Your Website Colours Are Costing You Enquiries (And Google Knows It)

When people talk about website colours, they usually mean aesthetics. Do the colours match the brand, do they feel modern, do they look “premium”. In reality, colour on a website has very little to do with taste and everything to do with performance.

What really matters is contrast. Contrast is what allows users to read your content quickly, understand what matters, and spot what they’re supposed to click. If your text blends into the background or your buttons don’t clearly stand out, users hesitate. When users hesitate, they leave. And when they leave quickly, Google takes note.

Google doesn’t rank websites because they look nice. It ranks them because they work well for real users. Poor colour contrast leads to lower engagement, higher bounce rates, and weaker usability signals, especially on mobile. This is why accessibility and contrast are not “nice-to-haves”, they are part of how Google evaluates the overall quality of a website.

One of the most common problems we see is with call-to-action buttons. Businesses often use soft, muted colours or reuse the same colour across the entire page. The result is that nothing stands out. A call-to-action should interrupt the page visually, not blend into it. If users have to search for how to contact you or book a service, the design has already failed.

This issue is made worse by the current trend toward beige, grey, and low-contrast “premium” design. These styles can work for large brands with established trust, but they regularly underperform for small businesses and service companies. For these businesses, clarity matters more than subtlety. A website should be easy to scan, easy to read, and obvious in what it wants the user to do.

Mobile users amplify all of this. Most visitors are viewing websites on small screens, often in bright conditions and while distracted. Colour contrast that feels acceptable on a desktop monitor can become unreadable on a phone. Because Google is mobile-first, poor contrast on mobile can quietly undermine your SEO without you realising it.

If your website is getting traffic but not enquiries, colour contrast is one of the first things worth checking. SEO can bring users to your site, but design decides whether they stay and take action. In many cases, it’s not a traffic problem at all, it’s a usability problem disguised as an SEO issue.

Website colours are not about personal taste. They are about communication. And the clearer your website communicates, the better it performs, both for users and for Google.

Want to actually show up on Google?
👉 Chat with Carl at Digitall Solution — I’ll tell you what Google’s been ignoring and how to fix it properly.