A Quality Company Website Often Pays for Itself in 2 Months
Last year, a locksmith business owner from the Kitchener–Waterloo region (Ontario, Canada) approached our agency with a clear goal: generate clients through Google Ads. Whenever we receive requests like this, we always start by reviewing the company’s website as a whole — and the landing pages used for advertising in particular.
We prepared a detailed list of recommendations and suggested improvements. After sharing it with the client, we were met with genuine confusion. He explained that while he fully understood the importance of a high-quality website for organic search traffic, he didn’t see the point of making changes specifically for paid traffic.
In reality, when a business pays for every single click, losing potential clients due to poorly designed landing pages is simply illogical. These pages must not only look professional and function flawlessly from a technical standpoint — they must also follow a set of UX principles aimed at maximizing conversion rates.
At the beginning of 2025, we were able to run an experiment that confirmed more than just higher conversion rates on a well-designed, Google Ads–focused website. It also demonstrated that, for an active business, such an investment can pay off in just over one month — and no more than two.
How to Test the Impact of a High-Quality Website
You can come up with countless hypotheses, but testing them in real-world conditions is far from simple. Directly comparing the performance of two websites to prove that one converts better than the other requires a very specific set of conditions:
- Both websites must offer exactly the same services and target a similar audience.
- They must belong to the same company and be managed by the same team (this significantly affects how incoming leads are handled).
- Traffic must come from the same sources — for example, identical Google Ads campaigns with the same keywords, budgets, and conversion settings.
- The time period must match exactly to avoid seasonal fluctuations.
In practice, this combination is extremely rare — but we got lucky.
In early 2025, an emergency car-buying business approached us. They were using a primitive template-based website with AI-generated copy, unnecessary outbound links, and poor mobile optimization. Traffic was driven entirely through Google Ads, and the owners strongly suspected that the campaigns weren’t performing as they should.
They believed competitors were clicking their ads using bots and interfering with their business in various ways.
After analyzing user behaviour metrics, we concluded that there was no black-hat activity involved. The real issue was trust. Many users simply didn’t take the website seriously and left almost immediately after clicking the ad.
We recommended building a new, more deliberate website, and the business owners suggested running the exact same ads on the new version.
How a Website Can Pay for Itself in 2 Months
About a month and a half later, we launched the new website. It featured a custom design, clear and straightforward copy, a detailed FAQ section answering common questions, and a transparent breakdown of the process.
We also added a dedicated section showcasing recently purchased vehicles, dynamically pulled from a database and displayed in random order. This created the impression that the website was constantly updated with fresh information. We removed all unnecessary links and replaced stock photography with original images.
After a couple of months, the results exceeded expectations. While we can’t disclose exact figures, with identical Google Ads campaigns (a direct copy via Google Ads Editor), the same budgets, and the same settings, the new website consistently generated around 25% more leads per month.
If you’ve worked with search advertising before, you likely understand the monthly budgets required to meet a business’s demand for new clients. In this case, the investment in a high-quality, ad-focused website paid for itself in just over one month — and certainly within two.
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