins and unmaintained / out of date software.
Difficult Navigation:
If users can’t easily find what they’re looking for, they’ll get annoyed and leave.
Lack of Quality Content
Thin content ( aka sparse content) will make it harder to rank well and can leave visitors unsatisfied but a lack of quality content will frustrate. Ideally, you want to aim for regular high quality content.
A Lack of a Clear Call-to-Action:
Users need to know what to do next. A confusing or missing call-to-action makes it difficult for them to take the desired action.
How Poor Website Experience Increases CPC
For those already utilising online ads, a poor website experience can increase your cost per click (CPC) by lowering your Quality Score in advertising platforms like Google Ads, which penalizes low-quality landing pages with higher bids. A high bounce rate and low user engagement on a poor-experience landing page indicates a bad user experience, leading to less relevant clicks and a higher cost for each click.
Lower Quality Score:
Advertising platforms use a Quality Score to measure the quality and relevance of your ads and landing pages. A poor website experience, such as slow load times or confusing navigation, lowers this score.
Increased CPC:
Search engines reward high-quality ads and landing pages with reduced costs by giving them a higher Quality Score. Conversely, a lower Quality Score means you’ll have to bid higher to achieve the same ad position, increasing your CPC.
More Wasted Spend:
When users land on a site that doesn’t meet their expectations or is difficult to navigate, they’re likely to leave quickly and not convert. This means you’re paying for clicks that don’t lead to valuable outcomes, making your overall ad spend wasteful.
How to Improve your website experience & lower CPC
Optimize Load Times: Reside on quality hosting, clean your code / rid yourself of bloated code / Compress images and use browser caching to speed up your site. Maintain your site, ensuring all software is always up to date.
Simplify Navigation: Ensure your menu is intuitive and users can find information quickly.
Improve Landing Page Relevance: Make sure your landing page content aligns perfectly with the ad the user clicked on.
Focus on User Engagement: Create a website that keeps users engaged by delivering regular quality content.
I hope the above information is useful and ultimately helps you succeed.
If you need an SEO and Website Evaluation, please contact us.
