How to Make Sure Your Website Achieves Its Goals

Achieving Your Website’s Goals

To determine the success of your website, it’s important that your goals are being met.

But how do you create a website that meets your business targets?

In this article, we’ll look at the different elements of your website that can help you meet your business goals. These include:

Determining your website’s purpose
Defining your website’s goals
Setting S.M.A.R.T goals
Creating an excellent user experience
Increasing traffic to your website
Using quality written content
Providing a clear customer journey
Instil trust in your customer

1. Determining Your Website’s Purpose

Before you start anything, you need to understand who your customers are and what your business can offer them to make their life better, or solve their problems.

If you have a USP (unique selling point) that separates you from your competitors, then you should focus in on it, using it when designing your website and determining its goals.

Your website should clearly to explain to your customers what you can offer them and what makes your service or products unique.

2. Defining Your Website’s Goals

Once you’ve determined your websites purpose and USP, the next step is to create goals that provide an objective and keep you on track. By doing this, it will improve the effectiveness of your work as you have something clear to work towards.

You should think about the main objectives of your website, for example:

Improving Web Traffic – Improving web traffic will largely be improved through search engine optimisation, social media promotion and advertisements. With more visitors to your website, you will have more opportunities to convert your customers.
Improving Conversion Rates – However, conversion rates are just as important, as otherwise no one will actually buy your products. Conversion rates determine the percentage of web visitors that buy from your website. You should make sure your website is effective in enticing your website visitors to purchase from you.

3. Setting S.M.A.R.T Goals

These goals should be SMART, which means they must be as followed:

Specific – They should focus on one area of your business that you’re trying to improve, rather than something broader.
Measurable – Rather than simply stating your goal is to “increase awareness”, they should be able to be measured through numbers.
Actionable – Is there a clear action you can take to achieve your goal?
Realistic – If you make your goals overly-ambitious then they’ll be impossible to achieve, but at the same time it’s important not to make them too easy as then you would be limiting yourself.
Timely – You should specify a time period for when the goal is to be achieved.

Another thing you should do is break down your goals into the short-term, mid-term and long term.

If your overall yearly goal is to increase conversion rate by 15%, aim for a 2% improvement in the next month, then you can think about how your weekly and daily tasks can contribute to the monthly goal.

4. Creating an Excellent User Experience

What are the actions you can take to meet these goals? One way is through improving the user experience (UX) on your website.

Easy Navigation – Your website needs to be quick and easy to navigate. If it’s difficult for the user to navigate through the website, then they’ll likely click off, which can lower conversion rates. Focus on creating a simple website interface that provides a clear direction of where your customers should go.

Mobile Compatibility – Most businesses create their websites with the desktop view in mind. When visiting the site on mobile, their content management systems will try to squeeze everything in and it doesn’t have the same appeal as it’s desktop counterpart. Since more visitors than ever are using mobile to explore the web, you can design your website with a mobile-first approach, making sure to optimise your website for mobile before anything else.

5. Increasing Traffic to Your Website

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – One of the first steps to improve web traffic is to make sure your website is easily crawlable for search engines. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t cost a thing – a completely organic source of traffic! You should create pages that match a search query that your customers have. While it may be difficult to get on the first page of search results, aim to rank for at least one keyword and work your way towards optimising your entire website for search engines.

Paid-Per-Click (PPC) – PPC can be one of the more effective ways of driving traffic to your website, but only if it’s done correctly. You should ensure that you write good copy and the landing page is optimised for conversions so you get good value for money.

6. Using Quality Written Content

The next step to reaching your goals is to create high-quality content that engages your audience. Focus on creating content that people want to share, as this could spread through social media.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many blog posts you create, if the quality of them isn’t good enough to interest your readers. Aim to create in-depth, high quality and unique content.

You should also consider optimising your content for search engines as this will make it easier to discover.

7. Provide a Clear Customer Journey

You want to keep customers on your site, so having somewhere for them to go when on any page of your website is important.

You can extend the length of time visitors spend on your website by using internal links and encouraging users to visit other pages of your website.

Using call-to-actions that prompt the user to click through to another page, or even better purchase a product from your website, can be effective ways to increase conversion rate.

8. Instil Trust In Your Customer

Security – Users want to feel safe on your website and so does google. In fact, insecure websites are unlikely to appear high in search engine ranks as google always aims to give customers the safe results. To tackle this, make sure you use the latest software and use strong passwords to ensure the safety of your customers or clients.

Be personable – Instilling trust isn’t only about security, but also reputation and personality. If your brand has no personality then customers will struggle to connect with your brand. Including testimonials on your website is a sign that other people approve of your products or services and that will make them more likely to trust you.