Without website goals and objectives, running a website can be disorienting and inefficient. Clearly establishing strategies and setting realistic but ambitious targets is an essential element of achieving effective online business growth. It is important to recognize the role of web strategy in meeting desired outcomes.
What Are Website Goals & Objectives?
Website goals and objectives are essential to online success; they give you a measure of progress to help identify areas that need more work. By setting measurable targets for a website over a given period of time, businesses can compare actual results and take the necessary steps to enhance performance.
Why do you need to set website objectives?
Anyone looking to build or redesign a website should consider their business goals first and foremost. There are three key reasons why it’s so important to do this:
- Setting well-defined goals ensures your site will be efficient and effective.
- Having clear objectives that align with the needs of your target audience make for an attractive, accessible website.
- You’ll be able to accurately measure the success of your website once it has gone live.
Why Does Your Website Exist?
Prior to establishing your website goals, it will be helpful to consider the aims or objectives of your website. What do you plan to achieve? Is it an effort to build a profitable online business, or an attempt to gain more visibility for an existing brick-and-mortar venture, such as real estate? Establishing this purpose in advance offers clarity, and should act as a starting point for the definition of persuasive achieveable goals. As you set those attainable objectives moving forward, seek out those that are SMART; that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable Realistic & Timely. With these parameters in place, approaching the final product with precision and direction becomes much simpler.
what your website goals should be?
It is essential to list your business goals and consider how your website can help you reach these. Consider whether increased revenue, maximizing profitability, improving customer satisfaction, cutting down hours of work or showcasing services are among these objectives. Evaluate what having a great website entails for each of them.
Having more visitors on your website is a great goal to have, but it’s important to first analyze how realistic and achievable it is. A good rule of thumb for establishing SMARTER goals for your website is having them be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time sensitive, evaluated and reviewed. Before setting a goal of site visitors, think about why it’s so important to you. What information do you want them to know? What action do you want them to take? Answer those questions directly and make sure your goals are driven by purpose rather than looks. Writing down these answers will help guide your strategy towards what matters most.
How to Choose the Right Goals to Build a New Website
Before engaging with a website design agency, it’s important to ask the right questions. Doing so ensures that both you and the agency come away satisfied with the results of your website project. Ask yourself, “What are my goals for this website?” and also ask the agency, “How will this website support my sales process and marketing efforts?” These questions can help guide you in your decision-making as you embark on creating a website.
Examples:
1- Increase brand engagement
Creating a website with the goal of increasing brand engagement is key to ensure that visitors have a positive experience while browsing and interacting with your site. When visitors have an enjoyable time engaging with your brand, they are more likely to become loyal customers. Here are some goals you can set for your website in order to increase brand engagement:
- helpful content
In order to create a successful website, it is pivotal to create content that not only appeals to readers but also upholds SEO standards. Content should be engaging, relevant and crafted in such a way that users will take interest in staying on the website and learning more about the brand. To accomplish this, blog posts can be written with SEO-friendly content; however, multimedia such as videos, podcasts or other types of engaging content can also be incorporated into the website.
- Optimizing user experience
Excellent user engagement is achievable through delivering a high-quality user experience. Ensure your website is easy to navigate with information readily available, as well as providing fast loading speeds. Having an efficient and organized platform will ensure the longtime retention of your users.
2- Increase Overall Website Traffic
Website visits are a basic indicator of online business success. As such, determining how to drive more traffic has been a consistent challenge for digital entrepreneurs. Strategies such as content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and website design can all be utilized to bolster web traffic. Professional bloggers, e-commerce sellers, and experienced marketers alike experiment with fresh techniques to bring in new site visitors and engage existing customers.
Every business owner should strive to increase website traffic for a variety of reasons. To set an effective website traffic goal, evaluate the current trends in both visitors and user figures. Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking website users and their demographic data, which can be used to inform changes that ensure visibility and boost traffic levels.
As an example, let’s set a SMART goal: In Quarter 4 of 2021, I would like to see 1,000 “Direct” visitors coming my way through weekly blog posts. Recall that more visitors to your homepage means more potential customers for your business.
