Without Concrete, Measurable Website Goals, Your Site is Nothing More Than a Brochure Sitting Online. 

In the early days of the internet, brochure sites were all a business needed to succeed. You put up a cheap site with Home, About Us, and Contact pages. If you were really cutting edge, a page that allowed users to purchased directly from your site.

The build it and they will come days are long dead. It’s now a must that your company’s site delivers value and information to your potential customers. This means that your site has to actually have an objective. And, that objective (or objectives) must be met if you are to sell products, generate leads, build credibility, or sell services online.

SMART Goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time based.

A Site With No Website Goals is a Site That Sucks

When someone wants to lose weight, they go on a diet. Most people make vague proclamations like “I want to lose weight,” “I want to get healthy,” or “I want to tone up.”

Then they proceed to fail.
Why?

How do you measure these website goals?

If you have a lot of weight to lose, you’re in it for the long haul….and you can lose steam along the way unless you have specific, measurable goals to shoot for.

The same goes for your website. Why do you have one? Why did you invest a good chunk of cash in building a site?

• Because everyone told you that you should have one?

• Because you want to show off your work (before and after pictures and videos, etc)

• Are you simply listing your services?

• Are you looking for more leads?

There is no wrong answer. And, in most cases, you’ll have multiple objectives. Though, one will always be dominant. For most businesses, that is generating leads or sales.

Choose the Most Relevant Goals for YOUR Business

You can have more than one goal (which can be placed on other pages on your site), but, there should be a primary goal. As mentioned above, that is usually to increase leads or sales.

Ideally, you want to bring people to your site from Google with a combination of organic (free) and Pay Per Click (paid ads) traffic. Once a customer lands on your site, you need to make sure it is set up to achieve the goal of turning them into a lead and getting them ready to be sold.

How To Map Out Your Website Goals

Accomplish this with high quality content that shows them what you do, how you do it, proof that you’ve done it successfully, and why they should choose you for the task.

• From there, you can add your secondary goals. For example, if you want to give yoru scuomers visual proof that your service or product is the best, you’ll want a great portfolio page where you show off your best before and after work.
• You will also want to build your credibility (review videos and testimonials), places you have been featured (newspapers, TV, magazines, trade papers, etc), and good reviews you’ve gotten from sites like Yelp or Angie’s List.

Build a Website Funnel to allow you to achieve your goals.

This can be spread out over a Reviews Page, your Blog and throughout your site. When you have multiple objectives, it is best to give each a specific page or blog post. A common mistake is to attempt to stuff multiple goals into a site’s Homepage. This is a hold-over from the days where users actually typed in a URL to reach a website. Now, they’re much more likely to find you through search, and will land on various pages on your site. Your Homepage can house your main objective, but give secondary and tertiary goals their own page. This will make your site user-friendly, and Google will reward you with higher page rankings.