When it comes to building an effective website that will drive sales, a lot of companies miss the mark. Their products and services may be great, but they simply fail to plan when it comes to their website design. As with any other facet of your business, your website needs a solid plan that will help you to reach your business goals. There are several factors that are crucial when planning to develop your website.
Your Target Audience
The most important thing to keep in mind when designing your website is your target audience. Every single element, from the images to the text, the voice and the navigation has to be designed with them in mind. What do you want your audience to do? Read your content? Make a purchase? Share on their social media sites? Think about what brought them to your site. Is that thing easy to find? These are all elements that you will need to keep in mind when planning your website design.
Planning Your Content
If your site has a blog, planning your content is of high importance. You want to ensure that you are putting out enough content to both keep your readers informed and to establish your company as an authority on your topic. How often will you post? What will you post? What is your content mix? Is it all video? All written posts? A combination of the two? Planning your content is one of the most important ways ensure that you are effectively reaching your audience.
Measuring Your Site’s Effectiveness
Is your site doing what you intend for it to do? Or ss your website bringing in traffic to your business? Does your website generate sales? Are you getting social media exposure? The key to making sure that you are reaching your website goals is to measure in real data. This means periodically looking at your site’s analytics. Click throughs, search terms, shopping cart activity, time spent on each page, the origin of the traffic. By regularly monitoring your website’s data, you will be able to plan your reach for better results.
How to Set Effective Website Goals
We use the acronym SMART to talk about what type of goals we should set and how we will achieve them.
Specific
It doesn’t help to set a goal to increase traffic to your site. The goal should be, “increase traffic by 50% in 2021,” or something similar. This way you can track the success of your efforts with a specific target in mind
Measurable
How will you know when you have increased your traffic by 50%? Will you look at analytics and data and record the number of clicks? Will you install widgets on your site that tell you what growth has been like over time?
Attainable
The goal should not be so large that it seems impossible to reach. If you set a target to gain 1,000,000 new newsletter subscribers in the next six months, it can seem daunting. Instead, make a goal to increase your subscribers by a certain number each month. When you reach that milestone, create another attainable milestone to incrementally reach your goals.
Relevant
your goals should match that of your business’ philosophy. Do you want to expand into new markets? Reach a brand new audience? Bring a new product to market? Your website goals should complement whatever you are trying to do in your business. That being said, it is not uncommon to have different goals for different parts of your website. That is okay, as long as the overall goals are in line with that of your company.
Time-Based
Put a time limit on those goals. If you want to have 75% more comments on your blog, set a date for when you want to reach that benchmark. By setting a time limit, you make the goal more concrete and you will be more likely to take steps to reach it.
If you start out on a road trip with no map, no expected time of arrival and no idea of where you’re going, you won’t get far. The same holds true with your website. In order to reach your goals, you will need to develop a road map to success.
When you are looking for expert website design in Leamington Windsor, look no further. We offer custom website services including design, search engine optimization and graphics. We can help you to develop a website that will reach your target customer and grow your business. Call us for a free consultation today.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
