Achieving Your Website Goals

So you’ve decided you want a new website, but do you know what you actually want to achieve from it? It’s easy to jump ahead and start thinking about the fancy features you want your site to have, but you need to establish some goals and objectives you want to work towards first. There is no use in a site that has nice graphics if it lacks functionality or isn’t designed to meet your end goal.

Whether you want to drive traffic with search engine optimisation (SEO), increase your conversions with conversion rate optimisation or raise visibility by building your brand, you need to make sure your website is designed to meet those goals. Or a combination of them all.

If you’re struggling to decide exactly what you want your site to achieve, don’t worry. This post will help you outline what you need to prioritise when it comes to your new site.

Setting Goals & Objectives

Before getting to work on what your new website design looks like and the graphics or the features involved, you need to outline the goals and objectives you want to achieve. Website goals aren’t all centred around receiving website traffic and page views alone, you’ve got to pinpoint why you want that traffic and what it is you want to achieve from it.

For many, this overall aim might be in terms of generating sales, but this isn’t the case for all businesses. Goals and objectives are specific to your business, and the industry you work in, so it will differ from business to business in terms of what you want to achieve.

Goals could include –

Increasing sales
Building your brand
Customer service
Improving interaction with your customers
Reduce costs

SMART Objectives

So now you’ve put together some more generalised goals you want to achieve and know what you’re working towards, it’s important to put some SMART objectives in place. These objectives need to be:

• Specific

Simply saying you want to build your brand is not specific enough, as it doesn’t outline exactly what you mean or hope to achieve in terms of this. Is this in terms of your approach with social media, recognition of your brand or perhaps market penetration? There needs to be a specific value/concrete number attached to this i.e. increase by 20%.

• Measurable

This comes in line with being specific, is the objective something that you can quantifiably measure? ‘Giving better customer service’ is not quantifiable, however saying ‘increasing customer satisfaction by 15%’ is.

• Achievable

Making achievable objectives is really important to think about, as it can be easy to get carried away with the excitement of creating a new site. But objectives that are too easily achieved, or impossible to meet have no use – and therefore should not be set. A great way to set achievable objectives is to look at your current website, and if an objective is easily met on that site, then it is not ambitious enough.

• Relevant

Creating relevant objectives for your website that match your business needs, and that are also in line with your mission statement and overall business objectives is also key. If there is no consistency across objectives, it makes it difficult to achieve overall business goals and objectives.

• Time

Finally, it is important to consider when you want to achieve these objectives by. So whilst you initially need to think about how long it’ll take to put your site together, it’s important to think about the short and long term effects of a website, and how this will impact on the achievement of your overall objectives and goals.

Ideal Website Visitor

No website is going to attract everybody, so outlining who your ideal website visitor is is key to making your website in a way that is best suited to them, and will aid you in working towards your goal. Optimising your website, in terms of content, usability and user journey for your ideal visitor is key to achieving your website goals. For example, if you were looking to increase sales you would look at using having a very accessible site, with well-organised content and plenty of calls to action in order to drive more conversions and take a user through the sales funnel more successfully.

Measuring Success

There is no use in setting goals and objectives for your website if you’re not going to measure them to know whether or not you’ve achieved them. The way you measure success depends on the goals and objectives you’ve set for your website, so whilst tools such as Google Analytics and HotJar can help to measure some objectives, they are not a fit for all.
Once you know whether or not your website is working towards your goal, you can adjust your strategy accordingly, and know what to look at going forward to really make your website one of your most important assets.

Once you’ve identified these all-important goals, the next step is building an accessible, responsive, user-friendly website that supports them. Our team of expert developers can help you build a website that really shows of your business – talk to us today to find out more.