What’s the Goal of Your Website?
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So, you want a “great” website. Or maybe you’re ready for a makeover, and you’re thinking, “we want to improve our website.” Well, do you know exactly what you mean by that? In other words, do you know what the goal of your website is?
It’s easy to get caught up in the “fun” of creating or redesigning your website – making it look good, using the latest design trends, and so on. Although it is important for your site to look appealing and up to date to your visitors, the more important purpose of your website is that it works for you.
Therefore, the question becomes: What specific work do we want our website to do for us?
Setting a Website Goal
Just as you set specific goals for individuals, departments, and your business overall, you need to get clear on how you want your website to work for you. If this leaves you scratching your head, let’s look at some examples of common website goals.
Establish Brand Awareness and Authority
This goal isn’t about growing your sales, per se. At the same time, once you become recognized as an authority in your market, people think of you first when they’re in the market for what you offer. Becoming an authority and making your audience aware of your brand makes your other marketing efforts more effective and your sales cycle shorter.
A website goal to enhance your market authority or increase your brand awareness involves showcasing your expertise and offering information that’s valuable to your target market.
Awareness and authority goals are particularly helpful for nonprofits that are educating the public about a cause, as well as political candidates or government initiatives that benefit an informed public. This is also an appropriate objective for companies launching new products and businesses going through a rebranding.
Generate More Qualified Leads
Attracting more leads is probably the most common goal for business websites. Properly designed, including using SEO best practices, your website will appear when people search online for a solution to a problem they’re having.
The key is to ensure that the right people – the ones you can serve – find you online. Regularly publishing good content on your site will help people find you, as well as let them know if they are or are not in the right place for the help they need.
Setting this as a goal can not only help you get more qualified traffic to your business, but it can also prevent you from wasting time fielding inquiries from the “wrong” people.
Increase Lead Conversion Rate
Okay, maybe you already know your website is attracting the right kind of people to your business – people you can serve. But now you want to focus on converting more of your site visitors into prospects (and, eventually, to customers.) If this is your goal, you need to ensure your site’s ability to capture information from visitors and convert them into prospects.
Grow Sales
More most businesses, the ultimate goal is growing sales, but this is the key goal for websites that sell products and services online, especially for those that don’t also have brick and mortar locations. Good content is needed to attract the right visitors, but a good user experience and product/service descriptions are going to be critical for making the final sale.
Other Website Goals
Those are just a few examples of marketing and sales goals for websites. Other departments within a company can have their own website goals, as well. For example, customer support may have a website goal to improve customer service, which might be achieved through effective FAQs or a robust chat function. Another department that might have its own website goal is HR, if the company’s website is a tool they use for attracting and recruiting job candidates.
How to Measure Progress Toward Your Website Goal
Ideally, you not only set a great goal for your website, but you also keep track of how well your site is doing that work for you. One of the best ways to set a goal you can achieve is to create a SMART goal.
You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before, but let’s do a super-fast refresher:
- Specific – This is about what you want your website to accomplish. For example, “Increase unique, monthly website visitors by 20%.”
- Measurable – Metrics are about how you’ll know how much progress you’re making toward your goal and whether or not you achieve it. To measure the goal above, you’ll need to know what your traffic numbers are – now and in the future.
- Attainable – Good goals stretch your limits but remain realistic. You want to set a goal that’s ambitious but possible.
- Relevant – Make sure your website goal is aligned with the rest of your business goals. If your website goal doesn’t line up with your overall business needs, go back to the drawing board.
- Timely (or time-bound) – When do you want to accomplish this goal? For the example above, you’d specify, “Increase unique, monthly website visitors by 20% within the next 6 months.” Once you reach the goal, or the six months are up, you’d simply set a new goal.
Your SMART Goal for Your Website
If you haven’t thought about what your website goal is – or it’s been a while since you’ve thought about it or checked in on your metrics – here are some questions to ask yourself.
- What is the primary goal of our website?
- Is the goal for our website aligned with our overall business objectives?
- Do we need to consider some additional, departmental goals?
- Do we have all the metrics in place to measure our site’s performance against our goals?
- Are we routinely reviewing our metrics?
- Are we using our data to drive decisions about website improvements when we fall short of our goal?
- Is the goal we set too easy, too challenging, or “just right” (attainable)?
We Can Help
If you’re struggling to come up with the best website goal for your business, or if you don’t know how to set up the metrics for measuring progress to your goal, we’d love to help.
We’ve helped many businesses establish a clear, prioritized plan to set and meet their website goals. Instead of trying to do all the things you think you need to do for your website, we work with you to create a streamlined process and set SMART milestones toward achieving your goals for your website.
To learn more about working together to develop a systemized plan for your website, complete the form below. you will receive details on our Discovery Workshop.
We look forward to hearing from you and learning about your amazing goals!