Why Ignoring Your Website Is Costing You Money

The same goes for your website. If your website design and content doesn’t align with the amazing high quality badass work that you do then your potential clients aren’t going to stick around very long to see what you have to offer. Remember that your website is your online headquarters.

Never settle for less than perfection when it comes to your website as you wouldn’t for your shop and your clients definitely will not when deciding to bring you their baby and spending money with you. A cheap low-budget website made by an untrained developer or an old outdated website will do your company more harm than good. It could even end up costing you more money in the long run.

With your website, you have to put in the time, money and effort. You have to build it so it speaks to your audience and captures leads regularly. Your website is your 24/7 sales representative, and if you put a poor amount of effort or money into developing and designing, it’s going to perform as poorly as an untrained employee.

You wouldn’t let a random person restore a classic car just because he has a tool box full of expensive tools, so don’t leave a poorly-created website to sell your products and services.

Having an old, outdated or low-budget website could also be ruining your company’s reputation and costing you money. Today, we’ll show you how a bad website can hurt your business and why you should start by build an amazing website.

6 Ways an old, outdated or low-budget website can damage your company

Cheap websites are as bad as we say they are. Sometimes on the surface they look great but over the years we’ve found that short cuts have been taken that can affect the user experience or even how you show up in search. They also make you look like a company that cuts corners and doesn’t care about their own business or the work they do for their clients.

Putting yourself out there as a company that doesn’t put the time and effort into their business will ultimately scare away any potential clients, which will result in no leads and no conversions.

However, having an updated, modern website that’s always kept up to date with the latest about your company and your work is an assured way to attract clients to your business and encourage them to invest in your automotive aftermarket restoration, performance, race or restyling services.

Don’t believe us? Here are six ways having an old, out of date, poorly designed or hard-to-navigate website damages your company.

1. They create bad first impressions

When your visitors land on your website, data shows that it only takes them 2.6 seconds to make up their minds about your company based on what they see on your home page. 

First impressions are vital to the success of your automotive aftermarket shop. To increase your conversions, you have to create a positive first impression on every visitor that lands on your website. And we’re not just talking about having a great home page, every page needs to be amazing as with the search people don’t always land on your homepage first when visiting your website.

94% of users’ first impressions are purely based on the looks of your website. So if you have an unattractive or user unfriendly website design, your visitors aren’t going to stick around for long. Plus, 38% of website visitors don’t engage with an ugly website at all and 75% of your website credibility comes from the design alone. If your website looks unprofessional, tired or missing what they’re looking for, they’ll leave and head straight to your competitors.

Having a low-budget or old outdated website usually means:

• Slow load time
• Poor navigation
• It may not work properly on a mobile device
• Bad or uninteresting content
• Confusing layouts
• Missing information

Don’t lose out on sales and give your visitors what they want – a well-designed, easy to navigate, fast-loading website full of relevant and valuable information.

2. They reduce your traffic

If users leave your website as soon as they land on your home page, Google will see this as a huge red flag. Having a high bounce rate will push your website further down the search results and away from the top of search results – and nobody ever goes as far as page two.

88% of website consumers never return to a page they’ve had a bad experience on and 57% of consumers won’t recommend poorly designed websites at all. So, not only will you end up with a ridiculously high bounce rate, but you’ll also find it hard to get any referrals or repeat customers. 

It’s time to stop losing out on potential new customers by updating your website which will lead to improved traffic, longer page view times and more leads.

3. They make you invisible to your audience

You’re on the internet to reach out to people and encourage them to check out your extraordinary auto restoration, performance, race or restyling product and services. If you have a poorly built website, your audience won’t notice you. You’ll be invisible!

Google won’t list you so your audience won’t be able to find you as they search for your products and services potential clients just won’t even know you even exist. If your audience can’t find you, then they can’t hire you!

A poorly designed or old outdated website usually has very little or no SEO improvement work done, which is precisely what your company’s website needs to become visible on Google. Without a decent SEO strategy in place, you’re not going to get noticed by Google, which means your audience won’t see you.

We can’t tell you how many times that we’ve taken in a new customer and learned that Google Analytics and Google Search Console was never set up. Search Console is one of the key ways you can tell Google that you exist and keep Google automatically updated as to the pages on your website and any updates you make.

If you want to reach more of your potential customers, you’ll have to update your website and optimize the heck out of it for the search engines. The more SEO work you get done for your shop’s site, the more likely you’ll show up on the first page of Google for relevant keywords.

There are key things regarding on-site SEO that have to be done when a new site is built as well as maintained as long as the site is live.

4. They waste time & money

In this day and age having a website for your shop is a must, but if you’re thinking of going for the affordable option to save a bit of money, then you could be setting yourself up for disaster and added expense and stress.Going with the affordable option for your company might save you a couple of thousand dollars at the moment, but down the line, that budget site is going to start costing you more.

Let’s say you were presented with an excellent, simple site for under $1,500. It’ll probably look and perform alright for a couple of months or so, but eventually, you’re going to notice it’s not bringing in any new sales, it’s missing key elements about your business, it’s not loading or working correctly, and you may be constantly getting hacked.

This budget website will need to be fixed or possibly even rebuilt by a professional developer, or you run the risk of turning your company into a business that’s untrustworthy or doesn’t pay attention to detail. 

So that site that was $1,200 will possibly end up costing you more money to get fixed! Plus, your bargain basement website probably doesn’t even represent your company well. If a novice designer/developer made it, they more than likely built it using a template with little changes from the original templates design. This means it’ll possibly look like every other website built on that template instead of a site customized for your company.

Please note we’re not saying templates are bad, as some quality templates offer a ton of features, we’re just saying that if a template is used the end result should not look the same as the core template once the site is built. Grabbing a template and just dropping in images and content is not a great solution. This is one of the things you’ll get with a low budget site build.

Think of it this way. You wouldn’t buy a low-budget, second-hand or no name part for a build project just because it was a few bucks cheaper. It’ll just break quicker, might not fit properly or even damage your reputation as the customer may come back for further repairs that could have been avoided. Instead, you’d get the best quality part that would last.

Here’s a simple website investment guide that you can use for the cost of a net new website build…

Please head on over to the Motorhead Digital Blog for the rest of this article.

Barry is the founder of Motorhead Digital, providing signature Marketing Maximizer™ programs specifically developed for auto restoration, performance, and restyling shops. These programs are geared towards customer acquisition and conversion to keep those project bookings coming. With over 24+ years of experience in digital marketing and web development, Barry’s goal is to help clients market and grow their shops through strategic marketing practices. You can reach him at (585) 766-9785, [email protected] or online at MotorheadDigital.com