I’ve mentioned having an overall goal for your website before you begin to build it in To help your website stand out and Asking certain questions before you begin. Having website goals gives you a starting point with your website content and provides direction for organizing your site strategically.
Why Have Goals?
When designing your website, I take into consideration the overall goal you are trying to achieve by having a website for your business.
Knowing your goals helps me to strategically organize your website, otherwise, your website might look nice and be helpful to your audience, but might not be helping you further your business, which will prevent you from truly reaching others with your passion.
Let’s quickly touch on two goals you might consider achieving with your website: Getting Traffic and Building a List. We’ll go into depth on these two goals in the future, but I’ll just introduce them for now.
More Website & In-Person Traffic
Your business needs more eyes on it. Getting people in the door isn’t as simple as having a web page that has your address and a map on it. A website can help people find you, both in person, and online, through content that speaks to the needs of your ideal customers.
To achieve the goal of more traffic, whether to your store or to your website, understand your target audience. Really know them, including the terms they look up in Google in relation to how you can help them. When you are armed with these terms you can use them on your website and show up in the search results. This is called SEO, search engine optimization.
You can find professionals to help you with this, or for those who want to DIY, check out SEO Made Simple; A step-by-step Guide, The First 9 Things You Should Learn About SEO and here’s a link to a tool to help you find keywords to integrate into your content, https://keywordtool.io/.
Build a List
You’ve no doubt been told you need an email list to make sales. When you’re just starting out online its hard to wrap your head around all the details you need to pay attention to, let alone think about making contacts that you can potentially sell to. That’s where your list comes in.
You want to build a list of people that you know need the services you provide. The over-arching goal of building such a list most often consists of utilizing a Call to Action where you collect a visitor’s email in exchange for a pdf, a free consultation call, e-book or some other item of value to your readers (often called an opt-in). It’s best if this item is directly related to why they come to your site and is helpful in some way, touching on their pain point.
If you’re interested in building a list, head to AmbitionAlly to learn more about how to actually do this as well as how it can help your business.
Take Action
Even before you begin gathering content for your website know what you want to accomplish with your website. What is the goal you want to achieve? Then read the articles I’ve linked to so you better understand how having a list can help you in your business, and how to get more eyes on your website or feet in your store.
If you already have a website and either of these two overarching website goals intrigues you, I encourage you to check out the links I provided and to do more research on them before planning out your site.
