Whether this is your first website or you have owned one for years, having a clear website strategy is essential for your site’s success. A great website strategy will help give your site purpose, establish a unique brand and culture, track your site’s results, and drive site conversions. Check out these handy tips below to create a website strategy that’s as awesome as your website.

1. Establish Your Website Goals

To establish your site’s goals, you need to determine what you would like your site to achieve. For example, an e-commerce business will want a beautiful, responsive site that promotes their services and products. A food blog will focus on creating a functional, user-friendly site that engages with subscribers using high-quality text, images, and videos. No matter what type of site you have, it’s important to identify your site goals. This is a great opportunity to evaluate areas to improve your business and how your site will help you accomplish your business goals.

Ask Yourself:

  • What are my most important goals to accomplish?
  • Do I need to establish credibility (i.e. new business)?
  • Do I need to validate my expertise and skills?
  • Do I need to generate leads for my business?

After you establish your unique goals, use this information to determine what type of site you build. Use your goals to help you track your site’s success overtime.

2. Build an Awesome Website Based on Your Goals

After you establish your site’s goals, you are ready to build your site with high-quality, relevant content tailored to your goals. If you make every site decision according to how it meets your site’s goals, you will create an awesome website that has purpose and is relevant to your specific target audience. For instance, an event business will need to build a website that includes a user-friendly event calendar, clearly marked CTA (call-to-action) buttons, and accessible contact form. On the other hand, a web developer needing new clients will likely build a professional online portfolio with their skills, experience, previous projects, and contact information for potential clients to reach them. Indeed, your site’s content should always align with your business goals.

3. Research Your Target Audience Group

As you craft site content, consider your target audience group. It’s a good idea to research and understand what this specific group of people will be interested in from your site. This varies depending on what type of site you own, so take some time to find out how you can produce high-quality, engaging content for your site visitors. When your site can capture a visitor’s interest, they are more likely to stay, explore your site, and drive conversions. If you fail to understand your target audience, this can lead to high bounce rates (the percentage rate of users that visit your site and leave without doing anything) and low conversion rates, which are usually not good for business sites.

4. Promote Your Competitive Edge

Among a sea of over 1 billion websites across the globe, it’s not enough just to have a good looking website to attract potential customers. The key ingredient that you must include in any website strategy is how to promote your competitive edge. What makes your business site special? How do you stand out from thousands of other niche sites like yours? Many businesses are starting to realize that the best approach is to show customers how much you care and appreciate them. This can lead to generating new leads, brand loyalty, referral opportunities, and sustainable success for your site. It’s recommended that you communicate your value to customers in a simple, straight-forward way. This will come across as being professional, honest, and trustworthy – three golden standards for today’s online consumers.

5. Track Your Goals

Like a physical business, owning a business site requires regular maintenance and evaluations for improvement. When creating your website strategy, it’s a great idea to include your plan for tracking your goals and overall progress. Consider what success looks like regarding your website.

Success Ideas:

  • Your site generates a certain number of new leads monthly
  • A certain percentage of customers purchase your monthly subscriptions.
  • Your site’s bounce rate decreases by 50% within 3 months.

While it may seem like it takes a long time to reach your goals, keep in mind the saying, “Good things take time.” It’s recommended that you track your site’s progress every 3 to 6 months. This gives your site time to gather key data that you can evaluate overtime. If you check your site daily, it may seem like there is little to no progress being made. However, this is far from true. A well executed website and strategy will yield positive results, it just takes time. 

As you can see, creating an awesome website strategy is an essential component for the overall success of your site and business. You will find that your site’s needs change overtime, especially if you scale your business. When those needs change, remember to adjust your site goals established in your strategy document. If you need to create meaningful business strategies for your site, contact Awesome Website Guys today.