3- Improve keyword ranking
The higher your website ranks in search engine results, the more clicks and traffic it will generate – leading to increased leads and sales. With 62% of customers using search engines as their main point of reference for learning more about a business, product or service, it is essential to optimize for relevant keywords in order for your business to reach its full potential.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are a prime source of digital traffic for many businesses, and as documented by Backlinko, the majority of visitor clicks come from the first page of results. With the top spot being an especially valuable commodity, optimizing your keywords to gain or improve page 1 ranking is a sure-fire way to increase website traffic. To track progress in your SEO efforts, creating SMART goals can be helpful. For example, improving the position of a main keyword from page 2 to page 1 would be one goal worth tracking. By taking advantage of data such as search difficulty and volume combined with tracking individual keyword rankings, smart marketers can use these metrics to make informed optimization decisions that result in higher website traffic.
4- Use an online shop
When you’re establishing or expanding your business, launching an e-commerce website can be a great way to increase your sales. Whether you have an existing brick and mortar shop front, are just getting started with a home business, or are already leveraging social media for sales, setting up an online store can be a great move. Keep in mind that having e-commerce as a primary web design goal requires careful thought when it comes time to choose your website theme, layout and structure – by doing so from the outset, you’ll maximize the potential of your online store.
5- Increase the Average Number of Pages Visited by Each User
The pages per session metric can offer invaluable insights into your website performance. A high average of page views indicates a harmonious navigation experience and effective content, which will result in more conversions and an increase in revenue. For instance, if the average is 4 pages viewed per session, users are engaging with the website over four distinct pages on average before leaving the site.
For every website, it’s important to ensure that visitors stay on the site for more than a few seconds. Increasing average page views can be achieved through various marketing strategies such as social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, running paid ads etc. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your efforts, set SMART goals like: by interlinking relevant pages on my website I want to see a 25% increase in average page views per visitor over a period of time.
6- Reduce Time to Complete a Task
Organizations can track the time spent by webmasters and contributors to complete management or content updating tasks. This helps to save time and ultimately reduce costs. For example, usability testing tools and events within Google Analytics can be used to measure the average task completion times and then set an objective such as a 20% reduction (e.g., Reduce the average time it takes to complete website tasks by 20% – measured through usability testing or analytics). A Webmaster / Content Contributor Goals Worksheet is available for further information, including examples.
7- Reduce Website Management Costs
This goal seeks to reduce the costs associated with keeping a website running, supported, and maintained. This can be measured both in terms of man-hours and dollars. Companies that spend an excessive amount of money on support or maintenance due to out of date technology, security flaws, or compatibility issues should consider this goal as an efficient way to reduce expenses. For example: By deploying CMS designed for easier content updates, businesses can target a 10% reduction in support/maintenance costs (measured in employees hours and financial resources).
8- Drive more people to your retail store
If you already have infrastructure in place at your brick-and-mortar store, driving website visitors to it could be a great way to extend awareness and increase foot traffic. You could incentivize customers with special offers or discounts available only in-store, or promote events happening there. Utilizing your physical location through targeted promotions on your website can help generate more leads which will drive more sales.
9- Provide support
As your customers often have questions and issues, it’s important to give them access to the customer support they need. Phone calls can be bothersome and costly for all parties; however, you can offer them other options such as live chat, contact forms, and FAQ pages on your website. These are effective ways of providing quality customer service without having to resort to phone calls.
10- Improve Customer Satisfaction
Monitoring customer satisfaction online can be difficult but there are several strategies designed to ensure a positive user experience. For websites that offer support services, like SaaS, online customer accounts and healthcare portals, it’s important to conduct systematic surveys with customers before and after any website redesigns. This is especially true with medical patients who expect quick responses while making appointments, accessing test results or paying bills. By conducting interviews and surveys before and after the redesign process, hospitals will be able to gain valuable insight into how well their new website meets the expectations of their patients. A goal in this case would be to improve average user satisfaction by 10%, through careful surveying of users comparing experiences before and after the web revamp.
11- Generate More Sales
E-commerce sites that sell products or services like SaaS, will benefit the most when working towards increasing the online sales. The key here is to use the percentage rate increase (in %) rather than a fixed amount as this accounts for seasonal sales and facilitates more meaningful historical comparisons. For example: Increase monthly sales by 20%.
Conclusion
For small business websites to be successful, clear objectives need to be set and the website maintained accordingly. This approach makes it much easier to measure your progress towards reaching those goals. With a well-defined goal in mind, success will be that much closer.
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